What’s Next?

The Plant-for-the-Planet children and youth initiative was launched in January 2007 after Wangari Maathai and the UNEP had called to action via the Billion Tree Campaign. At the end of his school presentation about the current climate crisis, nine-year-old Felix Finkbeiner announced his vision to his classmates: “Let’s plant one million trees in every country on earth!”

The current goal of the children and youth initiative is to plant a trillion trees worldwide. Trees are the cheapest and most effective means of binding CO₂, allowing us more time to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero and mitigate the climate crisis.

In 2011, UNEP handed over the Billion Tree Campaign, along with the official world tree counter, to the youth-led Plant-for-the-Planet Foundation. As the children’s aim is now to plant a trillion trees, they transformed the Billion Tree Campaign into the Trillion Tree Campaign and developed an interactive online tool that motivates others to get involved in planting (weplant.app).

So far, more than 13 billion trees in 193 countries have been planted. The children of Plant-for-the-Planet teach and empower others to become Climate Justice Ambassadors. More than 81,000 children from 73 countries are already participating.

On the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, Plant-for-the-Planet plants a tree every 15 seconds. This project demonstrates just how easy it is to make planting trees so effective on a large scale. The initiative uses its own products (i.e. The Change Chocolate) and campaigns (such as "Stop talking. Start planting.”) in order to plant trees and motivate others to get involved in planting.