How Humans Can Reforest the Planet by Planting Trees From the Sky
In an effort to fight climate change and rehabilitate our planet’s ecosystems, tech companies are using seed-firing drones to reforest the planet at scale.
For thousands of years, human activity has had a significant influence on the planet’s climate and its ecosystems. From the moment our species began setting roots roughly 12,000 years ago, humans have been extensively clearing the earth’s forests for agriculture, animal domestication, and urbanization.
By the eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution brought new technologies that accelerated the rate of deforestation. And by the 1960s, humans were well on their way to clearing our planet’s rainforests for agriculture at a truly alarming scale.
A 2015 study from Nature Journal estimates that over 15 billion trees are cut down every year, while 46% of the earth’s trees have been cut down entirely since the beginning of human civilization.
According to the WWF, around 17% of the Amazon rainforest has been lost just in the last 50 years, mostly for cattle ranching. And in 2019, the tropics lost close to 30 soccer fields’ worth of trees every single minute.
At the current rate of deforestation, the earth’s rainforests could be entirely eradicated within the next century. Massive ecosystems thriving with biodiversity could be completely wiped off the face of the earth and the lack of carbon sequestration that these forests provide could lead to catastrophic runaway effects of climate change on our species.
Forests are home to more than 80% of all known terrestrial species of plant, animal, and insect. But as the destruction of these lush ecosystems continues, we lose many of the species that once lived there. Several are driven to extinction. And thousands are completely erased from existence every year.
In 2019, over 33 billion tons of CO2 were released worldwide into our atmosphere by humans. And deforestation was responsible for almost 15% of carbon emissions. Forests absorb much of the climate’s carbon. But the fewer trees there are worldwide, the less carbon they can sequester, leaving behind large amounts of excess carbon in the atmosphere that accelerate the warming of our planet.
Humanity finds itself in the midst of an existential crisis and interventions are urgently needed to prevent a large-scale, irreversible ecological disaster. Avoiding this existential loss of biodiversity and the rampant acceleration of climate change may still be possible though, through conservation efforts like reforesting the planet and preserving existing forest ecosystems. But that window of opportunity is rapidly closing.
In an effort to solve the problem of deforestation, some technology companies are attempting to restore our forests by planting trees using autonomous seed-firing drones. Using ecology-trained AI, these drones map out the best planting locations and use compressed air to fire small biodegradable seed capsules into the ground from above like a paintball gun. And they can do this with remarkable speed and accuracy.
Using aerial mapping software, each drone studies the terrain carefully to determine which trees need to be planted and where. This enables the drones to plant a diverse number of unique species throughout the area to support a full and diverse ecosystem recovery. Then, once the nutrient-rich seed capsules have been loaded into the drones, they fly autonomously across the land, shooting each seed capsule down into the earth to germinate into a healthy tree.
Within a short period of time, these drones could be used to scale up restoration rates to tens of billions of planted trees every year, and for many of these trees, they could be fully grown in about 20 years after being planted.
Dendra Systems, a company based in the UK, is one such company working diligently to regenerate ecosystems at a rapid pace. According to Susan Graham, the company’s CEO, Dendra’s seed-firing drone technology can plant trees up to 150 times faster than traditional methods, planting 120 seeds a minute per drone at scale. Their Drones can plant tens of thousands of seeds a day. And in the near future, swarms of these drones could plant hundreds of thousands of seeds a day.
Other companies like DroneSeed are using seed-firing drones to rapidly revive thousands of acres of wildfire-ravaged land, an issue that continues to get worse as the planet gets warmer. With the power of automation, their software allows a single drone operator to successfully manage 15 drones simultaneously. This significantly reduces the cost of planting trees, makes it far less laborsome for people, and expedites the rate of planting trees at scale.
The rate of conventional methods for planting trees just isn’t fast or efficient enough to make up for decades of mass deforestation. A single person can plant roughly 800 trees a day. But a single person operating 15 drones can plant about 28,000 trees a day, equivalent to 360 manual labor hours. With that kind of speed and efficiency, these drones could reforest the planet much faster than any human ever could.
Another company, AirSeed Technologies, is using drones that can plant 40,000 seed capsules per day and a single drone operator can fly swarms of up to five drones at a time. They have already planted over 100,000 trees and have an ambitious goal of planting 100 million trees by 2024 and a trillion trees by 2050.
Flash Forest, another relatively new competitor in the field, has its own goal of planting one billion trees by 2028. At full capacity, they can plant 100,000 seed capsules a day under the guidance of two drone operators, with a single person controlling 10 drones at a time.
These companies are leading the way to new frontiers in a pioneering industry. For years companies have been engineering efficient technologies to cut down forests and harvest trees at scale with minimal human involvement, while reforestation efforts have continued to operate with little to no innovation. But that is beginning to change.
Throughout human history, we have destroyed our forests without hesitation. Today, that destruction is capturing the attention of people all over the world. And experts from a diverse number of fields are coming together to stop the widespread destruction of our ecosystems, engineering innovative solutions to bring those ecosystems back to life.
The reforestation industry is evolving. With drone engineering, companies now have the ability to aggressively combat climate change by planting trees with AI-driven self-governing drones. And as the technology improves, it will significantly advance our ability to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, restore ecosystems for wildlife, and bring new levels of accuracy, precision, and speed to the reforestation industry.
Forests are key to our climate’s wellbeing. They are home to numerous unique species. And they are extraordinarily resilient when they are given the chance to grow and flourish. With tree-planting drones and future innovations yet to come, we have a real fighting chance to bring our forests back to life before it’s too late. But will that be enough?
Many of these companies use drone technology to reforest land following a wildfire or after tree harvesting. But many of the planet’s forests are cleared for other industrial uses. For example, tree cover loss associated with forestry, wildfires, and shifting agriculture is often temporary if forests are given the chance to regrow. However, forest conversion for mining, oil and gas production, industrial agriculture, and urbanization is often permanent.
We cannot reforest land that has already been converted for other use. And we cannot undo the loss of biodiversity and species extinction once a forest has been cleared. That is particularly true for tropical rainforests that have been around for tens of millions of years and harbor most of the planet’s biodiversity.
If we want to protect our planet from the adverse effects of climate change and bring an end to the greatest mass extinction event in earth’s history, we will need to do more than just reforest the planet. We will need to actively preserve the forests that have been here long before our species arrived.
The world is waking up. Many people are genuinely concerned about the climate and care deeply about the world we are leaving behind for future generations. As the damaging effects of deforestation become increasingly self-evident, the appetite for meaningful innovative solutions grows.
Tree-planting drone technology is a big step in the right direction. But the challenge humanity faces is complex and it demands a concerted effort from all of us if we want to solve these problems with the urgency it requires.
