Niku Argane’s farm sits on a steep hillside in central Ethiopia’s semi-mountainous Gurage Zone, where years of relentless flooding have carved deep gullies through the earth. Soil that once produced enough barley and potatoes to feed his wife and four children—and left a comfortable surplus to sell at the local market—has steadily eroded away. Meanwhile, recurring drought has made the remaining land increasingly difficult to cultivate.
“We have never stopped farming, but our production declined because of land degradation,” the 32-year-old farmer said from his land in Ambele Kebele.
Over the last century, Ethiopia nearly eradicated its native forests as trees were systematically cleared for farming, livestock grazing, and fuel. The loss of extensive tree cover and complex root networks allowed wind and rain to wash away fertile topsoil, precipitating a long-term decline in agricultural productivity. Today, that inherent vulnerability is being heavily compounded by global climate change. Ethiopia is widely recognized as one of the countries most vulnerable to climate impacts. Heavier downpours are currently sluicing away depleted soils and triggering deadly landslides, while more intense droughts, combined with the loss of natural shade once provided by mature trees, are rapidly desiccating the landscape.
Land degradation costs the East African nation an estimated $4.3 billion every year through smaller harvests and lost income for farmers, which translates directly into diminished food availability. With more than 100 million Ethiopians dependent on agriculture for their daily livelihoods, the consequences reach far beyond environmental concerns. Climate shocks and localized crop losses rank among the primary drivers of acute hunger across the country. In 2024 alone, an estimated 15.8 million Ethiopians required critical food assistance, representing roughly 12 percent of the national population.
Turning the Tide: A Historic Reforestation Campaign
Now, the country is attempting to aggressively reverse this downward trajectory. Argane recently planted 80 tree seedlings on his own farmland and an additional 50 in a communal area—representing his small contribution to a vastly larger national effort. Over just the last seven years, tens of millions of Ethiopian citizens have planted more than 47 billion seedlings across the country as part of one of the largest environmental restoration campaigns in human history.
Volunteers for the ambitious program, which aims to plant a staggering 50 billion seedlings by 2030, are actively working to rebuild native forests and integrate valuable trees directly into agricultural landscapes. In doing so, they are capturing carbon to help insulate future generations against ever-worsening weather extremes.
While large-scale ecological initiatives frequently fall short of their stated goals, many Ethiopians are finding a deep sense of hope in the sheer scale of their collective ambitions.
“Reforestation is one of the most difficult things you can imagine,” said Aad Kessler, a researcher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. “It almost always fails, but this is so big that even if 30 percent of the trees survive, it’s still huge.”
In the early decades of the 20th century, dense forests covered an estimated 35 to 40 percent of Ethiopia. Its highlands were remarkably green, with lush canopies spanning much of the country’s cool, fertile uplands. But as local populations expanded and human settlements spread outward, trees were cut down indiscriminately for agriculture, pasture, fuel, and construction materials. As the underlying soils lost their natural fertility, agricultural cultivation pushed further onto increasingly marginal terrain, including steep slopes. Tillage and the complete loss of protective vegetation accelerated the erosion of fertile topsoil, which washed away into swelling rivers and major reservoirs. By 1989, national forest cover had plummeted to an estimated 3 percent, while Ethiopia’s vulnerable highlands were losing roughly 1 billion metric tons of topsoil every single year.
Following the devastating droughts and famines of the 1970s and 1980s, the Ethiopian government and international donor organizations began investing heavily in systematic soil and water conservation projects. These early measures included excluding livestock from worn-out tracts of land, planting trees across targeted areas, and building physical structures such as terraces and check dams—small, low barriers constructed from rocks and logs placed strategically across gullies to slow the destructive flow of rainwater. By the turn of the 2000s, these early restoration initiatives were being scaled up significantly.
Supercharging the Effort: The Green Legacy Initiative
The government supercharged that momentum in 2019 by transforming tree-planting into a synchronized nationwide campaign known as the Green Legacy Initiative. The scheme mobilized millions of individuals and diverse groups, including farmers, public servants, schools, and religious organizations, while distributing free seedlings across every corner of the country.
