Is Labour’s policy of planting 2bn trees by 2040 realistic?

You may be surprised how many trees someone can plant in a day, says Jon Stone

It would take tree-planting to historically high levels, but we’ve got close in the past (Reuters)

Labour’s environment manifesto pledges to plant 2 billion trees by the year 2040. The policy has raised some eyebrows: it amounts to 200 trees a minute every day for the next 20 years, which sounds like a lot.

Is it out of sync with other parties?

In reality, the policy is ambitious, but not actually impractical or unrealistic. While the party’s commitment is the biggest tree-planting pledge of the main parties, the others’ are in the same order of magnitude: