Insights from the World’s Top On-the-Ground Tree Ecosystem Restoration Leaders

The Art of Forests group met at COP26, and included many of the world’s top ecosystem restoration experts. Photo credit: Art of Forests

It has been a month now since COP26. The Art of Forests group, which includes the world’s top tree ecosystem restoration leaders, met in Loch Lomond to share their experiences and approaches to this work. These on-the-ground restoration practitioners, which includes people with decades of experience, as a whole restore over 250 million trees per year. A magnificent number! However, we asked ourselves — what would it take to collectively grow 25 billion trees a year, every year?

An estimated 15 billion trees die annually — of old age, disease, climate change, or human predation — with only 1.9 billion replanted each year. The media covers the loss of animal species more than the staggering number of plants and trees our planet loses on a daily basis. The frogs and insects and furry animals of course depend on the plant world for food and habitat.

The challenge is that restoring fully functioning ecosystems is complex and expensive. Society (individuals, companies, financial institutions, governments) needs to know how to scale and reach the audacious global targets that so many different organizations and nations have set.

Restoring critically endangered polylepis trees in the high Andes is extremely complex due to the altitude, landscape, and limited number of seeds available. Photo credit: Acción Andina

The members of the Art of Forest group want to help educate all on how complex the work is. This group has a deep understanding that comes from years of successes and failures out in the field, and the intimate lessons learned from prevailing in each specific ecosystem. This handful of organizations has been around long enough to know what works, and what doesn’t.

Here are some things we need to get right:

What are the right species in each spot on the planet?

Planting the right diversity of species in the right place at the right time is essential for resilience, sustainability, carbon, and biodiversity. Which plants will thrive and survive — not just in today’s world, but in very different climates decades in the future? What combination of complementary species will foster the most biodiversity in each biome on the planet? Forests are not monocultures, but rather an interconnected medley of plant varieties that all fill a specific niche within an ecosystem. And most importantly, where can we add more trees, a lot more trees, without further damaging natural ecosystems? The obvious place is farmland, using a technique called agroforestry.

Where are the billions of seeds needed for reforestation coming from?

In many places, there are simply not enough seeds available for large-scale, biodiverse restoration work. A mother tree or plant may be hard to locate or may not have seeded that season. If you want to put back what was there before, finding the right seeds of the various species can take a year or two or longer, especially if they are endangered and only a limited number of plants can be located. These endangered species need specialists with specific expertise to treat them with care. Once we find the billions of seeds, where do you put them once they are gathered? There are not enough global seed bank systems to store them, including trained professionals that know how to seed and nurture young saplings.

Seed availability remains a crucial bottleneck in regards to scaling up reforestation projects, especially when the focal species is endangered. Photo credit: Global Forest Generation

Rewilding and natural regeneration solve many problems and can be applied at scale. But they are limited by an obvious problem: many areas are so degraded that the natural seed bank left in the soil will not include many — or even most! — of the plant and tree seeds that were there before, let alone the microbial and fungal communities they depended on. Rarer, more endangered species don’t always find their way back. And more aggressive invasive species overwhelm native plants by outcompeting for limited resources and because local animals often don’t eat them. For those reasons, most natural regeneration efforts will include some companion planting — which brings us back to square one as far seed supply is concerned.

Who are the right humans to do the planting and protecting work, and what incentive do they have to conserve new forests and agroforests?

Individuals and communities need food, heat, shelter, fair wages, education, good work, and more. Other more destructive ecosystem jobs compete with the work of planting and protecting plants and animals, so there may be greater short-term financial incentives to destroy old forests.

If restoration projects are to succeed in the long term, local communities need to be the starting point for planning and capacity building. Photo credit: Global Forest Generation

When designing restoration sites, putting it back ‘how it was’ may be a challenge unless the new plants bring good wages, sustenance, and livelihoods. That is part of the reason why tree planting in farmland always has to make financial sense: farmers must know that the trees they add to their fields will benefit them directly. Suzanne Holmberg from TIST says, “Tree planting provides farmers with fruit and nuts to feed their family, and in the case of surplus can be used for sale. Trees also provide livelihood benefits of medicine, shade, windbreak, fodder for animals, firewood, better soil.” Or indirectly, through the ecosystem services they provide to their crops or livestock or via direct income now via payments for ecosystem services models available now via carbon credits.

