Niku Argane’s farm sits on a steep hillside in central Ethiopia’s semi-mountainous Gurage Zone, where years of unrelenting flooding have carved deep gullies through the earth. Soil that once produced enough barley and potatoes to feed his wife and four children — while leaving a comfortable surplus to sell at the local market — has steadily eroded away. At the same time, intensifying drought has made the remaining land increasingly difficult to cultivate.
“We have never stopped farming, but our production declined because of land degradation,” the 32-year-old farmer said from his land in Ambele Kebele.
Over the past century, Ethiopia nearly eradicated its native forests as trees were systematically cleared to clear room for expanding agriculture, livestock grazing, and harvesting fuel. The profound loss of tree cover and stabilizing root systems left the earth completely exposed to wind and rain, which steadily washed away fertile topsoil and triggered plummeting crop yields.
Today, that vulnerability is being severely compounded by climate change. Ethiopia is widely recognized as one of the countries most vulnerable to the impacts of a warming planet. Heavier, erratic downpours are sluicing away already depleted soils and setting off devastating landslides, while more intense droughts, combined with the loss of cooling shade that native trees once provided, are rapidly drying out the agricultural landscape.
Land degradation now costs the country an estimated $4.3 billion a year through diminished harvests and lost income for smallholder farmers, translating directly into critical food deficits. With more than 100 million Ethiopians depending directly on agriculture for their daily livelihoods, the consequences reach far beyond the environment, impacting the entire socio-economic fabric of the nation. Climate shocks and compounding crop losses remain among the primary drivers of acute hunger. In 2024, an estimated 15.8 million Ethiopians — roughly 12 percent of the population — required targeted food assistance.
Now, the country is undertaking an unprecedented effort to reverse this alarming trajectory. Argane recently planted 80 tree seedlings on his own farmland and an additional 50 in a communal area, serving as his small contribution to a vastly larger national movement. Over the past seven years alone, tens of millions of Ethiopian citizens have planted more than 47 billion seedlings across the country in what has become one of the largest and most ambitious environmental restoration campaigns in modern history.
Volunteers for the overarching program, which aims to plant a staggering 50 billion seedlings by 2030, are planting trees to rebuild native forests and thoughtfully integrating them into working agricultural land. In doing so, they are actively sequestering carbon to help protect future generations from the growing threats of extreme weather.
While such massive government-backed environmental programs frequently fall short of their stated goals, everyday Ethiopians are finding genuine hope in the sheer scale of their collective ambitions.
“Reforestation is one of the most difficult things you can imagine,” said Aad Kessler, a researcher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. “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 decades of the 20th century, dense forests covered an estimated 35 to 40 percent of Ethiopia. Its highlands were remarkably green, with thriving woodlands spanning the country’s cool, fertile uplands. However, as human populations expanded and settlements pushed outward, trees were cleared for agriculture, pasture, fuel, and construction materials.
As the soils steadily lost their natural fertility, cultivation was forced onto increasingly marginal land, including precarious, steep slopes. There, continuous tillage combined with the total loss of protective vegetation triggered the rapid erosion of fertile topsoil, which subsequently washed away into vital rivers and downstream reservoirs. By 1989, national forest cover had plummeted to an estimated three percent, while Ethiopia’s vulnerable highlands were shedding an astonishing one billion metric tons of topsoil every single year.
Following the devastating droughts and widespread famines of the 1970s and 1980s, the Ethiopian government and international donor organizations began investing heavily in foundational soil and water conservation initiatives. These early interventions included temporarily excluding livestock from worn-out land, planting trees across targeted areas, and building physical barriers such as stone terraces and check dams — small, low walls constructed from rocks and logs placed directly across gullies to dramatically slow the destructive flow of rainwater. By the turn of the century, these restoration programs were being implemented at an increasingly broad scale.
The government supercharged that momentum in 2019 by transforming tree-planting into an organized, nationwide campaign known as the Green Legacy Initiative. The scheme successfully mobilized millions of individuals and groups, including smallholder farmers, public servants, schools, and religious organizations, while distributing free seedlings to communities across every region of the country.
