Earlier this week there was an article in the Guardian Grow your own forest: how to plant trees to help save the planet.

According to some scientists, forest restoration is the number one strategy for stopping global warming. So what should we be doing? Here’s the TL;DR précis:

Tree planting has mind-blowing potential to tackle climate crisis … Billions more trees … could remove two-thirds of all the carbon dioxide created by human activity. Forest restoration is a top climate change solution.
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While a global programme might take 100 years to be fully effective, along the way it would reduce the consequences of the climate crisis – protecting soil from erosion, reducing risk of flooding and providing habitat for a vast range of other plants and animals.
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UK tree-planting initiatives include the Northern Forest, which will be made up of 25m trees, spanning the north of England from Liverpool to Hull … But we need to do much, much more … While there are more than 3 trillion trees in the world, that number is estimated to have fallen by 46% since the dawn of human civilisation … Amazon rainforest continues to be lost by the equivalent of three football fields every minute.
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How many trees should we be planting? UK needs to increase its woodland from 13% of land area to 17% (the European average is around 35%) … planting 30,000 hectares annually … Tree planting rates in the UK in the past decade or so have been the lowest for a generation; we are miles off where we should be.
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Can people planting trees in their garden make much of a dent? One individual tree might not make a difference [to climate, though it will to the local wildlife] but if 10m people put one tree in, that would … planting a tree in the right place is a good thing to do.
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What should we be planting and where? Species need to be chosen carefully to ensure they grow well … and fit into the existing ecosystem … other landscapes – such as grasslands and peatlands … must be protected and here it might not be appropriate to plant trees.
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Can we just plant trees in our gardens? You don’t need permission, but you do need to think about what species will grow where you live, and also how big it could get. It’s no use planting an oak tree two feet outside your back door … Smaller species include apple trees or rowan … and aftercare is absolutely vital for young and newly planted trees.
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What if we don’t have gardens? Can we plant trees anywhere? You can’t plant on waste ground or in your local park without permission from the landowner – that could well be the local council … but maybe approach places like school or hospital grounds.
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How else can we help? Support international organisations that promote the rights of indigenous people, whose land stores nearly a quarter of the carbon stored in tropical forests, and who are best placed to protect forested areas by monitoring illegal logging.
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Many products we wouldn’t even think of contribute to the problem. Ask questions … Ask the supermarkets where the palm oil in their products comes from, or the soya feed used to farm their meat … Ask the person responsible for your pension fund how much deforestation its investments are causing. Even if they don’t know the answer, you’ve put it on their radar.
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Support the rewilding forest restoration schemes.

And don’t get complacent. Keep going. One tree at a time if need be.

If you cannot do anything else consider supporting the Woodland Trust (in the UK; I’m sure there’ll be an equivalent organisation in your country); they offer a range of tree donation and sponsorship initiatives as well as tree packs for schools and other organisations.

Oh and there’s a bonus, as I know from experience: planting trees in your garden is a good way to piss off your neighbours, especially if (like mine) they think their garden should be nothing but a barren putting green. When we moved into the house 35+ years ago, there were two trees: a pear and an apple. Since then we have crammed almost 20 trees (plus lots of shrubs) into our suburban garden, and removed only two (the pear which died, and one which was really in a very wrong place). And we keep looking to see how to get more in!