Five years after President U.Khurelsukh told the 76th session of the UN General Assembly that Mongolia would plant more than one billion trees within nine years, the country has covered less than a 10th of the ground. More than half of the allotted time has slipped through its fingers, and fewer than four years remain to report on, evaluate and assess the results. The Billion Trees movement has yet to reach even 10 percent of its target. With the hourglass emptying, the country must now ask itself a hard question: can it still finish what it started, and what would it cost its standing in the international community if it walked back its word?
The pledge was made on one of the biggest stages in world diplomacy, and it was no small task. It targeted desertification and yellow dust storms, phenomena that directly endanger the livelihoods, lives and health of more than two billion people worldwide. For a landlocked country with the Gobi on its southern doorstep, the fight is anything but abstract, and dust does not carry a passport. The commitment was meant as a significant contribution to the global struggle against environmental and climate disasters, which is exactly why the world is watching how it is kept.
At home, the promise has taken the form of a nationwide movement that has been running for more than five years. The domestic target is set even higher than the figure announced in New York: to plant, nurture and grow 1.5 billion trees between 2021 and 2030, lifting forest cover to nine percent from the current 8.7 percent. Projections suggest that success would shrink the area severely affected by desertification by four percent and cut greenhouse gas emissions by 600,000 tonnes. On paper the gain in forest cover looks modest, a mere 0.3 percentage points, but a small number on a page can hide a mountain of work in the field.
The scorecard so far makes for sobering reading. According to the Forestry Agency, the government body responsible for the policy and execution of the movement, 140.3 million trees have been planted since 2021. The agency puts that at a 9.1 percent completion rate, equivalent to 71,400 hectares of afforested land. Over the same five years, 1.2 million people have joined the tree-planting drive, a sign of genuine public appetite. Goodwill alone, however, does not put roots in the ground.
The arithmetic ahead is daunting. To honour the commitment, more than 1.3 billion trees must be successfully established in the time that remains, an average of around 330 million a year. That is more than double the total planted across the entire 2021 to 2026 period, and it would have to be repeated year after year, not achieved once in a burst of enthusiasm. Rome, as the saying goes, was not built in a day, and neither will a forest be.
There is a subtler challenge hiding behind the headline numbers. A tree planted is not a tree grown, and the movement’s own wording, to plant, nurture and grow, sets the bar at seedlings that survive. In a country of harsh winters and thin rainfall, keeping young trees alive takes far more than a spade and a good intention. It calls for a steady supply of seedlings, suitable land, water, labor, funding and years of follow-up care. The figures released so far speak of trees planted, but the more telling measure is how many are still standing years from now. It is all too easy to miss the forest for the trees if progress is judged only by how many seedlings go into the soil.
Then there is the question of credibility. Mongolia made its pledge before the assembled nations, and a country that promises much on the world stage is held to a higher standard than one that stays quiet. Falling well short would not merely be a domestic disappointment. It could dent the country’s reputation as a serious voice on desertification and climate, and make its future appeals for international attention and support harder to sustain. Conversely, a late surge that delivers real, living forest would show that Mongolia can walk the talk. The proof of the pudding, then, lies in the next four years. Whether the country has the realistic potential and capacity to plant more than 1.3 billion trees in the time left, and to see them take root, is the question that will decide both the fate of the movement and the weight of Mongolia’s word abroad.
Planting 140.3 million trees in five years is a disappointing return set against the goal the country has given itself, and the figure itself is open to question. Those responsible for the initiative offer only rough estimates of the total planted, without tracking how many seedlings survived and how many died. They say they log every planting meticulously through the “terbummod.mn” system but they cannot realistically monitor survival and growth rates. Just as there is no unified system for irrigating and maintaining the trees, there is no proper oversight mechanism to check what happens once the planting day is over. Nor is there any independent monitoring to verify the counts and records. The Billion Trees registration system is run by the Forestry Agency, the very body responsible for carrying out the policy. In effect, officials are marking their own homework with a system under their own control.
A portion of the trees counted as planted were also tallied through “equivalency’ calculations. In other words, funding and investment from mining companies and financial institutions for afforestation were treated as if the trees had actually gone into the ground, so that a cheque could count as a sapling on the books. Therefore, these weaknesses make the figures for 2021 to 2025 an unreliable yardstick of progress, and the real number of trees planted may well be lower still. The country will need to try far harder than it has so far if it hopes to honour its international obligations.
When the pledge was announced, the World Meteorological Organization and the UN Green Climate Fund hailed it as a major step, significant not only for Mongolia but in the wider history of global environmental action. They described it as a commitment of immense responsibility and a strategic move in both geopolitics and climate diplomacy. Domestic researchers have often stressed, and criticised, the fact that the matter is tied directly to the country’s international reputation, its standing on the world stage and the obligations it has taken on under various treaties and agreements.
