The Trees We Count

Every year there is a photograph. A line of people in identical caps, each holding a sapling, a number announced afterwards — lakhs of trees, sometimes crores, planted in a single day. The number is the story. It is almost never followed up.

I have no argument with planting trees. I have an argument with counting them at the moment of planting, because that is the one moment at which a sapling tells you nothing at all about the future.

The question that matters is survival, and survival is determined by things that happen after the photograph: whether anything waters the sapling through its first two summers, whether it was a species suited to that soil and that rainfall, whether it was planted at the start of the monsoon or in the wrong month because that was when the event was scheduled, whether anything protects it from grazing, whether anyone returns at all. Where follow-up surveys have been done, survival rates are frequently far below what the planting figures imply. A number of saplings is not a number of trees. It is an intention.

There is a deeper problem underneath the counting one, and it is the idea that a forest and a plantation are interchangeable if the totals match. They are not remotely the same object. A mature forest is a system with a soil biology built over decades, an understorey, a canopy structure at several heights, fungal networks, deadwood, and a set of species that depend on all of the above and on each other. A block of same-age saplings of one or two fast-growing species is a crop. It may eventually become something richer. It does not start as one, and if it is a species chosen for growth rate rather than fit, it may never get there.

This matters because of how compensatory afforestation works in principle: forest is cleared for a project, and trees are planted elsewhere to make up for it. The accounting treats hectares as fungible. Ecologically they are not. You have exchanged a functioning old system for a young monoculture, often on land that was already doing something — grassland, which is routinely misfiled as wasteland despite being its own ecosystem, or land that people were using and did not agree to give up.

None of this is an argument for doing nothing, and I want to be clear about that, because the critique gets used that way. It is an argument for measuring the thing we actually want. Count survival at three years and at ten. Publish the follow-up, not just the launch. Weight native and locally appropriate species. Plant into the monsoon rather than into the calendar. Budget for maintenance, which is where restoration actually happens and where funding usually is not.

And take seriously the least photogenic option, which is also the most effective one: protecting what is already standing. An existing mature tree is doing more — for shade, for water, for the species living in it — than the saplings that would notionally replace it, and it is doing it now rather than in thirty years. Natural regeneration, where the soil and seed sources are intact, frequently outperforms planting and costs a fraction as much. It just cannot be scheduled for a morning, and nobody gets a photograph.

The trees we count are not always the trees we get. It would be worth counting the ones that are still alive when nobody is looking.