Niku Argane’s farm sits on a steep hillside in central Ethiopia’s semi-mountainous Gurage Zone, where years of relentless flooding have carved deep, jagged gullies through the land. Soil that once produced enough barley and potatoes to feed his wife and four children—and left a comfortable surplus to sell at the local market—has steadily eroded away. Meanwhile, recurring drought has made what remains of the 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 plot in Ambele Kebele.
Over the past century, Ethiopia nearly eradicated its forests as trees were cleared aggressively to make way for expanding agriculture, grazing livestock, and securing fuel wood. The dramatic loss of tree cover and stabilizing root systems allowed seasonal winds and heavy rains to wash away fertile topsoil, directly contributing to declining crop yields across the nation’s highlands. Today, that inherent ecological vulnerability is being compounded exponentially by global climate change.
Ethiopia stands among the countries most acutely vulnerable to the effects of a warming planet. Heavier downpours are currently sluicing away already depleted soils and triggering devastating landslides, while more intense droughts, combined with the loss of natural shade once provided by dense canopies, rapidly bake and dry out the agricultural landscape.
The economic and human toll of this crisis is staggering. Land degradation costs the country an estimated $4.3 billion a year through smaller harvests and lost income for smallholder farmers, creating an acute deficit in available food supplies. With more than 100 million Ethiopians directly dependent on agriculture for their daily livelihoods, the consequences reach far beyond environmental degradation. Climate shocks and recurring crop losses have emerged as the primary drivers of acute hunger in the region. By 2024, an estimated 15.8 million Ethiopians—roughly 12 percent of the national population—required emergency food assistance.
A Nationwide Campaign of Historic Proportions
To reverse this dangerous trajectory, the country has launched one of the most ambitious environmental restoration campaigns in human history. Argane has personally planted 80 tree seedlings on his own farmland and another 50 in a communal area—a modest, local contribution to a vastly larger national effort.
In just the last seven years, tens of millions of Ethiopian citizens have mobilized to plant more than 47 billion seedlings across the country. Operating under the banner of the Green Legacy Initiative, the program aims to plant a staggering 50 billion seedlings by the year 2030. Volunteers are working tirelessly to rebuild native forests and successfully integrate trees directly into working farmlands. In the process, they are sequestering atmospheric carbon to help protect future generations from ever-worsening weather extremes.
While large-scale ecological restoration programs frequently fall short of their lofty goals, ordinary Ethiopians are finding profound 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.”
Historical records show that in the early 20th century, rich forests covered an estimated 35 to 40 percent of Ethiopia. Its highlands were remarkably green, with dense woodlands spanning much of the country’s cool, fertile uplands. However, as human populations expanded and settlements pushed outward, trees were cleared indiscriminately for agriculture, pasture, fuel, and construction materials.
As soils lost their natural fertility, agricultural cultivation was forced onto increasingly marginal lands, including steep mountain slopes. Without protective vegetation and proper tillage management, fertile topsoil eroded rapidly, washing away into rushing rivers and vital reservoirs. By 1989, national forest cover had plummeted to an estimated 3 percent, while Ethiopia’s vulnerable highlands were losing around 1 billion metric tons of topsoil every single year.
Following the devastating droughts and famines of the 1970s and 1980s, the Ethiopian government and international donor organizations began investing heavily in localized soil and water conservation projects. These early initiatives included excluding livestock from worn-out land, planting trees, and constructing physical barriers like terraces and check dams—small, low walls of stacked rocks and logs placed strategically across gullies to slow the destructive flow of rainwater. By the turn of the century, these restoration programs were gradually being implemented at an increasing scale.
Supercharging Restoration Through Policy and Community Mobilization
The government supercharged these localized efforts in 2019 by transforming tree-planting into a synchronized nationwide campaign known as the Green Legacy Initiative. This sweeping scheme successfully mobilized millions of individuals and organized groups, including farmers, civil servants, educational institutions, and religious organizations, while distributing millions of free seedlings across every region of the country.
In 2024, the federal government formalized this commitment by establishing the Green Legacy and Landscape Restoration Special Fund. The administration committed between 0.5 percent and 1 percent of the annual federal budget—translating to roughly $73 million to $145 million—directly to landscape restoration.
