Ukraine has marked the planting of its billionth tree, with military forester Oleksandr Kotseruba and student Daria Nazarova planting a seedling on the grounds of the Main Military Hospital in Kyiv, Ukraine. The ceremony capped the completion of the presidential “Green Country” initiative, a three‑year drive to restore forests devastated by fires, pests, and illegal logging.
Launched in 2021 – one year before the Russian invasion, the program set a bold target: one billion trees in three years. According to Viktor Smal, head of the State Forestry Agency, the major achievement is symbolic. “Combining coniferous and deciduous species reduces the risk of spreading fires and pests,” he said, adding that “seedlings grown with closed root systems have an almost 100% survival rate.”
In 2020, wildfires destroyed nearly 75,000 hectares of forest. Bark beetle infestations accelerated tree die‑offs, while illegal logging surged to what officials called “a critical scale.” The State Enterprise Forests of Ukraine said the collapse was tied to the lack of centralised management and to chronic dependence on subsidies. “Solutions were needed that would unite Ukrainians around the issue of saving forests and reforming forest management,” the enterprise noted.
Over the course of the initiative, seedlings were planted across 95,900 hectares. Zhytomyr region led with nearly 30,000 hectares of new forest, followed by Volyn, Rivne, Lviv, and Chernihiv. Many of the new forests were established on land scarred by fires, illegal logging, or military operations, while others grew in places where no trees had stood before.
The billion‑tree milestone does not mark the end of Ukraine’s reforestation ambitions. Officials plan to expand forest cover by an additional two million hectares of natural vegetation, encouraging communities to transfer land into the national forest fund. Yet challenges remain. Ukraine’s forest fund has shrunk by 20 per cent overall, and illegal logging continues to be reported weekly.
At the COP30 climate conference, Ukrainian delegates urged international partners to help restore forests damaged by the war. In June, Wood Central revealed that two million hectares or more of Ukrainian forests have already been lost to heavy conflict, with Russian fire, artillery shelling and explosive devices making Ukraine’s eastern forests the most deadly on earth. That is according to data published by Girst, which shows that 90% of Ukraine’s wildfires have occurred in 20% of the country, 75% of which have ignited within or adjacent to the conflict zones.
So far, more than one-third of the country’s forests and agricultural lands are covered in unexploded ordnance (or land mines), with Svitlana Hrynchuk, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Minister for Environmental Protection and Natural Resources, claiming that more than 6,500 environmental crimes and a US$40 billion-plus damage bill are “just the tip of the iceberg.”
“Including the loss of natural resources (which includes conflict timber trafficked through Chornobyl), that number could be much, much higher,” Minister Hrynchuk noted, adding that the volume of land mines now makes Ukraine’s forests the most dangerous on earth. It comes after a report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) earlier this year, supported by the Ukrainian government, estimated that the total carbon lost since February 24, 2022, had surpassed 230 million tonnes.
- Click on Wood Central’s special feature to learn about Ukraine’s challenges in reconstructing its forests.
