One tree a month highlights the simple math behind a climate solution

The headline numbers around climate change tend to paralyse rather than inspire. A trillion trees. 489 million hectares of forest lost since 1990. Deforestation rates 63% above where they need to be to hit the 2030 pledge signed by over 100 countries. When the scale of a problem is this vast, the human mind reaches for the off switch.

Yishan Wong has a different instinct. He reaches for a calculator.

"If you divide a trillion trees into eight billion people," the former Reddit CEO told me in a recent interview, "you get 125 trees per person. Plant one tree a month for ten years, and you're there. Every single person on the planet can do this."

Wong is the founder of Terraformation, a reforestation company he launched in 2020 after spending several years systematically reading every major climate solution on the table from direct air capture to ocean iron seeding to giant space mirrors. He concluded that large-scale reforestation was not merely a good idea among many, but the most practical, most inclusive, and most reliable lever available to humanity.

The numbers behind the crisis

The data gives him room to make that case. According to NASA research, planting more than half a trillion trees could capture roughly 205 gigatons of carbon, equivalent to reducing atmospheric carbon by about 25 percent. The FAO's 2025 Global Forest Resources Assessment confirms forests currently cover 4.14 billion hectares, approximately 32% of global land, but gross deforestation still runs at 10.9 million hectares per year. In 2024 alone, a record-breaking 6.7 million hectares of tropical primary rainforest were lost, the highest annual total since satellite monitoring began.

From frustration to a subscription

Wong's frustration with that gap is where Terraformation's subscription model was born. After years of running large-scale restoration projects, thousands of hectares, millions of trees, funded through carbon credits and corporate programmes, he began receiving a surge of inquiries from individuals who simply wanted to give money to a credible tree-planting operation and couldn't find one. "Shut up and take my money," he summarised, with the bluntness of an engineer who has run out of patience for a solvable problem.

The resulting product charges $25 per month, per tree a price point that covers what Wong calls the "full lifetime cost": seed collection, nursery operations, planting, monitoring, maintenance, and replacement if a tree dies. That last part matters. In an industry where some programmes plant a million trees in a day and return to find 98% dead, Terraformation guarantees survival. "A bad day for us is 80% survival," Wong said. Every tree is monitored individually; if one dies, it is replaced within the cost already paid.

Quality over carbon credits

The voluntary carbon market's well-publicised scandals, rather than damaging Terraformation, performed a kind of competitive triage. Lower-quality operators collapsed or were exposed; Terraformation's high-quality projects, including one that recently received an A rating from Sylvera, gained credibility by contrast. A flight to quality, Wong called it.

What separates serious reforestation from performative tree-planting is not just survival rates, however. Research published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B identifies community involvement as among the most critical determinants of long-term forest project success, a finding Wong independently arrived at through practice. "The people who live near the forest are the true owners and beneficiaries," he said. "We benefit atmospherically from a forest on the other side of the planet, but they really feel it." A 2024 UC Santa Cruz analysis of global tree-planting campaigns found that while 91% of organisations now recognise community involvement as essential, only 38% actually report data demonstrating how communities benefited, a telling gap between rhetoric and accountability.

Terraformation measures success through multiple indicators: hectares restored, biodiversity recovery, carbon sequestered, and community economic benefit. It is a deliberately wide lens. "The health of the planet is a pretty multi-dimensional thing," Wong said.

The sceptics have a point 

Sceptics of reforestation, and there are legitimate ones point out that trees take decades to mature, that monocultures can harm ecosystems, and that natural forest protection is often more cost-effective than planting. These are valid constraints. Wong does not dismiss them; Terraformation focuses on native species, per-tree monitoring, and the right species in the right place. Natural regeneration costs as little as $12 per hectare in tropical regions compared to over $105 for manual planting, per research cited by TriplePundit which is why a well-run subscription model, directing capital to operations that actually know what they are doing, matters more than tree counts alone.

The subscription programme is currently open to individuals and corporates alike, with the unit of action kept deliberately small: one tree, one month, $25. Wong's bet is that climate solutions which require no special technology, no particular wealth, and no expertise are the ones that can scale to eight billion stakeholders.

"You can't say this about buying an electric car," he observed. "But anyone, anywhere, can plant one tree a month."

The math checks out. The harder question is whether enough people will do it.

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