It is encouraging that the Bangladesh government has launched the ambitious "National Green Mission" to plant 250 million trees over the next five years to combat climate change and environmental degradation.
However, as tree-planting efforts intensify, a recent lesson from China offers both encouragement and caution.
Across the country, tree planting has become a visible symbol of environmental responsibility. Government agencies, corporations, schools and community groups are planting trees on a scale rarely seen before.
This momentum deserves recognition. At a time when Bangladesh faces rising temperatures, shrinking green spaces, air pollution, biodiversity loss, and growing climate vulnerability, every genuine effort to restore nature matters.
Yet as we celebrate these initiatives, there is also growing concern about whether we are planting trees in ways that build ecosystems or merely increasing tree counts.
Recently, a report in Futura Sciences highlighted an unexpected outcome of China’s massive afforestation program.
Over the past four decades, China has planted an estimated 78 billion trees, increasing forest cover from roughly 10% in 1949 to around 25% today.
The program is widely regarded as one of the world’s most ambitious environmental success stories. It helped combat desertification, reduce dust storms, increase carbon sequestration, and transform vast landscapes.
However, researchers found that the program also altered regional water cycles. In some areas, forests consumed so much water through evapotranspiration -- the process by which trees release water into the atmosphere -- that local water availability declined even as vegetation increased.
The lesson is not that planting trees is harmful. Rather, nature is complex, and environmental interventions must be guided by ecological understanding, not just good intentions.
For Bangladesh, this means approaching large-scale plantation efforts with careful planning and scientific assessment.
Conducting environmental impact assessments before planting can help ensure that the chosen species suit local climate and water conditions and prevent unintended consequences, such as water shortages or loss of local biodiversity. We must treat this as a chance to plant wisely, not just widely.
The good news is we are not starting from scratch. Environmental awareness has grown significantly over the past decade. With the government expanding afforestation programmes, many companies have incorporated environmental sustainability into their CSR and ESG commitments.
Bangladesh currently has forest cover of around 17% of its land area, well below the level many environmental experts consider desirable for maintaining ecological balance. The country also faces growing environmental stress.
Groundwater levels continue to decline in parts of Dhaka, Gazipur, Rajshahi and the Barind region. Coastal districts face increasing salinity intrusion. Climate change is making rainfall patterns less predictable and weather events more extreme.
In this context, planting the wrong species in the wrong place could create new environmental challenges while attempting to solve existing ones.
Too often, plantation campaigns are evaluated by a single metric: The number of saplings planted. A million saplings sounds impressive -- 25 million sounds even better. But plantation efforts do not always create forests.
A forest is an ecosystem. It supports wildlife, protects soil, regulates water, stores carbon and builds resilience to climate shocks.
Bangladesh’s experience with large-scale eucalyptus plantations is a cautionary tale. Eucalyptus, once widely promoted for its rapid growth, has since proven problematic -- these trees deplete groundwater, reduce local biodiversity and are poorly suited to many native landscapes.
This illustrates that a plantation prioritizing fast-growing exotic species may increase green cover quickly but offer far fewer ecological benefits than a diverse ecosystem built around native species.
Our landscapes are naturally suited to a wide variety of indigenous trees such as jarul, koroi, hijal, kadam, bohera, haritaki, amloki and numerous mangrove species along the coast.
These species have evolved alongside local soils, rainfall patterns, birds, insects and wildlife. They are often more resilient, more beneficial to biodiversity and more sustainable in the long run than imported alternatives.
We should be honest about another reality: Planting a sapling is easy, but keeping it alive is difficult.
Every year, thousands of plantation drives generate headlines, PR photos, and social media posts. Yet few organizations publicly report how many saplings survive after one, three or five years.
Success is often measured on the day of the plantation rather than years later, when the true environmental impact becomes visible.
If we are serious about restoration, survival rates should matter as much as plantation numbers.
Perhaps this is where Bangladesh’s environmental movement must mature: Ask how many trees survived, not how many were planted; focus on biodiversity, not numbers; treat plantation as ecosystem management, not ceremony.
China’s experience demonstrates that even the world’s largest environmental programs can produce unintended consequences. Yet it also offers something else: Proof that countries can learn, adapt, and improve.
Bangladesh has the advantage of learning these lessons before scaling up its own efforts further.
The country’s growing commitment to tree plantation is encouraging and necessary. The challenge now is to ensure that this commitment is guided by the right species, the right places and long-term care, so it translates into healthier ecosystems, stronger biodiversity, protected water resources and greater climate resilience.
Planting trees is undoubtedly a good thing. But for a climate-vulnerable country like Bangladesh, planting the right trees, in the right places, and caring for them for decades may be one of the smartest investments we can make.
Ultimately, environmental success is not measured by the number of saplings we plant. It is measured by the right trees taking root and by the forests, shade, biodiversity, and resilience that future generations inherit.
Shafiq R Bhuiyan writes on how communication, culture and corporate social responsibility (CSR) converge to shape a more conscious and compassionate society.