A Billionaire Wanted to Save 1 Trillion Trees by 2030. It’s Not Going Great.

By Sophie Alexander Graphics by Kyle Kim Jason Kao May 3, 2024 at 5:00 AM EDT

Salesforce Tower is the tallest building in San Francisco, with sweeping views across the bay. From the top of it, software billionaire Marc Benioff has seen the natural world change around his native city. Several years ago, smoke from a wildfire made the sky so hazy one day, “I could not see out the windows,” he recently recalled by phone from his other office in Hawaii. The moment “really impacted me,” said Benioff, the chair, co-founder and CEO of Salesforce Inc. and a longtime advocate for the environment.

It was around this time that he launched a wildly ambitious plan to fight climate change. Benioff presented it at the capitalist cornucopia of Davos in early 2020 — dressed in black because he was “at a funeral for capitalism,” which was failing for its lack of social purpose, he said.

The plan was to plant or protect 1 trillion trees by 2030. The goal wasn’t exactly to add another trillion trees to the planet, but to do a mix of growing, restoring and conserving to keep the earth’s tree count 1 trillion higher than it would be otherwise. Other organizations had been trying to do the same thing for years, but Benioff and leaders of the World Economic Forum, where Benioff is a trustee, figured they could help move the needle faster. Leveraging Benioff’s pocketbook (he’s worth almost $10 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index) and WEF’s robust Rolodex, their initiative, called 1t.org, has gotten some of the biggest companies and governments in the world to promise to spend time and money planting trees and saving forests.

Rallying top decision makers to do more to halt climate change is sorely needed as the world keeps warming. But four years (and one global pandemic) later, the total number of trees pledged to 1t.org to date amounts to less than 15% of 1 trillion. And with flexible rules on who can pledge what, and little accountability to ensure follow-through, it’s impossible to know how many trees the project has actually planted or saved so far: By the partial count of WEF and American Forests, which co-runs 1t.org’s US Chapter, the number is as much as 2.6 billion trees — more than 997 billion short of the goal. Jad Daley, president and chief executive officer of American Forests, said he expects to report “many billions more” by the end of the year.

Bloomberg Green found that more than a fifth of the 85 companies’ pledges make use of the carbon offset market. Companies buy credits on the market to cancel out, or offset, their own climate emissions. Numerous offset-generating projects have promised climate benefits that crumbled upon scrutiny. Although proponents of offsets say they are the only viable way for some companies to hit net zero, many experts say they should not be used to cancel out emissions that can be reduced other ways.

“Nature-based solutions” such as reforestation have a big role to play in combating climate change. But climate advocates fear focusing on trees diverts time and resources away from the urgent and politically challenging task of phasing out fossil fuels, and that it can be used by companies as a tactic to delay real action.

“Preserving forests, safeguarding these biodiverse spaces — not just for the carbon, but for all the benefits that they provide to ecosystems and to Indigenous communities — it’s all very important,” said Rachel Cleetus, the climate and energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. But trees “should not be seen as a substitute for the core task at hand here, which is getting off fossil fuels.”

Benioff, for his part, is unperturbed by such criticism, which he attributes to people who “view talking about nature as a moral hazard” in the climate fight. “And I believe we have to be focused on many things.”

“I think that there’s a lot of people who are attacking nature and hate nature,” said Benioff, who has spent almost $17 million on 1t.org and committed hundreds of millions more to tree-related investments. “I’m somebody who loves nature and supports nature.”

“The greatest, most scalable technology we have today to sequester carbon is the tree,” Benioff told Bloomberg Green.

Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the air, then release oxygen. A single mature tree will store away about 22 kilograms (49 pounds) of carbon a year, according to the European Environment Agency, about as much as is produced by burning 24 pounds of coal.

In 2020 Benioff and WEF launched their global campaign to plant and conserve 1 trillion trees over the next decade. That’s enough to cover nearly three Indias.

Governments, companies and nonprofits signed on to the project, which they named 1t.org.

WEF, which runs the program, tracks company pledges. Four years later, the number of trees it accounts for as planted or conserved is less than 0.3% of the ultimate goal.

A spokesperson said WEF has “a rigorous process to track the implementation,” but noted that it relies “on transparency and reporting by the companies themselves.”

Slashing fossil fuel consumption is critical to slowing warming, but scientists say we also need to pull carbon that's already in the air back out of it. Trees are really good at that, drawing in CO₂ and then releasing oxygen. “I was in third grade. I learned about photosynthesis and I got it right away,” Benioff said.

It turns out trees are also a powerful political tool. Planting trees is something pretty much everyone can get on board with — and for the most part, after Benioff’s announcement at Davos, they did. Banks, nonprofits, energy companies and governments have all signed onto 1t.org. Former US President Donald Trump, who withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement and loosened rules on pollution while he was in office, was one of the first to endorse it, calling the initiative “a very big deal” after planting a tree on the White House lawn on Earth Day in 2020.

“Everybody agreed on tree diplomacy,” Benioff recalled. “I was in shock.” Republican lawmakers in the US have embraced the idea, introducing a trillion-tree bill in Congress in 2023.