Local communities will know what works best in the regions they live in, so are best situated to decide on the agroforestry and restoration work that will most benefit them (with help from local and international specialists in forestry, botany, and carbon strategies).

How to protect your baby forest from animals, fire, people, and disease for the next 100 years?

Do we need fences? People protectors for forests? Seedling protectors? Early alert systems for fires? Land tenure is often a challenge. Will government or private landowners change their minds about allowing the land to stay planted over decades? How can we secure favorable legal and community agreements that last for decades? These can be complicated and delicate for each location. In agroforestry systems, the solution is often to focus on the total stock of trees rather than on the harvesting of individuals.

Tracking and reporting on the plants over time.

A wonderfully large group of tech companies and other types of organizations have proposed various approaches to tracking and monitoring the vitality of planted or restored trees. Are trees and wider ecosystems still happy, healthy, and growing over time?

Tracking and monitoring the vitality of planted or restored trees over time is an ongoing project cost that is often overlooked in planning stages. Photo credit: Global Forest Generation

How to track mangroves planted in water (Eden, Regenerative Resources (blog post), and many others are doing this important work) under existing tree canopy, agroforestry trees on both large and small farms, trees mixed in with other plants and grasses in high scale projects, trees regenerated from stumps or seeds (a process known as FMNR, or Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration — pioneered by World Vision and championed by the Global Evergreening Alliance), projects in the first years, after year 5? At what frequency and at what cost?

Choosing the right tech or manual method, and implementing the checking and reporting over time, requires upfront work, ongoing effort, and fresh approaches (such as the AVOCADO, or Anomaly Vegetation Change Detection — an algorithm recently published by World Agroforestry scientists). Tree losses due to climate, disease, predation and poor planning, and other unforeseen circumstances often require replanting on a yearly basis, which takes additional effort and resources.

How do you attract the money to finance for scale and do this work well?

It will take millions per project and we need thousands of projects. Funding the early stages of a forestry restoration project can be extremely slow and difficult. Encouraging farmers to adopt agroforestry at scale is also challenging and expensive. Who is willing to take the financial risk of the years of design, legal structuring, capacity building, early seeding and seedling stage, initial tracking, and verification?

Growing the tree growers.

Everyone in the Art of Forests group noted a shortage of people with the interest, experience, and training needed to run restoration and agroforestry projects on the ground. To grow this group of land stewards takes an investment in people. Many organizations like WeForest have to take on the apprenticing and in-practice training of restoration leaders in order to be able to scale beyond linear growth.

Investment in the next generation of tree stewards will be an important part of scaling beyond linear growth in the future. Photo credit: Global Forest Generation

Where We Are Now:

In the last few years, there has been a huge influx of interest in tree planting coming into restoration organizations. The reason? Carbon credits. Carbon credit financial mechanisms have become a huge focus of governments and companies for offsetting and meeting global net-zero or emissions goals. Trees as a ‘carbon capture technology’ are very cheap at current prices, but credits will increase in value over the coming decades. Buying credits now could save companies billions in the future.

Historically, the price to companies and investors of tree restoration-based offsets has been subsidized by development, charitable, religious, and sometimes government funding. Companies and investors buying tree carbon credits, or simply ‘trees’ (unverified offsets), are getting a discount since other organizations that value the ecosystem benefit rather than the carbon credit value take on the bulk of the cost. Buyers do not necessarily understand the TRUE cost of what it takes to do this work in a way that supports the permanence of the restoration work.

Many costs associated with tree planting, such as collecting seeds and building nurseries, are not factored into the “cost per tree” when negotiating pricing with funding agencies and organizations. Photo credit: Global Forest Generation

Nor do these buyers necessarily invest in permanence: aboveground carbon — trees — can be wiped out by fire, disease, or illegal logging, but are easy to monitor. Carbon stored deep underground is at much less risk of being released again, but is much harder to monitor. This artificial skews carbon investments to humid tropic forest restoration efforts (fast growth, a lot of aboveground carbon, practically none underground) and away from the silvopastoral and silvoarable restoration efforts required across the vast drylands of our planet (a lot of room, the need for billions of new trees, slow aboveground biomass growth, but a lot of carbon deposited in deep soil levels).

