The numbers in Felix Finkbeiner 's life are impressive. His stated goal is to "plant one thousand billion – that is, one trillion – trees." His NGO "Plant for the Planet" plants a tree every 15 seconds. More than 70,000 young people have joined his movement, and 15 billion trees have already been planted, one billion last year alone. Finkbeiner's biography is equally impressive: At the age of 9, he initiated the tree-planting project; at 13, he spoke at the United Nations; last year, at just 20, he received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany; and now his second book is being published.

Prince Albert of Monaco and Klaus Töpfer serve as patrons of Plant for the Planet. The organization, based in Uffing, Bavaria, conducts educational projects in schools and operates a tree nursery in Yucatán, Mexico. An app helps register trees. In the future, it will even use satellite data to track the progress of reforestation projects worldwide, and an algorithm will calculate how much carbon dioxide is captured as a result. This is intended to create transparency and give all donors the feeling that their money is being spent on a worthwhile cause. However, upon closer inspection, one begins to doubt the impressive figures.

This begins with the progress bar for the 1,000 billion tree goal on the Plant for the Planet website ; it currently stands at about a quarter – that would be around 250 billion trees. However, if you click on the "tree counter," that quarter shrinks to 1.5 percent , to 15 billion planted trees. Still, that would still be a considerable amount. However, almost all significant reforestation projects were carried out by countries like China, India, or Ethiopia as part of the "Billion Tree Campaign" of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). This campaign ended in 2011. Plant for the Planet is merely the formal successor to the project. While the NGO also plants trees, with 7 million reportedly planted in Mexico so far, that would only represent 0.05 percent of all trees in the database.

What's strange is that the world's top ten planters include not only countries, but also individuals. A "Valf F." from France is said to have planted 682 million trees, while "Deekay" from Egypt has planted 500 million. And, of all things, the energy company RWE is also said to be among the tree sponsors. Atonement for the Hambach Forest?

When contacted, Plant for the Planet stated that the RWE incident was unfortunately a "fake report" that was "accidentally released." The NGO promised it would review the database again, explicitly including the suspicious individuals at DIE ZEIT's request. A week later, a second email arrived from the spokesperson: "We discovered that some of the entries date from the UNEP era, some from the time after the tree counter was handed over to Plant for the Planet, but before we introduced a verification mechanism. The information seems very strange to us; we have contacted all the email addresses provided. However, responses are pending." Therefore, the dubious numbers have been deleted "as a precautionary measure."

After just two emails, the database is already 1.4 billion trees lighter, nine percent of all plantings. It currently counts 13.62 billion – mostly from the old UNEP project. "We assume that the tree counter is now largely cleared of false reports," the organization writes, expressing contrition: The overlooked fake entries are "very, very annoying." However, no one was harmed "because no money was involved." That may be so. But what has undoubtedly been damaged is the NGO's credibility. Anyone who boasts about numbers like that should also count accurately.

Source: https://www.zeit.de/2019/11/plant-for-planet-ngo-projekt-aufforstung-daten