But there’s less scientific agreement about how much we should rely on trees to fight global warming. Lots of trees require lots of land, potentially competing with uses like agriculture or crowding out other ecosystems. The amount of carbon that a given tree can store depends on myriad factors. Newly planted trees in reforestation projects don’t always survive to maturity, when they’re able to sequester the most carbon. And trees themselves are vulnerable to deforestation, heat and drought — which may diminish their carbon-sucking power — as well as wildfires that release their CO₂ into the atmosphere.

What launched Benioff on his arboreal crusade was a paper by the Swiss research group Crowther Lab that went viral in 2019. Published in the journal Science, the paper claimed there was room on the planet for around one trillion new trees and that, if planted, these could suck more than 200 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. That’s about five times the amount of global CO₂ emissions in 2023.

The conclusion received strong pushback from other scientists after publication. Joseph Veldman, an ecologist at Texas A&M University, says the researchers vastly overestimated the carbon-storing potential. “In my mind, it’s fraudulent,” he said.

Several 1t.org companies have business in the fossil fuel industry, including the Italian oil supermajor Eni SpA and Indian coal giant Adani Group. Burning fossil fuels is the single biggest driver of global warming, releasing more CO₂ than large forests can cancel out.

Jane Goodall, the renowned primatologist and activist, is a mentor to Benioff and a spokesperson for 1t.org. Of the fossil fuel companies that make pledges, she said, “That is greenwashing for sure.” But imperfect action to stave off climate change is better than none at all: “Nevertheless, those companies — if they plant trees, it’s better than if they don’t.”

WEF, which emphasizes that its work is part of the broader trillion trees movement, counts a total of 134.4 billion trees pledged to 1t.org specifically. Most of that comes from two countries: China (70 billion trees) and the US (55 billion trees). Globally, WEF only tracks the progress of corporations’ pledges (9.4 billion trees). The US chapter of 1t.org is the only part of the organization that checks on pledges from governments and NGOs.

Company pledges vary widely in the forms they take — from trees to dollars to acres of land — making it tricky to compare and monitor progress. So, for instance, Nestle SA said it would plant 200 million trees while Amazon.com, Inc. pledged $100 million for reforestation and conservation. And Unilever Plc promised to protect and regenerate 1.5 million hectares of land, forests and oceans.

Not one of those companies has submitted the 2023 reports that 1t.org requests from participants. Amazon and Unilever didn’t submit their 2022 reports either. WEF’s 1t.org director Nicole Schwab said her team is deciding how to take action against companies that don’t file them. A spokesperson for Nestle said it’s “close to finalizing” its report. Amazon declined to comment, and Unilever didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Companies aren’t required to report back to WEF until a year after making a pledge. So only 35 were required to file 2023 reports, and of those, 27 did. From those reports, WEF counts 1.2 billion trees completed so far, Schwab said. Most of them by far — 88% — are existing trees conserved. Only 148 million are new or restored trees. On Thursday, the US Chapter published its first impact report, announcing that its corporate, nonprofit and government partners have conserved 113,948 hectares and restored and grown more than 1.3 billion trees from January 2020 through December 2022. A spokesperson for American Forests said there is a chance some trees were double counted.

Schwab said companies must have a “credible” net-zero goal to pledge to 1t.org. A WEF spokesperson clarified that companies can pledge only if they are working with standard-setting groups like the UN-backed Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). At a minimum, they must have a public goal to reach net zero before or by 2050, covering direct and indirect emissions, in line with the Paris Agreement.

But not all companies on 1t.org meet these criteria, according to an analysis of the companies’ climate goals on SBTi and Net Zero Tracker, which WEF said it uses to check potential pledgers. For example, Vale SA, the Brazilian mining company, pledged to protect and recover 500,000 hectares of land outside its operating sites, but SBTi had removed its net-zero commitment months earlier because it failed to comply with the organization’s criteria.

SBTi removed the net-zero commitments of multiple Adani Group companies and Amazon after the companies made their 1t.org pledges.

Adani Group didn’t respond to questions on the SBTi removal. A spokesperson for Vale said, “There are huge challenges to decarbonize mining and steel industries,” but “we will continue to focus on finding solutions that effectively reduce [greenhouse gas] emissions within our value chain.”

Bloomberg Green’s analysis of 1t.org’s records also found that 18 companies’ pledges involve the carbon offset market. Some companies are buying credits from the market while others are listing their projects with some of the biggest registries. Bloomberg Green couldn't quantify how much each pledge relied on offsets. WEF didn’t respond to a question about guidelines for using offsets toward pledges.

Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project at the University of California at Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, said companies can’t assume the credits they’re buying are working as they should because registries aren’t adequately vetting projects.

“With reforestation projects, you can’t just buy credits off the market and assume it’s ensuring quality and avoiding harm,” Haya said.

One 1t.org signatory using credits is Bank of America Corp. Its pledge isn’t to protect a specific number of trees or hectares of land, but instead to “help develop the voluntary carbon offset market.” Both of the carbon offset projects it touts in its 2022 report to 1t.org — one that protects a national park in Peru and another that supports reforestation in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley — have been found to be less effective than advertised. The project in Peru saw tree canopy shrink even after the forest conservation credits were sold and the other project was found to take credit for trees that were already planted or would have been anyway.

