I asked him and he said it would be little trouble to plant that many seedlings if you coordinates the efforts and planned for it.

He also told me that these stunts, like airlines planting a lot of trees to go carbon neutral, often ends up with a lot of dead trees. Because the hard part isn’t planting trees it’s making sure they survive the first five years.

Which is interesting because the article already mentions a lack of water resources:

>> as Ethiopians heeded Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s ambitious plan to roll back years of drought and scanty rains that the United Nations says has left some 3.8 million people in immediate need for assistance.

Won't these new trees demand a lot of water?

1. Https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/59/4/341/346941

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-11137903

There is also quality of the seedlings. The best example is kitchen herbs. If you buy some rosemary in a pot at you local supermarket, it’ll taste fine. It’ll probably also survive long enough for you to eat it. If you try to plant it in your garden with the intention of keeping rosemary around for years, then there is a good chance it’ll have died within its first month. That’s because supermarket herbs are mass produced in safe environments, where long term survival isn’t valued. You could get lucky, but you’d have a much higher rate of success if you buy your rosemary from a grower who grew them to be planted outside. This is both slower and more expensive though.

Getting 350 million seedlings, often as cheap as you can, is easier with the mass-production approach, and that’s typically what these projects do.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_planting

They state that you can plant 100-200 trees per hour, and extrapolate that to planting 8x a day (presumably assuming an 8 hour work day).

Simply using common sense will tell you that this number is total nonsense, unless you're using seeds and just tossing them into the ground. 200 trees per hour assumes 1 tree every 18 seconds.

Multiple issues here:

1. The work is strenuous. I've planted trees before the proper way and it's not something you can do for 8 hours day in day out without breaks. Digging is intense work that requires frequent breaks even for a person who is in shape.

2. You need to have 1600 saplings available somewhere. Simply taking the time to bring 1 sapling to the dug hole will take you probably anywhere between 10 and 30 seconds. The farther away the hole from the sapling collection, the longer it will take, possibly up to a minute.

3. 18 seconds for digging a tree hole is absolute nonsense as well. This assumes top quality topsoil that's already been prepped for planting (trees or other plants). It basically assumes garden soil quality and no need to dig the hole back up once you planted the tree.

4. You need put the dug up soil back and cover the exposed roots with either soil that you dug up or good soil that was brought to the planting site. You also need to water the soil afterward and compress it around the roots to make sure the sapling doesn't fall from the slightest gust of wind. This easily triples the time compared to just "digging a hole".

Basically - don't believe the first number you see on the wikipedia or the internet. The source is not reputable and sounds like it was written by a person who hasn't done a day of garden work in their life.

I also wouldn't really consider anything less than a 2-3ft sapling a tree. And I wouldn't consider it "planted" unless it survives at least the next year.

Though the limiting factor on how fast you can plant trees is more the production of seedlings than the physical labor of planting. So I guess if they've spend the last several months growing and distributing seedlings in preparation for this campaign, actually plainting them all in one day isn't so crazy

Edit: This doesn't account for all the volunteers that they say participated in the effort, so they probably didn't use this method.