South Korea planted more than ten billion trees after the Korean War — and the volume of wood standing on its hills has risen roughly thirtyfold since 1953

In the 1950s and early 1960s, national assessments classified more than 4 million hectares, nearly 58% of forest land, as degraded or “bare mountain.” The land could still be classified as forest land, but much of it carried very little timber. Early reforestation efforts struggled: survival rates of planted trees were often below 50% in the 1950s. How do you actually plant ten billion trees? Across the wider reforestation drive, more than 10 billion trees were planted from the 1960s to the 1980s.