Tree planting is widely advocated and applied in urban areas, with large-scale projects underway in cities globally. Numerous potential benefits are used to justify these planting campaigns. However, reports of poor tree survival raise questions about the ability of such projects to deliver on...

The principal options for engineering Earth's ecological future can be concisely visualized in a conceptual dilemma matrix. Scaling of the matrix with real world data confirms the widening of Earth's sustainability gap, due to our increasing ecological footprint. The simplicity of the dilemma...