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China Planted 78 Billion New Trees, and Seriously Messed Up Its Water Cycle
(www.popularmechanics.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2026
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It's since 1980, they've had almost half a century to do it.
That's still 1,695,652,173 trees per year (78,000,000,000/46 years).
"In all seriousness, how?"
The us plants about 2.3 trillion corn plants per year. 25,000 per acre, 95,000,000 acres. Considering they plant 68,000,000 trees per year just for paper, in the US, the numbers aren't shocking. Worldwide tree nurseries probably dwarf that 1.6 billion, maybe.
68 million is a pretty far cry from 1,695 million.
But the US plants around 1.3 billion a year, so China's number isn't shocking
It's not vastly more than every Chinese person planting 1 tree a year. If you pay people to plant 10 trees a day, 5 days a week, 48 weeks a year you only need to employ one person in every 2400 to get close.
That's still over a billion trees a year. Actually that's over 1,500,000,000 trees a year. Again...HOW?
And this begs a side question. Out of those 78 Billion trees, how many are alive now?