> Not surprisingly, those locals often reacted badly. For example, in northern Malawi, they broke fences and burned a growing forest to get back the common grazing land on which the trees had been planted. In two Nigerian projects, villagers cut all the planted non-fruit trees for firewood, while protecting those that bore fruit.<p>Recommended reading: "Seeing Like A State" by James Scott. The first section on Scientific Forestry directly applies, and the rest of the book conceptually does too.<p>In summary, the state seeks to render its resources and populace legible, because local arrangements are very hard to quantify (and tax) from the center. This drive to achieve legibility inevitably distorts the world they are attempting to understand, for example by incentivizing monoculture forestry (easier to count the trees) instead of natural forest growth (providing many communal resources that are impossible to measure such as firewood, foraging, grazing, and so on).<p>There is a very prevalent idea that "subsistence farmers" know little about the land they work. It's usually the opposite; they tend to have far more practical expertise than the centralized planners.<p>If instead of planning these projects centrally, they were planned and executed by locals in collaboration with central funding sources, you'd be much more likely to get good results. The local farmers can usually tell you what trees will grow, where they will survive, what the village needs more of, and so on. To be more concrete -- why not provide a centralized program that subsidizes villages to plant trees, but does not specify which trees to plant? If the incentives are high enough you'll get people to plant anything (as the OP shows). But at a lower level of incentive, they will only do the work for something that they actually value. That's the sweet spot.
The problem is with the incentives. We reward organizations for <i>planting</i> trees when we should be rewarding them for <i>growing</i> trees.<p>Anecdotally, paper mills don't seem to have a problem successfully growing monocrop forests on their own properties because they actually have a reason to care about the success of replanting their own land.
The Miyawaki method [1], which I'm sure has been on HN before, is a very different approach to these projects. When I first read about it, it seemed like a kind of too-good-to-be-true miracle approach, but reading further it's really just a lot of hard work.<p>Site preparation is a huge part of it. This photo gallery [2] gives some sense. It starts with soil testing and soil amendment, I doubt they ever consider the soil "good enough" at the outset. I'm not sure if they also do any hydrological changes? Then they plant a dense and diverse set of trees. I'm not clear how many trees ultimately survive. There's theories about the set of trees you'd use, but I can only imagine some of the process is just natural selection, and a belief that early density is positive to later growth.<p>Bringing it back to technology, I do wonder what tools could support this kind of higher-effort higher-impact forestation. It seems like there's work to be done performing soil tests and understand the results and recommended amendments, including some decision trees around tests and results. There's general guidance on the choice of trees, but it requires matching that guidance against local conditions and local plants.<p>In some ways the process is simpler than landscaping a house: you aren't trying to get a perfect set of plants, and you aren't imposing other requirements. You're really trying to build a mini ecosystem, and the ecosystem is there to do a lot of the work on its own.<p>I am less sure how this approach translates to more marginal locations. It's a bit easier to rapidly create a lush and vibrant forest in India than at the edge of a desert. Most of the examples are in tropical locations.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.crowdforesting.org/miyawaki-model/forest-kerala" rel="nofollow">https://www.crowdforesting.org/miyawaki-model/forest-kerala</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.greenyatra.org/miyawaki.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.greenyatra.org/miyawaki.php</a>
Trees tend to fail spectacularly, even for seasoned growers. The site that I bulk purchase seedlings from estimates a failure rate as high as 70% for evergreen plugs <i>if you do everything right</i>. As you move up from seedlings to 3 year old plants, the failure rate drops to 10%, but my real failure rate is probably closer to 30%. The number one reason is too much/too little moisture, with some pests/disease thrown in.<p>Furthermore, trees need organic material. A lot of it. A tree planted in "dirt" will be about the same size 3 years later. A (young) tree planted in rich compost can double in size in a year. You can't stick a tree in the ground anywhere and expect it to grow without a good amount of help.
Much of the Earth's surface is not suitable for growing trees, either because it's too dry, to wet, to cold, poor soil or lack of soil, etc. The article gives examples of planting in places where trees don't typically grow, on coastlines and in deserts, so it's not at all surprising that the trees planted there died. This is why I've always been skeptical of tree planting initiatives. In areas where they can survive, trees will just naturally appear on unused land, there's no need to plant them. If this isn't happening on it's own, it's probably because the conditions there aren't right for them.
"<i>There is no anti-tree lobby</i>"<p>There absolutely is. In my country, logging companies release statements complaining bitterly about effects to industry when new areas of land are protected from logging by the government. They equally are quite happy to quietly log ancient trees when allowed. Just because people don't march around with their agenda printed on a badge doesn't mean they don't exist.
As the article points out, the problem is our obsession with "trees planted" instead of "trees survived" after n years (n=20? not sure, but at least 10).<p>It's a reason why those "we plant a tree every time you buy X" marketing claims are mostly BS.