It is not surprising to hear complaints from investors and companies that there are not enough ‘high quality’ carbon credit projects available on the market. This is part of the reason why there are very few on the ground organizations with the experience to operate successfully at a scale of 500,000+ plants restored per year. Given the challenge of early project costs and the low prices offered ‘per tree’ or ‘per credit’, there is rarely enough ‘extra’ to hire ahead of growth, or to train and build capacity on the ground. Any work that is not directly tree planting or verifying carbon sequestered has no economic value and is therefore hard to fund commercially.

The Art of Forests:

To address these issues, a group of the most experienced tree growers in the world was invited to come together and put their collective knowledge into action. Coordinated and lead by Celia Francis of The Art of Forests community group and Terraformation, with support from Global Forest Generation, the Global Ethical Finance Initiative, and The Kilimanjaro Project, an important event dubbed the ‘Art of Forests: Accelerating Ecosystem Regeneration’ was organized at COP26 that gave leaders from each group the opportunity to discuss, collaborate, and share insights into the most pressing restoration challenges facing humanity.

The Art of Forests group was founded with the goal of collaboration and knowledge sharing between the world’s top tree planting and restoration organizations. Photo Credit: Art of Forests

Together and separately, The Art of Forests is tackling the challenge of trying to explain to the world what it takes to do this work well. What sort of scientific, financial, policy, technical, and development support is needed to achieve the scale and speed we so desperately need. If we are to go from 250 million trees planted each year by the Art of Forests group, to 25 billion planted each year, then this collective needs support from governments and corporations to flip their thinking about the costs, processes, and capacity building required for this monumental task.

What We Need:

1. A better understanding by carbon investors, carbon marketplaces for consumers and corporates, verification bodies, standards declarers, ‘tree tech’ firms, and others of what ACTUALLY works, and what inadvertently blocks scale.
2. Increased knowledge of the current economics of the ‘tree value chain.’ We see consumer applications and carbon traders giving on the ground restoration organizations 10 cents per tree but charging $25 to consumers (or companies) for the same tree. What would happen if more of the money collected went back into the ground to do more restoration work or build capacity? How can we educate about the drivers behind different prices of restoration work across the world without leaving buyers confused?
3. A conversation about declared ‘standards’ for the restoration work, that ask for comprehensive perfection on the ground. ‘Perfect’ is often the enemy of ‘done’, and other than making sure to guard against fraud and abuse, we all have to accept that the work will be varied and evolving — especially when working with local communities to build skills and consensus.
4. More access for individuals and smaller organizations to carbon verification bodies that can charge huge fees to check for perfection. Often the bulk of the money stays in corporate bodies predominantly located in the global north. The verification process can also take years, eating up time and financial resources, while the projects on the ground starve for cash and can’t scale quickly. Smaller shareholder farmers, unless they club together via wonderful groups like ‘The International Small Group Tree Planting Program’ (TIST), don’t have access to these processes to turn their tree planting and protection efforts into cash.
5. De-emphasis of the concept “nature will come back on its own.” Yes, some land that is left alone near standing old forests will regenerate marvelously. Unfortunately, that land will also be cleared again if the restoration is not designed well and monitored or legally guarded for permanence. And not all degraded land will rewild without help. We also need to consider the definition of rewilding in the face of aggressive invasive species that outcompete. Organizations like Eden, Global Forest Generation, WeForest doing large scale (millions of trees) restoration projects with biodiverse native species recognize that simply scaling the seeding/seedling work needed in advance to locate the mix of genetically diverse mother individuals requires sometimes a year of upfront work to gather the millions of seeds needed and store them safely in seedbanks or similar.
6. Stop downplaying the importance of economic value in forest restoration projects. The only reliable way to prevent the destruction of the old biodiverse forests of the world is to make sure that the fruits of the old forests are still made available in at least some of what is planted new. We also have to design our projects, in part, to be food and medicine forests. To quote Patrick Worms of World Agroforestry, ‘Most of the world’s tropical forests are more accurately described as being Forest Gardens.’

