Flash Forest aims to plant 40,000 trees per month with a drone

Drones can do many things faster, more efficiently, and more economically. One of them we now learn is planting trees. The Flash Forest drones can plant up to 40,000 trees per month. Much faster than humans could do. The goal is to plant 1 billion trees by 2028.

Flash Forest aims to plant 40,000 trees per month with a drone

Adele Peters writes for Fast Company that:

Flash Forest, the Canadian startup behind the project, plans to use its technology to plant 40,000 trees in the area this month. By the end of the year, as it expands to other regions, it will plant hundreds of thousands of trees. By 2028, the startup aims to have planted a full 1 billion trees.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that it's necessary to plant 1 billion hectares of trees—a forest roughly the size of the entire United States—to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Existing forests need to be protected while new trees are planted; right now, that isn't working well.

“There are a lot of different attempts to tackle reforestation,” says Flash Forest co-founder and chief strategy officer Angelique Ahlstrom. “But despite all of them, they're still failing, with a net loss of 7 billion trees every year.”

… drones can work more quickly and cheaply than humans planting with shovels. Flash Forest's tech can currently plant 10,000 to 20,000 seed pods a day; as the technology advances, a pair of pilots will be able to plant 100,000 trees in a day (by hand, someone might typically be able to plant around 1,500 trees in a day, Ahlstrom says.) The company aims to bring the cost down to 50 cents per tree, or around a fourth of the cost of some other tree restoration efforts.

“When you look at the potential for drones, we plant 10 times faster than humans.”

You can read the entire article here and watch the Flash Forest video below. Click here to learn more about how drones can be used for good in a number of ways.

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Photo: Flash Forest