Tree planting is often seen as one of the easiest solutions to environmental problems. When a country faces desertification, land degradation, dust storms, and climate pressure, planting more trees looks like an obvious answer. This is why governments often prefer large tree-planting campaigns. They are easy to announce, easy to count, and politically attractive.
Mongolia’s One Billion Trees Program is a clear example. The campaign was launched after Mongolia’s participation in COP26 and aims to plant one billion trees by 2030. It has been promoted as part of Mongolia’s response to desertification, deforestation, food insecurity, and climate change. By mid-2022, all 21 provinces and 330 sums were reported as participating in the seedling process, while major corporations, including mining companies, pledged hundreds of millions of trees.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?country=~MNG&tab=line
Mongolia’s emissions have increased sharply since the 2000s, showing the broader environmental pressure behind climate and land restoration policies. However, tree planting alone cannot solve this problem unless it is connected to long-term land management.
Mongolia also faces serious land degradation. The country has an extreme continental climate and is highly vulnerable to climate change. One policy article from Mongolia’s Institute for Strategic Studies states that 76.9 percent of Mongolia’s land suffers from desertification and grassland degradation. It also notes that Mongolia aims to plant one billion trees by 2030 and commit around one percent of GDP annually to climate change and deforestation efforts.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/forest-area-as-share-of-land-area
Mongolia has a relatively low share of land covered by forest compared with many countries. This makes forest restoration politically important, but also difficult because much of the country is dry and ecologically fragile.
However, the main problem is that planting trees and growing forests are not the same thing. A government can plant millions of seedlings and still fail if those trees do not survive. In Mongolia’s case, this is the central risk. The country faces harsh climate conditions, water scarcity, poor soil, grazing pressure, and strong desertification. Many local areas may also lack the technical and financial capacity to maintain trees after planting.
As a result, the campaign may look successful in the short term while still being weak in the long term. The policy risk is not only environmental. It is institutional.
One major weakness in tree-planting campaigns is that success is often measured too early. Governments usually count how many trees were planted. But this does not show whether the policy actually worked.
For example, if one million trees are planted but most of them die after two or three years, the campaign has not achieved real forest restoration. The real question should not only be how many trees were planted. It should be how many trees survived, how much canopy was created, and whether the land actually recovered.
This matters especially for Mongolia. Tree survival is difficult because many planting areas face dry weather, limited water, weak soil conditions, and grazing pressure. Planting is only the first step. After that, trees need irrigation, fencing, protection from animals, soil preparation, monitoring, and sometimes replanting.
This means the main cost does not end when trees are planted. In many cases, the real cost begins after planting.
Mongolia’s One Billion Trees Program is ambitious, but ambition is not the same as capacity. The campaign depends on many actors, including ministries, provinces, private companies, mining firms, banks, and local communities. This broad participation can be useful because it mobilizes resources. However, it can also create fragmented responsibility.
If everyone supports the campaign, but no one is clearly responsible for long-term survival, the policy becomes weak in practice. Provinces may plant trees, companies may sponsor planting events, and banks may announce financing. But these actions do not automatically create a working maintenanable system.
The Diplomat raised this issue directly by asking whether participants in Mongolia’s One Billion Tree movement can actually follow through on their commitments. The article also noted that green projects in Mongolia are often disrupted by elections and changes in national or provincial administrations, which can weaken funding and continuity.