The True Impact of Donating to Reforest the World
It’s not as simple as giving money to plant a tree.
Once upon a time, pre-Covid, a close environmentalist friend of mine felt guilty about taking an international long-haul flight and decided to pay to offset his emissions — meaning he would pay to have that carbon dioxide removed and stored out of the atmosphere. Googling a platform, he calculated the tons of carbon that his plane emitted during the flight and was quoted $30 to offset his emissions by subsidizing an activity that allegedly pulls carbon out of the air (like planting trees…but not necessarily). He pulled out his credit card and, conscience soothed, went back to work running biodiversity research expeditions.
Months later, my friend remembered his payment and wondered if trees had truly been planted to offset his personal carbon emissions. Digging through the platform, he could find no mention of where trees were being planted, what species they were, and if they had even survived their first few months as saplings. Basically, there was no way to verify if he had truly made the positive impact he thought.
Today, carbon offsetting is the de rigeur solution for climate change. The Paris Accords require all signatory countries to commit to reducing their carbon emissions, not necessarily by actually cutting back, but by investing in mandatory carbon offsets that make their net emissions appear lower. And plenty of large tech companies are publicly trying to become carbon neutral or carbon negative. And because planting trees is one of the most obvious ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it away safely, carbon offsets are often taken as synonymous with reforestation schemes so people paying to offset individual assume they are doing good for the world by planting these trees. While intentions may be good on both sides, there are a lot of misplaced incentives and very little transparency about how carbon is actually getting offset.
There is one thing that is very important to clarify here before going further into the dangers of reforestation schemes on their own — leaving carbon out of it:
Carbon offsets ≠ reforestation. If you (or a government or big corporation) pay to offset carbon emissions, the cheapest way is to subsidize renewable energy sources — like wind farms — which don’t directly reduce emissions but get to count carbon credits for not emitting as much as a fossil fuel energy producer. It’s a big gray area. So if you’re trying to offset for a price of <$10 per ton, it’s almost definitely not tree planting.
What happens when you pay to plant a tree?
Say you are like my friend and want to make sure you not only offset your emissions but actually do it in a way that removes carbon rather than just not emitting it. You want to pay to plant trees (reforest) somewhere in the world that is suffering from high deforestation rates, like South America or Southeast Asia. Maybe you don’t even care about the carbon offset guilt (the trees soak up carbon anyway!) but just know you want to fight deforestation.
Great! Here’s what you need to know before you click ‘pay now.’
1. We can come close to reversing climate change with the right tree planting projects.
Carbon credit programs aside, there exists a massive opportunity to simply reforest areas of degraded private land around the world (where no government permission would be needed) as a way to slow climate change. In an article published in Science in 2019, researchers found that there are .9 billion hectares of land not currently being used, which could be reforested to remove between 133.2 and 276.2 gigatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere. For context, this would be about a third to half of the total carbon dioxide we’ve emitted since the Industrial Revolution. That’s a massive drawdown to help us reach the goal of slowing the heating of our Earth.
The researchers here looked specifically for opportunities in areas that are not already forested, protected, or transformed into agricultural land. If we look to start improving those areas, as well, there may be opportunities to remove even more of our carbon debt from the atmosphere. But there are projects today that are committed to reforesting degraded (read: partially logged and abandoned) forests that belong to private individuals and communities so that we can start capitalizing on the opportunity quickly before more forest cover is lost.
2. Planting trees is not an unequivocal good.
Remember my friend wondering where his trees were planted? This lack of transparency is sadly the norm for reforestation (although not all!). While it might not seem like a huge deal, there are numerous problems and dangers that arise from a reforestation or carbon offset program where you cannot track your trees.
First, you won’t know if the trees being planted are native species. Now, if you only care about carbon emissions (and not other problems like biodiversity loss), it is true that any species of tree will do the trick. You just need to get some roots in the ground. But if you care about helping the planet, you need to be sure that the trees being planted are native to the area. Not only will this increase their chance of survival, but it will also ensure you are helping restore the local environment, rather than potentially drying, changing, or harming it by bringing in fast-growing foreign species.