In 2024, the federal government established the Green Legacy and Landscape Restoration Special Fund, legally committing between 0.5 percent and 1 percent of the annual federal budget—roughly $73 million to $145 million—directly to landscape restoration. For a low-income nation, this financial commitment is unusually large. According to development experts, the program’s exceptional success and sweeping ambition contributed directly to the selection of Ethiopia as the host of the upcoming U.N. climate conference, a prestigious honor that will allow the country to showcase its greening achievements on a global stage.
In August, 26.6 million Ethiopians planted an astonishing 800 million tree seedlings in a single day, according to official government figures, surpassing the previous year’s impressive tally of 714.7 million.
Among the dedicated volunteers was Yeshihareg Teferi, who traveled at sunrise from her home in Addis Ababa to Tulu Dimtu, spending hours hunched in the cold rain to dig holes in the thick mud. It marked Teferi’s fifth consecutive year participating in the annual planting event. While she had previously planted indigenous species such as African wild olive and African fern pine, this time she deliberately chose juniper.
“We have a responsibility to ensure future generations inherit a green and fertile environment, rather than barren land,” she said.
There are already measurable signs that the work is having a tangible impact on the ground. The Ethiopian government reports that national forest cover rose from 17.2 percent in 2019 to 23.6 percent in 2023, while detailed scientific studies of restored areas have documented substantial reductions in active soil erosion. Between 2013 and 2023, the annual deforestation rate dropped sharply from more than 350 square miles to approximately 100 square miles.
These sweeping restoration efforts have also begun to benefit local wildlife populations. In Abijata-Shalla National Park, situated in the central highlands, conservation workers replanted degraded areas while constructing terraces and contour bunds—small earthen ridges running horizontally across hillsides to slow down water runoff and allow vital moisture to soak deep into the soil.
As native trees and grasses gradually returned, more water infiltrated into the underground aquifers, causing water levels in the park’s lakes to rise, according to Kumera Wakjira, director-general of the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority. The influx of water spurred the return of fish populations along with fish-eating birds such as cormorants and African darters. Populations of Grant’s gazelles and wild dogs are also expanding back into territories where they were previously scarce, Wakjira noted.
Survival Rates and Scientific Debate
Yet, simply planting trees offers no guarantee of long-term survival. A comprehensive 2022 study analyzing 176 distinct reforestation projects across Asia found that roughly half of all planted trees failed to survive their first five years. Furthermore, conservation experts emphasize that trees alone do not constitute a functioning forest.
According to Endalkachew Wolde-Meskel, a soil scientist and senior researcher at the Center for International Forestry Research, successful ecological restoration usually requires the natural regeneration of native grasses and understory vegetation, combined with robust soil and water conservation measures and active management by local communities.
“The objective is not really ‘plant trees,’” he noted. “It is to restore the functioning of the entire landscape.”
Emiru Birhane Hizikias, an Ethiopian restoration ecologist currently based at Norway’s Nord University, described having the prime minister personally lead the national tree-planting campaign as a “blessing, politically speaking.” However, he cautioned that the breathtaking scale of the Green Legacy Initiative has occasionally outpaced the practical systems required to ensure its long-term effectiveness on the ground. Too often, he argued, the primary focus remains on forcing massive numbers of seedlings into the earth rather than ensuring their ongoing maintenance and survival.
“You can’t expect a baby to grow if you don’t care for it,” he said, adding, “that’s how plantation in Ethiopia is being done.”
Abreham Berta Aneseyee, an environmental scientist at Wolkite University in Ethiopia and an adviser to the Ministry of Agriculture, strongly disputes that characterization. He maintains that the massive planting campaign is consistently accompanied by practical, boots-on-the-ground guidance from government experts in forestry and agronomy. These specialists travel from farm to farm, advising smallholders on proper planting techniques for different species of seedlings, including optimal planting depth and how to construct protective structures like earthen bunds. They also educate farmers on sustainable forest management and the importance of protecting mature trees instead of cutting them down.