Bank of America declined to comment.

China’s 1t.org chapter doesn’t accept pledges that involve buying credits from the voluntary carbon market. But companies there aren’t necessarily planting trees where they have the best prospects for surviving and soaking up carbon. China Mengniu Dairy said it’s already planted more than 97 million trees in China’s Ulan Buh Desert.

The effort builds on a decades-long national program to combat desertification: The Great Green Wall, as it’s known, has increased vegetation in an effort to stabilize sand dunes and stop the dust storms that blow into Beijing. While the Chinese government claims success in pushing back the desert, academics question the long-term viability.

Hong Jiang, a geographer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who has researched the impacts of China’s tree-planting programs, said reforestation is a laudable goal. But not only do many of the trees planted in and near the desert not survive, they suck up the already limited water that other vegetation relies on.

“You might be able to get some trees up, you can count the numbers, but those trees are not producing enough of a biomass at all,” she said. “They become dwarf trees. They don’t create an ecosystem.”

Back in 2019, at an August WEF trustee meeting in Geneva, former US Vice President Al Gore told Benioff about an interesting new paper on the potential trees have to sequester a huge amount of carbon dioxide out of the air.

That same day, University of California at Santa Barbara researcher Douglas McCauley — whose ocean science lab Benioff funds — asked him, “Have you seen Tom Crowther’s research?”

Benioff read it. He described his reaction some months later in Davos: “I said, ‘What? One trillion trees will sequester more than 200 gigatons of carbon? We have to get on this right now. Who’s working on this?’”

Soon after, the billionaire had a meeting with Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner at the White House. “I said, ‘I’m just here to talk about one crazy thing that is the last thing that you expect me to be here to talk about,’” Benioff recounted. By December 2019, representatives from the billionaire’s company were in Switzerland with others from the WEF, the United Nations and NGOs to come up with a plan to put the research into action.

As this was all happening, the science community was still digesting Crowther’s findings. Months after the paper was published, dozens of scientists wrote a response in Science, calling into question the validity of his claims. Veldman, the Texas A&M ecologist, was the lead author.

He’d long been fighting what he sees as a misguided obsession with trees and planting them where they don’t belong and can even harm ecosystems. People “have ascribed these almost fantastical values to forests,” said Veldman. “They think that anything that can help promote this global movement for forest restoration is an innate good.”

Crowther, a professor of ecology at Swiss university ETH Zurich, said in an email that his critics misunderstood his 2019 paper — that “it had nothing to do with ‘planting’ trees anywhere, and certainly not in wetlands or grasslands that are not naturally forested.” He stands by his finding that there’s room on Earth for 1 trillion more trees and that the carbon benefit would be roughly 200 billion metric tons, and his 2023 follow-up paper, which cited a similar carbon savings estimate, was signed by hundreds of co-authors. But in an update to his original paper, Crowther and his team clarified that they were wrong to say “tree restoration is the most effective solution to climate change to date.”

Benioff said he hasn’t spoken to Veldman or the other scientists who countered Crowther, and dismissed their criticism. “I view it as nonsense,” Benioff said.

Salesforce, Benioff’s company and one of the founders of 1t.org, has SBTi-validated emissions-reduction targets and hopes to reach net zero by 2040. Although it purchases carbon credits, it doesn’t apply them to its 1t.org pledge. It’s taken pains to document its progress toward a trillion trees — but it hasn’t been easy. The company submitted only partial documentation to WEF for the past two years.

To get a better sense of what’s happened, last year, Salesforce enlisted Environmental Resources Management to conduct an audit of its work so far. It found that Salesforce has funded 52 million trees to date — more than halfway to its 100 million tree goal — and that roughly 10% of those have been lost, mainly to extreme weather events.

Like many other 1t.org companies, Salesforce is largely counting on third parties to implement its pledge. It’s partnered with more than 20 organizations in 13 countries. Some of the projects are difficult to get to, making it harder for the company to get a clear picture of results, so it’s set up satellite imagery to keep track of them.

“We’ll be able to have a much, much clearer picture in the next reporting round,” said Tim Christophersen, who heads Salesforce’s climate work. “We also really want to share this information” with the other companies, he added, “Because the level of sophistication within the companies also varies. Some of them, to be honest, are quite scared. They’re concerned that they want to do the right thing, but they don’t have the expertise.”

Salesforce is looking beyond a tally of simple trees to gauge its success, Christophersen said, “with measurements that look at the impact for people and nature and climate.” But it’ll still be counting trees, because, as he puts it, “everything else is more nuanced, more complex and doesn’t often get transported in a good way to the public.”

1t.org is part of the UN’s Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which ends in 2030. After that year, the program is scheduled to die. No one knows what will happen to what’s been built and whether it will continue — not even WEF’s Schwab. “I don’t know, I can’t tell you,” Schwab said. “I mean, I hope so.”

Benioff said in a text message that he’s not planning on stopping his funding until the work is done: “I am committed to the trees and oceans ❤️.”