This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.​

Niku Argane’s farm sits on a steep hillside in central Ethiopia’s semi-mountainous Gurage Zone, where years of flooding have carved deep gullies through the land. Soil that once produced enough barley and potatoes to feed his wife and four children — and left a surplus to sell in the market — has eroded, while drought has made what land remains harder to cultivate.

“We have never stopped farming, but our production declined because of land degradation,” the 32-year-old said from his farm in Ambele Kebele.

Over the last century, Ethiopia nearly eradicated its forests as trees were cleared for farming, grazing, and fuel. The loss of tree cover and tree roots allowed wind and rain to wash away fertile topsoil and contributed to declining crop yields. That vulnerability is now being compounded by climate change. Ethiopia is among the countries most vulnerable to its effects: Heavier downpours are sluicing away depleted soils and triggering landslides, while more intense droughts, combined with the loss of shade that trees once provided, rapidly dry out the land.

Land degradation costs the country an estimated $4.3 billion a year through smaller harvests and lost income to farmers, which also means there is less food to eat. With more than 100 million Ethiopians dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods, the consequences reach far beyond the environment. Climate shocks and crop losses are among the biggest drivers of acute hunger; in 2024, 15.8 million Ethiopians were estimated to need food assistance, roughly 12 percent of the population.

Now the country is trying to reverse this trajectory. Argane planted 80 tree seedlings on his farmland and another 50 in a communal area — a small contribution to a vastly larger effort. In just the last seven years, tens of millions of Ethiopians have planted more than 47 billion seedlings across the country in one of the world’s largest environmental restoration campaigns. Volunteers for the program, which aims to plant 50 billion seedlings by 2030, are planting trees to rebuild native forests and integrating them into farmland. In the process, they are sequestering carbon to help protect future generations from ever more extreme weather.

Such programs often fall short, but Ethiopians are finding hope in the scale of their ambitions. “Reforestation is one of the most difficult things you can imagine,” said Aad Kessler, a researcher at the Netherlands’ Wageningen University. “It almost always fails, but this is so big that even if 30 percent of the trees survive, it’s still huge.”

In the early 20th century, forests covered an estimated 35 to 40 percent of Ethiopia. Its highlands were greener, with forests spanning much of the country’s cool, fertile uplands. But as populations grew and settlements spread, trees were cleared for agriculture, pasture, fuel, and construction. As soils lost their fertility, cultivation moved onto increasingly marginal land, including steep slopes, where tillage and the loss of protective vegetation led to the erosion of fertile topsoil, which washed into rivers and reservoirs. By 1989, forest cover was estimated at less than 3 percent, while Ethiopia’s highlands were losing around 1 billion metric tons of topsoil every year. 

After the devastating droughts and famines of the 1970s and 1980s, Ethiopia’s government and international donor organizations began investing heavily in soil and water conservation, excluding livestock from worn-out land, planting trees across the country, and building terraces and check dams — small, low barriers of rocks and logs placed across gullies — to slow the flow of rainwater. By the 2000s, restoration programs were being implemented at increasing scale.

The government supercharged that effort in 2019 by turning tree-planting into a nationwide campaign with a scheme known as the Green Legacy Initiative, which mobilized millions of individuals and groups, including farmers, public servants, schools, and religious organizations, and distributed free seedlings across the country. In 2024, the government established the Green Legacy and Landscape Restoration Special Fund, committing 0.5 percent to 1 percent of the annual federal budget — roughly $73 million to $145 million — to restoring landscapes. It was an unusually large commitment for a low-income country, and the program’s success and ambition, according to development experts, contributed to the selection of Ethiopia as the host of next year’s U.N. climate conference — a prestigious honor that will help the nation showcase its greening efforts.

In August, 26.6 million Ethiopians planted 800 million tree seedlings in a single day, according to government figures, beating the previous year’s tally of 714.7 million. One of the volunteers, Yeshihareg Teferi, traveled at sunrise from her home in Addis Ababa to Tulu Dimtu so she could hunch in the rain to dig holes in the mud. It was Teferi’s fifth year participating in the annual event. Previously she’d planted indigenous species, including African wild olive and African fern pine. This time, she chose juniper. “We have a responsibility to ensure future generations inherit a green and fertile environment, rather than barren land,” she said.

There are already signs the work is having an impact.

The government reports that national forest cover rose from 17.2 percent in 2019 to 23.6 percent in 2023, while studies of restored areas have found substantial reductions in soil erosion. Between 2013 and 2023, the annual deforestation rate fell from more than 350 square miles to around 100 square miles. 

Such efforts can also benefit wildlife. In Abijata-Shalla National Park, in the Ethiopian highlands, workers replanted degraded areas and built terraces and contour bunds (small earthen ridges that run across hillsides to slow runoff and allow water to soak into the soil). As trees and native grasses returned, more water infiltrated into the ground, and water levels on lakes in the park began to rise, said Kumera Wakjira, director-general of the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority. More water spurred the return of fish and fish-eating birds like cormorants and African darters. Grant’s gazelles and wild dogs are also expanding into areas where they were previously scarce, Wakjira said.

