Research Claims Ambitious Large Scale Tree Planting Efforts are Failing

Governments worldwide praise high-profile projects to plant millions of trees as significant contributions to the battle against climate change. But according to experts, many of these initiatives are poorly planned, poorly executed, and frequently ineffective at growing any forests.

Spectacular Failure

In what was arguably the most spectacularly unsuccessful tree planting initiative in history-definitely the quickest. On March 8, 2012, in just one frantic hour of work, teams of local volunteers in the Camarines Sur province on the Filipino island of Luzon planted more than a million mangrove seedlings in the mud along the coast.

At the seashore now, where the majority of the trees were planted. The mangroves that should be nearing maturity after ten years of development are nowhere to be seen. Fewer than 2% of them have survived, according to an on-the-ground investigation conducted in 2020 by British mangrove restoration expert Dominic Wodehouse, then of Bangor University in Wales. The remaining 98% were either dead or washed away.

Jim Enright, a former Asia coordinator for the American organization Mangrove Action Project, concurs that "it was a catastrophic disaster." Guinness has not replied to calls for feedback. However, neither Guinness nor the record-planting advocates have conducted follow-up monitoring.

Common Problem

Debacles like these are common. They are surprisingly frequent, according to forest scientists. They caution that failed afforestation projects worldwide threaten to undermine efforts to make planting a credible method of halting climate change by lowering atmospheric carbon dioxide levels or producing carbon credits that can be sold to businesses to offset their emissions.

Eric Coleman of Florida State University and colleagues examined decades of extensive government-organized tree planting in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh and published their findings last year. They found scant evidence that the program had increased tree cover, increased carbon sequestration, or benefited the local area. Common tree species that provided locals with animal feed and fuel had typically been replaced with plantations of quickly growing, less beneficial trees frequently gated off nearby settlements.

According to a 2019 investigation by the government's Commission on Audit, tree planting in the Philippines under its National Greening Program has likewise been a colossal failure. It claimed that ministers enforced unrealistic planting goals, leading to planting "without... survey, mapping, and planning," with the actual increase in forest cover only reaching slightly over a tenth of what was anticipated.

The reasons for failure vary, but some include planting only one kind of tree, which makes them susceptible to disease, competing land uses, climate change, planting in regions that weren't previously wooded, and a lack of aftercare, such as watering saplings.

Everyone like trees. There isn't a lobby against trees. The Bonn Challenge, which set a target of restoring about 860 million acres of forest globally by 2030, was signed by many governments worldwide, including the United States, in 2011. This was the beginning of a global movement to go beyond conserving existing forests and creating new ones. This would add nearly a fourth to the estimated forest carbon sink-an area larger than India-and absorb 1.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide yearly.

Everyone Wants to Plant, No One Maintains

According to Lalisa Duguma of World Agroforestry, a global research organization in Nairobi, Kenya, "millions of dollars" are spent yearly on reforesting areas. The incorrect trees are planted in the wrong places, and many are left unattended, partly because ownership and administration of trees are not transferred to local communities, he claims; thus, often, only a minority of seedlings survive.

Because performance measures evaluate planting rates rather than survival rates and programs often last three years or less, Duguma contends that such failures frequently go unrecognized. We get "phantom woods" as a result.

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