How many trees are there in the world?

ScientificAmerican.com, 9/9/15; Pat Macpherson and Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

The Buddha's life is replete with trees: He was born under a sal tree, entered meditation under a rose apple tree, had his life saved by the women Sujata and Punna under a banyan, became enlightened under a pipal (all buddhas have a special tree), passed into nirvana under twin sals.

All those trees thriving on carbon (Getty)

How many trees? It’s a simple question, but as Nature Video describes it, getting the answer required 421,529 measurements from 50 countries on six continents.

The answer is that the world is home to over three trillion trees — with almost half of them living in tropical or subtropical forests [mainly in the Amazon and Siberia]. There are roughly 400 trees for every human.

Tropical and subtropical trees in climate chaos

But 12,000 years ago, before the advent of agriculture, Earth had twice as many trees as it does now [nearly 7 trillion]. Currently, the planet is losing 10 billion* trees a year.

Researchers represented the number of trees across the globe using bars that are taller for denser forests. This report was published in Nature on September 2, 2015.

• *Editor’s Note (11/27/18): This sentence was edited after posting to correct the statistic.