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From Adrian Bowyer, Foxham, Wiltshire, UK

Adam Osen says an average person in a developed country releases about 14 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, and a tree absorbs 22 kilograms a year on average (Letters, 7 December 2019). That is true, but it doesn't follow that everyone needs to plant 680 trees a year, because trees aren't a permanent solution.

They are much more important than that: they are a stopgap. The point of planting trees is to absorb a lot of CO₂ over the next 100 years or so while they are growing and while we completely decarbonise every aspect of human activity.

This is the basis of the . With a human population of nearly 8 billion, we need to plant only about 130 trees each. This is completely feasible.

Recently, Ethiopia – a country with a population of 100 million and fewer available resources than many more developed nations – planted more than 350 million trees in just 12 hours.