In 2024, the federal government formalized its commitment by establishing the Green Legacy and Landscape Restoration Special Fund, dedicating between 0.5 percent and 1 percent of the annual federal budget — roughly $73 million to $145 million — exclusively to restoring degraded landscapes. It represents an unusually large and bold financial commitment for a low-income nation. Development experts note that the program’s remarkable success and sheer ambition directly contributed to Ethiopia being selected as the host nation for an upcoming U.N. climate conference, offering a prestigious international platform to showcase its large-scale greening efforts.
In August, a reported 26.6 million Ethiopians planted 800 million tree seedlings in a single day, according to official government figures, surpassing the previous year’s impressive tally of 714.7 million.
Among the dedicated volunteers was Yeshihareg Teferi, who traveled before sunrise from her home in Addis Ababa to Tulu Dimtu so she could spend the day hunched in the cold rain, digging holes in the stubborn mud. It marked Teferi’s fifth consecutive year participating in the annual planting event. While in past years she focused on indigenous species such as the African wild olive and the African fern pine, this time she deliberately chose the hardy juniper.
“We have a responsibility to ensure future generations inherit a green and fertile environment, rather than barren land,” she said.
Tangible signs that the immense effort is taking root are already becoming visible across the country. The government reports that national forest cover rose from 17.2 percent in 2019 to 23.6 percent in 2023, while targeted studies of restored areas have documented substantial, measurable reductions in soil erosion. Between 2013 and 2023, the country’s annual deforestation rate fell sharply from more than 350 square miles to approximately 100 square miles.
These sweeping restoration efforts are also yielding unexpected benefits for local wildlife populations. In Abijata-Shalla National Park, located within the Ethiopian highlands, conservation workers actively replanted heavily degraded sectors while constructing terraces and contour bunds — small earthen ridges running horizontally across hillsides designed to slow surface runoff and allow precious water to thoroughly soak into the soil.
As native trees and grasses gradually returned, increased groundwater infiltration caused water levels in the park’s lakes to begin rising, according to Kumera Wakjira, director-general of the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority. The returning water naturally spurred the comeback of local fish populations, which in turn attracted fish-eating birds such as cormorants and African darters. Furthermore, Grant’s gazelles and wild dogs are now expanding their ranges back into areas where they were previously scarce, Wakjira noted.
Yet, planting trees does not guarantee their long-term survival. A prominent 2022 study examining 176 reforestation projects across Asia found that roughly half of all planted trees failed to live past five years. Moreover, experts warn that trees alone do not constitute a functioning forest.
According to Endalkachew Wolde-Meskel, a soil scientist and senior researcher at the Center for International Forestry Research, successful ecological recovery typically requires the natural regeneration of native grasses and understory vegetation, paired with ongoing soil and water conservation measures and active management by local communities.
“The objective is not really ‘plant trees,’” he emphasized. “It is to restore the functioning of the entire landscape.”
Emiru Birhane Hizikias, an Ethiopian restoration ecologist currently at Norway’s Nord University, described having the prime minister personally lead the national tree-planting campaign as a “blessing, politically speaking.” However, he cautioned that the breathtaking speed and sheer scale of the Green Legacy Initiative have occasionally outpaced the technical systems required to ensure its long-term effectiveness on the ground.
Too often, he noted, the primary focus centers on getting massive numerical totals of seedlings into the earth rather than ensuring their ongoing maintenance and survival. Just as you cannot expect a child to grow without proper care, he argued, tree plantations require sustained attention.
Conversely, Abreham Berta Aneseyee, an environmental scientist at Wolkite University in Ethiopia and an adviser to the Ministry of Agriculture, strongly disputes that characterization. He maintains that the massive planting campaign is consistently accompanied by practical, hands-on guidance delivered by government forestry and agricultural experts. These specialists travel directly from farm to farm, advising smallholders on proper planting techniques for different varieties of seedlings, including optimal planting depths and the construction of protective soil-conservation structures like bunds. They also educate farmers on sustainable forest management and the importance of protecting mature trees rather than cutting them down.
A comprehensive 2026 study tracking more than 44,500 seedlings planted in southern Ethiopia under the Green Legacy Initiative found that about 80 percent had successfully survived. Survival rates were notably higher among older seedlings, plantings conducted during the wet season, and instances where the planters had received formal training in best plantation practices.
In the Humbo and Boloso Sore districts of Ethiopia’s southwestern Wolaita Zone, the Green Legacy Initiative has been thoughtfully layered onto pre-existing, long-term land management efforts. Local communities there have built stone check dams to stabilize deep gullies, dug half-moon ditches designed to capture and retain scarce moisture, and combined tree planting with native grasses and ground cover.
Researchers like Kessler of Wageningen University note that Ethiopia’s approach has very few direct parallels anywhere else in Africa, largely due to its unique combination of high-level political leadership, dedicated domestic funding, broad public mobilization, and massive overall scale. He draws frequent comparisons to China’s historic restoration of the Loess Plateau, one of the most severely eroded regions on Earth.
Beginning in the 1990s, China launched major rehabilitation initiatives across the plateau, including a World Bank-backed watershed project and the 1999 launch of the Grain for Green program, which financially compensated farmers to halt cultivation on vulnerable slopes and plant trees, shrubs, and grasses. By 2016, those efforts had successfully converted more than 11,500 square miles of rain-fed cropland into dense forests and grasslands, contributing to a remarkable 25 percent increase in regional vegetative cover over a single decade.
Important limitations remain, however. While China largely paid farmers to take fragile, degraded slopes completely out of agricultural production, millions of Ethiopian smallholders continue to depend directly on their small plots of land for daily food and survival. Even so, Kessler points out that the fundamental philosophy underpinning both national campaigns is strikingly similar: “Do it massively, and then see where you end up.”
Kessler’s own academic work, which includes a government-backed field project implemented within Ethiopia, favors a more participatory approach that directly involves local farmers and rural communities in collaborative decisions regarding what specific areas to restore and the methods best suited to achieve it.
“Of course it is better than top-down action,” he said, acknowledging the nuance, “but it takes more time.”
Even as Ethiopia invests heavily in rebuilding its forests and revitalizing damaged soils, a rapidly changing climate continues to alter the environmental baseline that these restored landscapes must withstand. In the arid pastoral regions of Afar and Somali, the Green Legacy Initiative has increasingly pivoted toward drought-tolerant plant species, though uncertainty remains over whether the trees planted today can endure the more extreme climate conditions anticipated decades into the future.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects increasingly frequent and intense rainfall events across East Africa as global temperatures continue to rise. In July 2024, exceptionally heavy, unseasonal rainfall in Ethiopia’s southern highlands triggered devastating landslides in the Geze Gofa district that claimed at least 257 lives.
Recent scientific studies also indicate that climate change is driving more frequent and severe El Niño cycles, carrying profound consequences for East Africa. Earlier this year, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network explicitly linked El Niño conditions to historically poor summer rains across parts of Ethiopia, leaving several agricultural regions experiencing their driest June and July on record.
For many farmers, these shifting climate patterns have directly complicated the foundational requirement of successful environmental restoration: keeping young seedlings alive through their crucial first growing season.
Belayneh Mamo, a 65-year-old farmer living in Ethiopia’s northern, drought-prone Amhara region, traditionally relies on predictable July rains to nurture his staple crops of teff, sorghum, maize, and wheat. While he regularly receives government-distributed coffee, neem, and gesho seeds, erratic weather prevented him from planting any crops until August, when the season’s belated rains finally materialized.
“In previous years, September was a period when crops were already developing and food such as bulgur and maize were becoming available for consumption,” Mamo reflected. “The delays affected the seedlings we plant, our primary crops, and the availability of animal feed.”
Back on Niku Argane’s hillside farm in the Gurage Zone, however, tangible signs of environmental recovery are already taking hold. Since 2019, Argane has carefully integrated grasses, nutritious animal fodder, fenugreek, and fruit trees along the outer edges of his cultivated fields. These additions have successfully helped anchor the fragile soil while supplying essential feed for his four cows, six goats, and three sheep.
Through these sustained efforts, his barley harvest has climbed from roughly 1,800 pounds per acre to approximately 3,200 pounds, while the newly established vegetation and conservation structures have visibly curbed soil erosion and slowed the destructive velocity of storm runoff 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.”