Saving millions of forgotten trees

The Dutch NGO Urgenda (which won the world-first climate case) has become Netherlands’ second largest tree planting organisation within four years. After succesful pilots in Germany, the UK and Ireland the campaign will start to explore France. With a combination of professional staff and tools plus thousands of volunteers we can save trees that would otherwise die and thus scale up tree planting activities. The project is called More Trees Now and starts this autumn.  

 Climate change, storms, droughts, pests, and single-species and exotic tree-planting schemes have decimated Europe’s native biodiversity. As a result, tree planting schemes are booming, yet we hear there are ‘not enough’ trees which halts large–scale efforts. A new campaign aims to remedy that by using another source: the forest itself. Native saplings in the forest that grow in areas where they cannot mature are transplanted to places where they will thrive to create new green areas. Originally developed in the Netherlands as a solution for tree shortages and slow-moving tree planting schemes, the method is unlimitedly scalable in all countries where saplings of native trees are abundant, and the autumn and winter is cold enough.    

More Trees Now  

Every tree creates hundreds of saplings a year. Most of these saplings will not reach adulthood. They either disappear naturally due to competition, or they are removed in routine forest management. They grow in bogs, on a hiking path, or they are thinned to create space for other types of plants and trees. These surplus saplings are a source of diverse, ecological, free and native trees. By transplanting these saplings locally one can restore ecosystems and create more green areas elsewhere. More Trees Now is an initiative based on Meer Bomen Nu, a Dutch initiative which has inspired a mass volunteering movement that has transplanted over 1.4 million saplings in three winters in the most densely populated country in Europe. The aim is to make tree planting accessible and free for all who are concerned about biodiversity loss and deforestation.