The prize for getting it right is considerable. If Mongolia delivers on its promise to plant one billion trees, it could set a global benchmark alongside Pakistan’s “Billion Tree Tsunami” and southern neighbour’s “Great Green Wall” afforestation and restoration programs, cementing its place as a leading player in the fight to protect the environment and slow climate change. Success would lift the country’s international standing and count in areas now at the forefront of global debate, such as climate diplomacy, “green soft power” and competitiveness. It would open the door to investment from international markets, secure a privileged seat at major conferences on environmental conventions and pressing global issues, and allow successful national projects and programmes to be scaled up. The flip side is just as stark. If the promises go unkept, Mongolia risks a tarnished reputation, joining the likes of Turkey’s “Let’s Breathe into the Future” and Africa’s “Green Wall” initiatives, which are remembered more for the gap between ambition and outcome than for the forests they left behind.
Turkey’s experience is the cautionary tale most often cited. In 2019, its government launched a high-profile campaign to set a Guinness World Record by planting 11 million trees in a single day. The country’s forestry union revealed to the world that more than 90 percent of the trees planted with such fanfare had withered and died within a few months. The episode showed that environmental work, and forestry above all, demands meticulous planning, research, care, protection and constant monitoring. Planting is the photogenic part of the job. Keeping a seedling alive through its first dry summer, season after season, is the slog that nobody films, and it is where a campaign is actually won or lost.
The Sahel tells a similar story on a far grander scale. An ambitious plan to halt the advance of the Sahara Desert, the Great Green Wall, called for a belt 8,000 kilometers long and 15 kilometers wide across 11 African nations, and for the afforestation of 100 million hectares by 2030. It has effectively stalled. Political tensions and armed conflict in the Sahel have hampered progress, and so has poor coordination among those carrying out the programme. To date, less than 20 percent of the project has been completed, and thousands of trees have perished for want of maintenance and protection. At COP17, representatives of international organisations held it up as a prime example of an “overzealous initiative”, a plan whose ambition ran well ahead of what conditions on the ground could support.
The two failures look different, but they share a root. Both show what happens when abstract metrics and impressive figures take priority over tangible results, and when pledges are driven by emotion rather than scientific evidence. Neither country lacked enthusiasm. What they lacked was the patient machinery needed to turn enthusiasm into living forest. For Mongolia, the lesson comes with an uncomfortable corollary. A promise made before the world cannot be quietly withdrawn, so the country has no choice but to strive to turn it into reality. So can it deliver its billion trees?
Put that question to the Forestry Agency and the answer begins with a timetable. Officials said the Billion Trees national movement is planned over nine years in three stages. “Project preparations were carried out from 2021 to 2024, the project will be activated from 2025 to 2027, and intensified from 2028 to 2030,” they replied. Read plainly, that means the first four of the nine years went on groundwork, the activation phase is already under way, and the stage of real intensity is not due to begin until 2028, leaving just three years to close the biggest part of the gap.
Head of the agency’s Forest Restoration Department B.Ganzorig struck a confident note. “The true measure of our success lies in helping people understand that planting trees to combat desertification is a responsibility Mongolians owe to the global community. Having successfully completed the preparatory phase of the Billion Trees national movement, we will now build on that foundation to carry out large-scale afforestation. We have accumulated the necessary capacity and experience. This is a nationwide, truly national movement,” he said.
He stressed that the movement depends on the public. “Therefore, the effort of every single citizen is crucial,” B.Ganzorig added, noting that representatives from around 80 entities, including 21 provinces, major mining companies, and various government and financial institutions, have committed to planting thousands of trees. It is an impressive coalition on paper. Even so, pledges counted in thousands of trees, however many times they are multiplied across 80 entities, fall a long way short of the more than 1.3 billion that must still take root. In short, officials say the national drive will gather pace from here on. It seems the past five years were a warm-up for the Billion Trees initiative, with the heavy lifting saved for the time that remains. Let us hope that proves true.
The message the Forestry Agency is sending to the public is that whether the country keeps its pledge depends on citizen participation. There is no denying that this is a major national program, and as such it concerns every citizen. A schoolchild with a sapling, a herder’s family or an office team on a weekend planting day all have a part to play. But citizens cannot build a unified irrigation and maintenance system, set up independent verification of the tree count, or track what share of the seedlings survive. Those are the gaps identified above, and no volunteer with a spade can fill them. The responsibility for providing unified policy, planning and management at the national level rests with the officials themselves.
