You may have seen the news items last week on the number of trees in the world. A new study in Nature has looked at forest density around the world and come up with a new estimate: 3,040,000,000,000. That’s been widely reported as 422 for every person alive, except that of course trees are not ‘for’ us. Every tree is for itself, but we take the point.
The study estimates that around 15 billion trees are lost every year, and around 5 billion new ones are planted, naturally or otherwise. That means we are losing 10 billion trees every year – the issue of sustainability in a nutshell.
This little video sums up the findings, and shows how those three trillion trees are distributed:
Great news but I think we could do with more!