Estimated hectares of forest gained since midnight UTC, through planting and through natural expansion onto land no longer farmed.

This counter used to report trees planted, a figure nobody measures globally. It now reports forest area gained, which FAO does — a different quantity with a different unit, and a more defensible one.

Nobody counts this as it happens. EarthNow takes a published figure for the whole day, divides it by the 86,400 seconds in a day, and multiplies by the seconds elapsed since midnight UTC. So the value climbs smoothly and is the right order of magnitude — but the smoothness is arithmetic, not observation. Nothing happening in the world is being watched in real time.

value = daily total ÷ 86,400 × seconds since 00:00 UTC

A consequence worth knowing: the counter resets at midnight UTC, not at your midnight. And because every signal advances at a constant rate, this page cannot tell you whether today is unusual. For that you need a measurement.

~5 million hectares a year of afforestation and natural expansion — half what is cleared.

Daily total

13.7K hectares

Published by

FAO Forest Resources Assessment (2020)

The figure is theirs; the running total is ours. Cite them for the number, and EarthNow for what it looks like as it accumulates.

• Whether gain is measured at planting or at survival — many saplings die in the first two years
• Species choice: native mixes versus fast-growing monoculture
• Farmland abandonment, which drives more natural regrowth than any planting scheme
• Whether the land would have regrown on its own, which is often cheaper and better