This financial allocation represented an unusually large commitment for a low-income developing nation. According to development experts, the remarkable scope, political backing, and tangible success of the program directly contributed to the selection of Ethiopia as the host of the upcoming U.N. climate conference—a prestigious international honor that will allow the nation to showcase its pioneering greening efforts to the world.
The mobilization capacity of the campaign was vividly demonstrated in August, when 26.6 million Ethiopians planted 800 million tree seedlings in a single day, according to official government figures. This milestone easily surpassed the previous year’s impressive tally of 714.7 million.
Among the dedicated participants was Yeshihareg Teferi, who traveled before sunrise from her home in Addis Ababa to Tulu Dimtu, spending hours hunched over in the cold rain to dig holes in the thick mud. It marked Teferi’s fifth consecutive year participating in the annual mass planting event. While she had previously planted native species such as the African wild olive and African fern pine, this year she deliberately chose to plant juniper.
“We have a responsibility to ensure future generations inherit a green and fertile environment, rather than barren land,” she explained.
Measurable Progress and Ecological Recovery
There are already clear, measurable signs that this massive undertaking is having a profound impact on the landscape. Government reports indicate that national forest cover rose from 17.2 percent in 2019 to 23.6 percent in 2023. Furthermore, scientific studies of previously restored areas have documented substantial reductions in soil erosion. Between 2013 and 2023, the nation’s annual deforestation rate fell sharply from more than 350 square miles to approximately 100 square miles.
These coordinated restoration efforts are also yielding unexpected benefits for regional wildlife populations. In Abijata-Shalla National Park, located in the heart of the Ethiopian highlands, conservation workers replanted severely degraded areas while constructing physical terraces and contour bunds—small earthen ridges running horizontally across hillsides to slow surface runoff and encourage water to soak deep into the soil.
According to Kumera Wakjira, director-general of the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority, the return of trees and native grasses led to an immediate increase in groundwater infiltration, causing water levels in the park’s lakes to rise. This influx of fresh water spurred the ecological return of fish populations, which in turn attracted fish-eating birds such as cormorants and African darters. Beyond avian life, populations of Grant’s gazelles and wild dogs are actively expanding into territories where they were previously scarce.
Despite these environmental victories, experts caution that simply planting trees is no guarantee of long-term survival. A comprehensive 2022 study analyzing 176 reforestation projects across Asia revealed that roughly half of all planted trees failed to survive their first five years. Furthermore, scientists emphasize that trees alone do not automatically constitute a healthy, functioning forest.
Endalkachew Wolde-Meskel, a soil scientist and senior researcher at the Center for International Forestry Research, notes that successful restoration typically requires the natural regeneration of grasses and diverse understory vegetation, paired with strict soil and water conservation measures and active management by local communities.
“The objective is not really ‘plant trees,’” Wolde-Meskel said. “It is to restore the functioning of the entire landscape.”
Echoing these concerns, Emiru Birhane Hizikias, an Ethiopian restoration ecologist at Norway’s Nord University, described the heavy personal involvement of the prime minister as a political blessing, yet warned that the sheer speed and scale of the Green Legacy Initiative have occasionally outpaced the logistical systems required to ensure long-term survival on the ground. He argued that public messaging too often prioritizes moving massive quantities of seedlings into the earth over providing the ongoing maintenance they require.
“You can’t expect a baby to grow if you don’t care for it,” Hizikias said, adding that similar vulnerabilities have historically affected tree plantations in the region.
Conversely, Abreham Berta Aneseyee, an environmental scientist at Wolkite University and an adviser to the Ministry of Agriculture, strongly disputed that characterization. He maintained that the mass planting campaign is consistently accompanied by practical, boots-on-the-ground guidance from government forestry and agricultural experts. According to Aneseyee, specialists travel directly from farm to farm, advising smallholders on proper planting techniques for different species, optimal soil depth, and the construction of protective physical structures like contour bunds. Farmers are also instructed in sustainable forest management to ensure established trees are protected rather than illegally harvested.
Recent scientific literature appears to support these localized oversight efforts. A 2026 study examining more than 44,500 seedlings planted in southern Ethiopia under the Green Legacy Initiative found an impressive survival rate of about 80 percent. Survival rates were significantly higher among older seedlings, those planted during peak wet seasons, and those handled by volunteers who had received formal training in best plantation practices.