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But planted trees are not guaranteed to survive. A 2022 study of 176 reforestation projects in Asia found that around half of planted trees did not live five years. And trees alone do not make a forest, said Endalkachew Wolde-Meskel, a soil scientist and senior researcher at the Center for International Forestry Research: That process usually requires the regeneration of grasses and other vegetation, in addition to soil- and water-conservation measures and management by local communities. “The objective is not really ‘plant trees,’” he said. “It is to restore the functioning of the entire landscape.” 

Emiru Birhane Hizikias, an Ethiopian restoration ecologist at Norway’s Nord University, said it was a “blessing, politically speaking,” to have the prime minister lead on tree planting but that the scale of the Green Legacy Initiative had outpaced the systems needed to make it work effectively on the ground. Too often, he said, the focus is on getting huge numbers of seedlings into the earth rather than ensuring their survival. You can’t expect a baby to grow if you don’t care for it, he said, but “that’s how plantation in Ethiopia is being done.” 

Abreham Berta Aneseyee, an environmental scientist at Ethiopia’s Wolkite University and an adviser to the Ministry of Agriculture, disputes that characterization, saying the planting campaign is accompanied by practical advice from government experts in forestry and farming. The experts go from farm to farm, advising smallholders on how to plant and care for different types of seedlings, he said, including how deeply to place them in soil and how to conserve soil with structures like bunds. They also advise farmers on managing forests and protecting trees rather than cutting them down. 

A 2026 study of more than 44,500 seedlings planted in southern Ethiopia under the Green Legacy Initiative in 2023 found that about 80 percent had survived, with rates significantly higher among older seedlings, wet-season plantings, and seedlings whose planters had received training in best “plantation practices.” In Humbo and Boloso Sore districts in Ethiopia’s southwestern Wolaita Zone, the Green Legacy Initiative has been layered onto longer-running efforts to sustainably manage land, with communities building check dams to stabilize gullies, digging half-moon ditches to trap water and let it soak into the soil, and planting trees alongside grasses and other vegetation.

Ethiopia’s approach has few direct parallels in Africa for its combination of political leadership, funding, public mobilization, and scale, said Kessler of Wageningen University. He compared the effort with China’s restoration of the Loess Plateau, one of the world’s most highly eroded regions. In the 1990s, China launched major restoration efforts on the plateau, including a World Bank-backed watershed rehabilitation project and, starting in 1999, the Grain for Green program, which paid farmers to restrict cultivation and plant trees, shrubs, and grasses. By 2016, more than 11,500 square miles of rain-fed cropland had been converted to more dense forest or grassland, contributing to a 25 percent increase in vegetative cover in a decade.

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The comparison has limits, though. China paid farmers to take degraded slopes out of cultivation, while millions of Ethiopian smallholders still depend on the land for food and livelihoods. But Kessler said the two efforts shared a fundamental approach: “Do it massively, and then see where you end up.”

Kessler’s work, which includes a government-backed field project in Ethiopia, takes a more participatory approach, involving farmers and communities in decisions about what to restore and how. “Of course it is better [than top-down action],” he said, “but it takes more time.”

Even as Ethiopia invests in rebuilding forests and soils, climate change is altering the conditions landscapes must withstand. In the arid pastoral regions of Afar and Somali, the Green Legacy Initiative focuses on drought-tolerant species, but it is unclear whether the trees planted today will be able to withstand the conditions they face decades from now.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects more frequent and intense rainfall in East Africa as global temperatures rise. In July 2024, exceptionally heavy rainfall in Ethiopia’s Geze Gofa district, in the southern highlands, triggered two landslides that killed at least 257 people. Recent studies also suggest that climate change is making El Niños more frequent and severe, with consequences for East Africa. This summer, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network linked El Niño to “historically poor” summer rains in parts of Ethiopia, leaving some areas with their driest June and July on record. 

For some farmers, the changing climate has already complicated the most basic requirement of restoration: getting seedlings to survive their first season. Belayneh Mamo, 65, a farmer from Ethiopia’s northern and drought-prone Amhara region, relies on July rainfall for his teff, sorghum, maize, and wheat for bulgur. He also receives government-provided coffee, neem, and gesho seeds, but was unable to plant any crop until August, when the season’s first rains arrived. 

“In previous years, September was a period when crops were already developing and food such as bulgur and maize were becoming available for consumption,” he said. “The delays affected the seedlings we plant, our crops, and the availability of animal feed.”

On Argane’s hillside in the Gurage Zone, however, signs of restoration are already visible. Since 2019, he has planted grass, fodder, fenugreek, and fruit trees along the edges of his fields, helping to hold soil in place while providing feed for the four cows, six goats, and three sheep that he keeps for milk and meat. His barley harvest has risen from about 1,800 pounds per acre to roughly 3,200, while the trees and grasses have reduced erosion and slowed the flow of water across his land during heavy rains.

“Restoring degraded land isn’t just about protecting the environment,” Argane said. “It’s also about making life better for my family and community.”