Second, if you cannot see that they are native species, the trees you planted might actually just be subsidized logging plantations or agricultural developments. Yep, for most carbon offset schemes, any tree is good enough, so local organizations will plant coffee, oil palm, eucalyptus, pine, cacao, and other species so they can make double income off the subsidized plants. Chile’s reforestation schemes have even been found to decrease biodiversity as favorable trees for logging — eucalyptus and pine — are planted over native species, drying the soil and destroying the native environment. And when these trees reach maturity, many will be cut down for construction or paper, so your offset is negligible in the end. But there are few — if any — regulatory bodies overseeing this industry to prevent these issues at the moment.
Third, quality over quantity matters a lot here. We are hearing more about massive tree planting initiatives that aim to plant millions or even trillions of trees. Governments and corporations love to support these initiatives because it sounds like they are having a massive impact. But here’s how most of them really work: millions of inch-high saplings are planted out with less than a hand’s length between each and have to be thinned dozens of times before a few reach maturity. 80–90% of these trees might die before they reach mature height. But you have no idea how or where your trees were planted, so how can you check or find out? This is what I mean about incentives being poorly placed to ensure these schemes actually do what they say they will do.
3. Remember the people behind the planting.
The final important point to keep in mind when shopping for a reforestation program is the people who make it all run. More often than not, these people are local farmers and community members who are being told to convert their sparse arable land into forest, and not at a profit. Or organizations will buy up or lease land from subsistence farmers in rural areas to replant, leaving these communities with little to no income options. Yes, planting trees sounds better than drilling for oil, but not if you’re kicking local people off their land to do so, which happens far too often in the conservation industry as is.
However, tree planting can be profitable for local communities, when structured to include them as main stakeholders in the scheme’s success. And after all, since these communities will be here for generations past when reforestation is trendy, they better see some benefit of the program, or the area will simply revert to agriculture or scattered logging.
If you want to support a reforestation scheme, do some research into whether the local communities are involved with planting, what they are paid, and where the plants are going on their land. Trees should not be planted on active agricultural land, leaving families with few options for food but rather should go onto areas of degraded forest that are not good enough for agriculture or for supporting wildlife communities. Planting trees in these areas, and paying farmers to protect them from herbivores until they reach maturity, gives local communities an additional income source without threatening their form of subsistence. It also helps the plant slightly larger saplings, well-spaced from the start, to ensure all the trees you plant have the best chance of survival.
What about tech- and finance-backed reforestation?
As the world begins to pay attention to climate change, and tree planting as one viable solution to reversing this trend, tech startups have dived in headfirst, looking for ways to feasibly scale the planting and financing of reforestation schemes. These innovations are exciting and sexy potential solutions to climate change that range from planting trees with drones, using Lidar and Artificial Intelligence to measure carbon and produce credits to protect existing forests at scale, or using a credit card or search engine that plants a tree every time you spend or search.
I cannot say which of these schemes is doing things right and which are falling into the traps I mentioned above, so do your research carefully looking for red flags if you want to invest in one of these programs. Try to find out where and how their trees are being planted, the species, and how local communities are empowered as a result. If they are doing it at a massive scale, there better be a plan in place to ensure trees are not later getting harvested, that communities maintain their land rights and that they plant native species to support biodiversity, too.
Why you should still support reforestation
As I mentioned near the beginning, reforesting is an effective way to support biodiversity and slow climate change. There are reforestation schemes, mostly run by smaller organizations with close local ties, that work constantly to counteract all the issues I brought up above with high levels of transparency.
For example, the Wallacea Trust, a UK-based charity working with conservation research organization Operation Wallacea to replant 30,000 native saplings in rural Sulawesi on private, community-owned land that has been degraded by illegal logging. Local farmers are paid to collect these saplings, nurture them until they reached 1.5m height, and plant them out (with a minimum of 10 species per hectare) in degraded forests, protecting them from future logging and animal foraging. Donors who have paid to plant trees at a price of $5 each receive bi-weekly updates with photos and stories from farmers so they can see exactly where and how their trees are planted. And as these native species grow, they will bring wildlife back to the area, which will be monitored by Operation Wallacea’s research teams yearly. Therefore, a community that normally makes >50% of its income from tourism has become more resilient in the face of the pandemic by reforesting this degraded forest.
Yes, it’s a lot more work to find (and run!) a reforestation scheme this transparent. But if you want to be sure your donation dollars are going the make the desired impact, take the time to look for organizations that are planting the right trees, in the right place, with the local people involved. A well-planned reforestation program really can make all the difference for people, animals, and the planet — so choose wisely.