In the Humbo and Boloso Sore districts of the southwestern Wolaita Zone, the Green Legacy framework has been successfully layered onto long-running community land-management programs. Local residents have constructed rock check dams to stabilize deep gullies, excavated half-moon ditches designed to trap scarce rainwater, and integrated native trees with perennial grasses.
Global Comparisons and the Challenges of a Changing Climate
Academic observers note that Ethiopia’s approach has few direct parallels anywhere else on the African continent, particularly in its unique combination of top-level political leadership, domestic funding, widespread public mobilization, and sheer geographical scale. Aad Kessler of Wageningen University compared the ongoing effort to China’s historic restoration of the Loess Plateau, widely recognized as one of the most severely eroded regions on Earth.
During the 1990s, China initiated massive ecological recovery efforts on the plateau, anchored by a World Bank-backed watershed rehabilitation project and reinforced in 1999 by the Grain for Green program, which provided financial incentives for farmers to halt cultivation on vulnerable slopes and plant protective trees, shrubs, and grasses. By 2016, more than 11,500 square miles of rain-fed cropland had successfully transitioned into dense forests or grasslands, yielding a 25 percent increase in overall vegetative cover within a single decade.
However, researchers point out clear limitations to this comparison. While China directly paid farmers to take fragile, degraded slopes out of active agricultural production, millions of Ethiopian smallholders continue to rely directly on their modest plots of land for daily food and survival. Even so, Kessler noted that both national efforts share a foundational operational philosophy: execute a massive intervention first, and evaluate the outcomes along the way.
Kessler’s own academic work, which includes a government-backed field project in Ethiopia, relies on a more decentralized, participatory framework that actively involves farmers and rural communities in decisions regarding what specific areas to restore and which methods to employ.
“Of course it is better than top-down action,” Kessler acknowledged, “but it takes more time.”
Even as Ethiopia pours unprecedented resources into rebuilding its forests and rejuvenating exhausted soils, global climate change is actively altering the environmental baselines these restored landscapes must endure. In the arid pastoral regions of Afar and Somali, the Green Legacy Initiative has deliberately pivoted toward planting drought-tolerant species, though experts remain uncertain whether these saplings will survive the harsher climatic conditions projected for the coming decades.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects increasingly frequent and intense rainfall events across East Africa as global temperatures continue to rise. The devastating human cost of this volatility was underscored in July 2024, when exceptionally heavy rainfall in Ethiopia’s southern Geze Gofa district triggered dual landslides that claimed the lives of at least 257 people.
Recent scientific literature also indicates that climate change is driving an increase in the frequency and severity of El Niño weather patterns, with profound consequences for the East African region. Over the summer, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network explicitly linked El Niño phenomena to historically poor seasonal rainfall in parts of Ethiopia, leaving several agricultural zones with their driest June and July on record.
For many farmers, these shifting weather patterns have complicated the most basic prerequisite of ecological restoration: ensuring that young seedlings survive their very first dry season. Belayneh Mamo, a 65-year-old farmer living in Ethiopia’s drought-prone northern Amhara region, traditionally relies on predictable July rainfall to cultivate teff, sorghum, maize, and wheat. Although he regularly receives government-provided seeds for coffee, neem, and gesho trees, unpredictable weather delayed his planting season until August, when the region’s first delayed 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 said, reflecting on the altered seasonal calendar. “The delays affected the seedlings we plant, our staple crops, and the availability of animal feed.”
Yet, back on the hillside plots of the Gurage Zone, tangible signs of ecological recovery are already taking root. Since 2019, Niku Argane has successfully integrated resilient grasses, nutritious fodder plants, fenugreek, and fruit trees along the precise boundaries of his agricultural fields. These additions have helped anchor the fragile topsoil in place while supplying essential feed for his four cows, six goats, and three sheep.
Through these sustained conservation practices, Argane’s annual barley harvest has rebounded significantly, climbing from approximately 1,800 pounds per acre to roughly 3,200 pounds. At the same time, the newly established vegetation has dramatically reduced surface erosion and slowed the destructive velocity of storm runoff during heavy rains.
“Restoring degraded land isn’t just about protecting the environment,” Argane said, surveying his recovering hillside. “It’s also about making life better for my family and my community.”