How many trees are there on Earth?
Guess before you scroll — the answer is below
The answer
3,040,000,000,000 trees
Roughly 3T.
A 2015 study combining satellite data with 400,000 ground plots put the global tree count at about 3.04 trillion, roughly 380 trees per person. That was eight times higher than the previous estimate. The same study concluded human activity has roughly halved the number since the dawn of agriculture.
How to get close to this number
Estimate by area and density. Forested land covers roughly forty million square kilometres, and a forest holds somewhere in the hundreds of trees per hectare — which is tens of thousands per square kilometre. Multiply and you land in the trillions.
The revision in the explanation is the methodological lesson: the 2015 study put the count eight times higher than the previous estimate. Combining satellite data with hundreds of thousands of ground plots produced a figure an order of magnitude off from what had been accepted, which is a reminder that global environmental counts can be badly wrong in either direction until somebody counts properly.
The historical comparison is the finding that matters: human activity has roughly halved the number since the dawn of agriculture. A trillion-scale count only becomes meaningful next to a baseline, and the baseline is that there used to be twice as many. Absolute environmental figures mean little; trajectories mean everything.
Where this number comes from
| Source | Crowther et al., Nature |
|---|---|
| Figure refers to | 2015 |
| Last checked | |
| Unit | trees |
Numbers move. If this one has drifted from its source, let us know.
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