It depends on the species, but in many cases the best way to get ten big trees quickly is to plant many more, maybe even a hundred. The young trees enjoy having dense company. As they grow each tree needs more room, so cut down a few every year.
>>>> The researchers’ biggest worry is that the trees are depleting subterranean aquifers so that eventually nothing will flourish.
I know nothing about this subject so the above may be an issue, or it may not. What can you take away from the article? I'm sure there have been a great many displaced along the way by the project, is it going to be worth it in the end?
It seems like it should be a great project to analyse. There's a large amount of money being injected into it and it's at a large enough scale that you could try a lot of different approaches to see what worked. But, as ever, it sounds like incentives are misaligned so we may never get true information about what is actually working and what isn't.
Reading through the article it sounded spookily like China's Great Leap Forward at the end of the 50s:
If the desert expands that will most likely definitely destroy the areas.
And while trees will use a lot of water (somewhat depending on specie I think) they'd hopefully also provide protection against direct sunlight for a more diverse ecosystem to establish.
Compared to the Midwestern way of pumping groundwater only to grow seasonal crops this seems like a good step in a better direction.
The article unfortunately doesn't talk about what we think the latter is.
edit: explain the down vote. you think planting trees to die is immoral, or something?