Ethiopia's Highlands Turning Green — Green Legacy, 2026

For most of the last century Ethiopia was losing its forests — around 560,000 hectares of tree cover, about 2,160 square miles, went to farmland, logging and charcoal between the turn of the millennium and 2025. Then, in 2019, the government launched the Green Legacy Initiative and ordinary people started planting. The headline claim is enormous: 48 billion trees in seven years, including a reported 353 million seedlings in a single day, with a target of 50 billion by 2030. The figure most worth paying attention to, though, is a quieter one. Ethiopia's annual deforestation rate fell from 92,000 hectares in 2013 to 27,703 hectares in 2023 — a drop of roughly seventy per cent — and over the same period the government reports forest cover rising from 15.5 to 23.6 per cent of the country.

The honest version of this story includes its own uncertainty, and the people running it say so. How many of those 48 billion trees are still alive has not been established from the outside. Ethiopia's own technical committee put survival at 83 per cent in 2019 and 79 per cent the following year; researchers reviewing Ethiopian planting schemes found that ten of fifteen with stated targets hit less than half of them, and studies in Asia suggest nearly half of all reforestation trees fail within five years. A systematic independent assessment is now underway. The coordinator of the UN Environment Programme's REDD+ scheme in Ethiopia frames it this way: even if only half the trees survive, the country is already holding more soil, retaining more moisture and storing more carbon than it was — and the shift he values most is that the national habit has moved from clearing to planting. The commitment has outlasted the launch, too. In 2024 parliament created the Green Legacy and Landscape Restoration Special Fund, allocating between 0.5 and 1 per cent of the annual federal budget — roughly $63 million to $140 million — to restoring degraded land. In the Berbere district of Oromia, thousands of households have joined in, and WaterAid Ethiopia has distributed around 55,000 indigenous seedlings there with an 85 per cent growth rate reported so far. In November 2027 Ethiopia will host COP32 in Addis Ababa, in part because of what it has been doing with its trees.

The puzzle is the Ethiopian highlands from the air: a steep, terraced valley in full green, with cultivated plots stacked up the slopes like contour lines and a hard-edged escarpment running down the right-hand side. It is a properly demanding build, because almost the entire frame is one colour family. The way through it is light rather than hue — the sun rakes across the ridges, so every piece carries a gradient from bright lime on the sunlit face to near-black in the shadowed gullies, and sorting by that gradient works far better than sorting by green. Anchor the dark basalt cliff on the right first; it is the only sharp, angular geometry in the picture. The pale hazy ridgeline along the top gives you a second boundary. Save the middle-distance patchwork of fields for last, and use the thin dirt tracks winding between them as the connectors that finally stitch the valley together.