If you've ever doubted whether big environmental goals can actually be achieved, Pakistan has a story for you.
In 2014, the Pakistani province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa launched an audacious goal: plant one billion trees. Skeptics were plentiful. But by 2018, a WWF audit confirmed the province had not only hit its target but surpassed it, planting 872 million seedlings with an average survival rate of nearly 89 percent, ahead of schedule, expanding the region's forests by 350,000 hectares. The International Union for Conservation of Nature called it "a true conservation success story," and the province became the first entity in the world to complete the Bonn Challenge, a global pledge to restore degraded land.
Energized by that success, Pakistan launched the Ten Billion Tree Tsunami in 2019, a nationwide, government-backed effort to keep going. More than 500,000 green jobs were created in the process, many of them going to daily workers in rural communities who needed them most. Forest cover has measurably increased around every major planting site.
No project this large is without bumps. Independent researchers note that survival rates at some sites run lower than official estimates, and that species selection and long-term care matter as much as raw planting numbers. But even the skeptics agree: this is one of the most ambitious reforestation efforts ever attempted, and it is working.
