Page 76 - EarthHeroes

Felix and the team needed to raise money to meet their tree-planting target, so they decided to ask wealthy companies to contribute, starting with their favourite industry – chocolate. Speaking at a conference attended by 350 chocolate companies from all over the world, Felix asked them each to contribute one Euro to a tree-planting fund for every tonne of chocolate sold. But not a single one agreed to join the scheme, and Felix fought back tears as he left the stage. A week later, a Plant-for-the-Planet Ambassador, 12-year-old Max, suggested they should make their own chocolate. Felix loved this idea, so when one of the chocolate manufacturers contacted him to ask if they could help, he knew how to respond. In 2012, Plant-for-the-Planet launched Die Gute Schokolade, the Change Chocolate bar, which is fair trade and climate neutral, meaning that farmers are paid a good price for their cocoa and that carbon emissions from making the chocolate are offset, or balanced, by the farmers
planting more trees amongst their cocoa plantations. For every five bars of the chocolate sold, Plant-
for-the-Planet plants one tree in Mexico.
When Felix called for one trillion new trees, no scientist knew how many trees
actually existed in the world, how many additional trees could be planted or where these should be. Luckily Gregor,
who was now studying forestry at Yale University in the USA, persuaded a friend, Thomas Crowther, and his research team
to carry out a study into these questions.
Over four years, they combined satellite images of the Earth and information about
the density of forests, or how many trees grow in them, for many countries to produce
a computer model of all the trees on Earth. They found that there are just over three trillion trees on the planet, although there would have been double this number around 11,000 years ago before humans first started cutting them down. Every year 15.3 billion trees are chopped down while only 5.8 billion are replanted, which results in a loss of 9.5 billion trees each year. Most importantly, their study showed that there are enough unused areas of previously forested land to plant between 700 billion and 1.2 trillion new trees. The Trillion Tree target was possible but would need around 150 trees to be planted for every human on the planet. These could capture one quarter of human-made carbon emissions, and while it would not end global warming, it would slow it down.
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