So just like investing, true value comes from diversifying the ‘forest portfolio.’ There will need to be some projects designed to yield some food or wood crops on top of ‘carbon,’ which takes the pressure off the need to cut old forests down for farming to serve the needs of the growing human population. Agroforestry can support commercial restoration work by creating sustainable value chains for foods and raw materials harvested from biodiverse forests and farmlands.

True sustainable value is derived from a diverse “forest portfolio” that yields a variety of goods and services to serve the needs of a growing human population. Photo credit: Global Forest Generation

These are the challenges that need solving if we are to continue advancing towards a sustainable future. We still have a long way to go, but one can’t help feeling a bit more positive with so many organizations collaborating through the Art of Forests. The combined knowledge, experience, and leadership within these groups can only lead to progress and good things for the planet.

******

A Note From the Organizers:

At COP26 we had the first large-scale gathering of the Art of Forests group with 60 tree ecosystem restoration leaders getting together in person and online for a whole day session at Ross Priory, Loch Lomond and online for those who could not join in person.

We are grateful for event host GEFI, sponsor Terraformation, co-organizers Florent Kaiser and Wade Million from Global Forest Generation, and co-founder of the Art of Forests, Sarah Scott from the Kilimanjaro Project, who helped bring it all together. Most of all, for Celia Francis in bringing us all together and taking the initiative to make this whole thing happen.

The Art of Forests event was successfully hosted as a hybrid conference, which allowed experts not in attendance at COP26 to contribute equally to the discussion. Photo credit: Art of Forests

At our gathering, we had speakers talking about what it would take to accelerate our efforts (Marie-Noelle Keijzer of WeForest), how to make food forests (Patrick Worms from World Agroforestry), how to engage communities (Florent Kaiser), the importance of preserving seeds (Jill Wagner from Terraformation), what is in a fair price of carbon (Suzanne Holmberg, TIST), and financing restoration projects (Ed Hewitt, Respira).

We then shared in smaller groups, about capacity building on the ground for scale and acceleration. We also talked about the true costs of planting and a fair price for carbon. We identified many common areas of interest. They include:

• Biodiversity credits and measurement approaches to biodiversity improvements on the ground. Expertise came from SeeWater Solutions and Cassinia and others.
• Capacity building — How do we grow the interest in restoration and teach more and more people about what works and how to do this work successfully?
• Measurement and tracking — What are the most efficient and effective ways to track that don’t hinder planting?
• External verification — What could make this process faster and less expensive?
• Financial innovation — What new paths to funding and profit are available to help everyone be able to go faster?
• Tree and carbon pricing — How to communicate the true full costs and the wider benefits of ecosystem restoration and value those properly?
• Story telling — How can we be more powerful in sharing the vision?
• Seeds: Best practices to get ahead and looming seed shortages
• Land tenure — Can we work together regionally to support legal frameworks for restoration?
• Carbon markets and changes in local and global approaches that might impact the way projects are structured and which stakeholders need to be involved.
• Community engagement and different approaches to partnering or employing people doing the restoration and protection work.
• Governance approaches.

We hope to find ways to work together, share information, and tell stories to help the world understand this group, and find ways to better support the work on the ground to get to 25 billion plants in the ground per year!

What would it take to work together as one global community?

Like the vaccine collaboration we saw in the global emergency, we need to put aside competition and collaborate. We need to open source and share, support each other, champion each other within this group of experienced on-the-ground leaders, and also within the wider systems of business and governments that surround this group. We all have great ideas for making this beautiful vision possible.

If you have read this blog so far, you are one of the people keen to help and play a part, and for this we thank you.

To get involved contact:

Celia Francis — celiafrancis@yahoo.com

Florent Kaiser — florent@globalforestgen.org

Sarah Scott — sarah22scott@gmail.com

Hashtags: theartofforests