A 2026 study examining more than 44,500 seedlings planted in southern Ethiopia under the Green Legacy Initiative in 2023 found that roughly 80 percent had successfully survived. Survival rates were significantly higher among older seedlings, plantings conducted during the wet season, and instances where planters had received formal training in best plantation practices. In the Humbo and Boloso Sore districts of the southwestern Wolaita Zone, the Green Legacy Initiative has been successfully layered onto longer-running community land-management efforts. Local residents have built check dams to stabilize eroding gullies, dug half-moon ditches to capture scarce rainwater, and planted trees alongside native grasses and shrubs.
Parallels, Climate Pressures, and On-the-Farm Realities
Ethiopia’s coordinated approach has few direct parallels anywhere else in Africa due to its unique combination of top-level political leadership, sustained public funding, massive community mobilization, and sheer geographic scale, according to Kessler of Wageningen University. He compared the national endeavor to China’s monumental restoration of the Loess Plateau, widely regarded as one of the most severely eroded regions on Earth.
During the 1990s, China launched major restoration initiatives on the plateau, including a World Bank-backed watershed rehabilitation project and, starting in 1999, the sweeping Grain for Green program, which provided financial incentives for farmers to halt cultivation on vulnerable slopes and plant trees, shrubs, and grasses. By 2016, more than 11,500 square miles of rain-fed cropland had been successfully converted to denser forest or permanent grassland, contributing to a 25 percent increase in regional vegetative cover within a single decade.
Important limits remain to the comparison, however. While China compensated farmers to take degraded slopes entirely out of agricultural production, millions of Ethiopian smallholders still depend directly on their small plots of land for basic food and daily survival. Nonetheless, Kessler noted that the two monumental efforts share a singular, foundational philosophy: “Do it massively, and then see where you end up.”
Kessler’s own academic work, which includes a government-backed field project in Ethiopia, adopts a more participatory methodology, directly involving farmers and local communities in decentralized decisions concerning what specific areas to restore and the methods to employ.
“Of course it is better [than top-down action],” he acknowledged, “but it takes more time.”
Even as Ethiopia pours resources into rebuilding its depleted forests and degraded soils, ongoing climate change continues to alter the environmental conditions these landscapes must endure. In the arid pastoral regions of Afar and Somali, the Green Legacy Initiative focuses heavily on planting drought-tolerant species, yet considerable uncertainty remains over whether the trees planted today can withstand the severe climate pressures projected for decades to come.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects increasingly frequent and intense rainfall events across East Africa as global temperatures continue to rise. In July 2024, exceptionally heavy rainfall in Ethiopia’s Geze Gofa district, located in the southern highlands, triggered catastrophic twin landslides that claimed the lives of at least 257 people. Recent scientific research also suggests that climate change is driving more frequent and severe El Niño cycles, carrying profound consequences for East Africa. Earlier this year, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network linked El Niño conditions to historically poor summer rainfall across parts of Ethiopia, leaving several regions grappling with their driest June and July on record.
For many rural farmers, a shifting climate has already complicated the fundamental prerequisite of ecological restoration: keeping young seedlings alive through their vulnerable first season.
Belayneh Mamo, a 65-year-old farmer living in Ethiopia’s drought-prone northern Amhara region, traditionally relies on predictable July rainfall to cultivate teff, sorghum, maize, and wheat. While he routinely receives government-provided coffee, neem, and gesho seeds, he was unable to plant any crops this year until August, when the delayed seasonal rains finally arrived.
“In previous years, September was a period when crops were already developing and food such as bulgur and maize were becoming available for consumption,” he said. “The delays affected the seedlings we plant, our staple crops, and the availability of animal feed.”
Back on Argane’s hillside farm in the Gurage Zone, however, tangible signs of environmental recovery are already clearly visible. Since 2019, he has successfully integrated grasses, fodder crops, fenugreek, and fruit trees along the outer boundaries of his fields. These additions help anchor the fragile topsoil while providing essential nutrition for the four cows, six goats, and three sheep he keeps for milk and meat. Consequently, his annual barley harvest has climbed from roughly 1,800 pounds per acre to approximately 3,200 pounds, while the newly established trees and dense grasses have visibly reduced soil erosion and slowed the destructive rush of stormwater during heavy seasonal downpours.
“Restoring degraded land isn’t just about protecting the environment,” Argane reflected. “It’s also about making life better for my family and community.”