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
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.
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.