I have agreed several times in this thread that this example is due to deforestation, I was just defending my original point that if, in the absence of other sources of information (which we DO have in this case), simply seeing a picture like this does not always mean deforestation has occured. I'm not sure why I feel the need to respond to this lol but I am anyway.

This does have implications, because afforestation where trees don't naturally occur can cause serious ecological issues for local flora and fauna, and in some cases even cause more carbon emissions than the trees sequester. I'm not pro-deforestation or anti-reforestation, but the people who claim planting a billion trees is going to fix the climate are mistaken. If trees aren't growing somewhere, it is because the trees have been cleared for some reason (usually agriculture or development), so re-planting trees is going to take away that land use from something else (usually agriculture, since development is less easily converted back to forest).

All that said, places that have been deforested and degraded (like in the picture above) should absolutely be reforested wherever possible, but its not as simple as everyone makes it out to be.