How we’ve grown to 1 million trees in 5 years

A million trees of many shapes and sizes

In January 2021, we reached the milestone number of 1 million trees in our forests, as our foresters planted the latest batch of saplings. It’s been an emotional journey to get here in just five years and we have been celebrating the French and Danish way with cake and high fives. 

But you might be surprised to know that 1 million trees in our forests don’t mean we’ve planted a million since we were founded in 2015. (Thankfully for our foresters, doing the back-breaking work of planting!) That’s because we don’t just plant trees. We also protect, maintain and develop established forests, to ensure diversity of age as well as species. So some of our trees are newly planted, and some are beautiful old guardians of the forest.

How much exactly is 1 million trees?

A million is a lovely round number, but to really mean something, it helps to know how much Europe we’ve covered with forest. So let’s try to visualise that enormous amount of trees, shall we? Because we often get shown how much forest is being lost every year. We are happy to be able to say how much we’re covering instead.

And because we actually have a million trees, we don’t need to guess. We know that our forests cover around hectares of land. To put this into perspective, that’s the equivalent of around 1000 sports fields, or 1500 football pitches. You could actually squeeze the country of Monaco into our forested areas nearly five times!

We’re not the quickest tree planters in the world!

Spreading forests is an enormously complex task. If you don’t take great care to plant the right kind of trees, on the right kind of land, you can damage pre-existing ecosystems and cause more harm than good. Our foresters work from detailed forestry plans that fit to local conditions and then they maintain them afterwards. 

This is another reason why we’re not the quickest planters in the world. We’re not planting all the time! Our planting season follows the seasons themselves, from November to April, ready for the following year. And the rest of the time, our foresters are 100% engaged in tending the forest and nurturing trees over their lifetime, before they are selected and harvested for sustainable timber. Planting trees is quick. Nurturing and maintaining forests takes forever!

Why we’re not hitting Elon Musk up straight away for a meeting

Did you see Elon Musk recently announced he’d give 100 million dollars to whoever could present him with the best carbon capture technology? Many hilarious memes followed, reminding the world, and Elon, that nature itself found the best solution hundreds of millions of years ago through the evolution of carbon-absorbing forests. And we do forests!

But… EcoTree forests are beautifully balanced forests, where biodiversity is prized and protected as much as carbon capture. That’s just one of the many reasons why we’re against planting monocultures to maximise carbon capture. And our bigger mission is to bring the world into sustainable forestry, helping move away from dependence on polluting resources like steel and concrete. So we’ll hold off setting up that meeting with Elon and carry on championing the many environmental benefits of our forests. 100 million dollars to celebrate a million trees would be a fitting way to celebrate though!

That’s 1 million of your trees, not ours!

And we mustn’t forget that those million trees are not even ours! We simply own the land, so everyone can own trees and contribute to the future of sustainable forestry. So the congratulations should really go to you - our tree owners, for growing our movement to a million happy trees. Here’s to the next million we plant, preserve and maintain together. The future is bright green and full of trees.