One of my favorite anecdotes on this problem is Guatemala. The laws on the books are pretty decent, incentives for farmers to reforest land where there used to be trees, with the government paying for the initial seedlings and then yearly payments (with verification of tree growth) over 7-15 years as the trees mature.<p>However, farmers quickly found a loophole where they could find a plot of virgin forest, clear cut the hardwood for lumber and then use the bare land to sign up for the program. They would plant a fast growing monocrop of pine and tend it (and collect payments) for 7 years until they would harvest it for lumber. All fully paid for by the government.
Great comments about monoculture and poor incentives.<p>Natural forests have a complexity that doesn't seem worthwhile to brute-force by massive tree planting. There's an obvious spatial complexity for different plant phyla patterns (see a bunch of links below).. a kind of blending between meadows to underbrush to trees, mosses and lichen in rocky areas, mangroves holding onto rivers. And there's plenty of fungus and animal participation to consider as well.<p>I like to listen to permaculture people and their approaches.. thinking of the water tables, clay and soil types. I think there's probably also some new thinking to be done about how functional water cycles differ from arid areas and developing long-term plans to coax water back up with strong cloud-seeders, from coastlines and river basins towards inland deserts.<p>That all leads to healthier rivers and tidal estuaries, which are keystones for many maritime ecosystems, due to feeding and breeding migrations e.g. of salmon, crab, eels.<p>I guess I'm saying we're missing the forests for the trees :)<p><a href="https://cache.desktopnexus.com/thumbseg/2276/2276110-bigthumbnail.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://cache.desktopnexus.com/thumbseg/2276/2276110-bigthum...</a>
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I think the author is incorrect about no one hating trees, because developers seem to hate trees. The most conspicuous detail in a new development is the absence of trees.<p>I think trees need a forest. The best place for a tree to grow is under a mature tree of its own species. But even trees of different species help prevent damage to each other from winds and storms. Perhaps instead of trying to plant a new forest, we should be jealously conserving and expanding what forest remains. Harvesting timber by clear-cutting should be illegal, and while the logging industry has adjusted somewhat to conservation, wealthy landowners still do it all the time.
a quick read of this -- it appears to be a list of badly executed projects by struggling governments, more than anything ecosystem-oriented; coinciding with "constant topic of conversation in political circles" .. Second in failure rate only to "protecting healthy forests that exist now" ?
See also <a href="https://placesjournal.org/article/informal-settlers-environmental-rehabilitation-manila/" rel="nofollow">https://placesjournal.org/article/informal-settlers-environm...</a> (discussion at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32726036" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32726036</a>), describing how one local-run tree-planting operation has succeeded where government and NGO-run prestige projects failed.
As mentioned in one of the other comments here, we have come to the realization that the last-mile growers are not incentivized enough, sometimes not at all, to "maintain" the trees till they can sustain themselves.<p>The government and public authorities will sign a plan; then it goes down to multiple intermediaries, and by the time it reaches those planting the trees get little to care. It is rampant with corruption and fraud. If I have to put in numbers, here is an idea -- if there is $1 available for every tree to be planted, anyone in direct benefit at the final step gets less than 10¢. Those organizations and people "shouting" about planting trees goes on to the next plantation project, and it goes on.<p>I have been involved with and have invested in nurturing an ecosystem in a remote corner of India. I have got the involvement of the locals, and they know what trees/plants to grow that will benefit not just in sucking in CO2 but bears fruit that the locals can leverage. The idea is to have a tangible outcome from the trees that we can create a circular economy and treat the Climate actions as a good side-effect. The locales have no clue and don't even have enough to survive to care about Climate Change.
This is an all negative perspective. There are many that succeed too (Caveat: No, I'm not a forest expert but I do travel). I have seen at least 3 examples of Miyawaki forests that have succeeded close to where I live. I've seen some fairly large and successful afforestation efforts too.<p>While yes, an extremely unbalanced perspective helps us focus on a rather important issue, I do wish the article were a mite more balanced.
This is one of the "earnest environmentslist thinks we can do better" articles that are so popular with the "see, it was a hoax all along" crowd.<p>Within the intended audience, this is a call for stricter standards to ensure this is done well and achieves its aims. Outside, for people who just read the headline, it's taken as further evidence that it's all BS. A fake solution to a fake problem, both pushed by evil people.<p>I'm not sure what you can do about this, climate change deniers are not famous for their appreciation of nuance, but we should probably take note of it anyway, otherwise you end up with people with very different opinions thinking they are agreeing when they say "this is terrible!". And nerds seem extra vulnerable to being sold this kind of know-it-all, "well, actually", cynicism for some reason.
The thing is we do not live in ordinary times. Last summer temperatures made many established trees in the cities close to getting killed. Anything with less developed root system and without regular, generous watering probably fared worse.
Farmers hardly abandon their crops or are clueless about agriculture, but in many regions this growing season was a disaster.<p>From large scale, low initial investment and high yield tree planting: pick one. Any even the most amateur gardener can figure out that growing things successfully requires checking many boxes.<p>Last but not least: in climatic emergency maybe instead of as we can see a pipe dream of low cost, no maintenance, native species only eco-forest we may start to think about planting almost anything that grows successfully and does not burn too easily.
All you need to do is stop cutting the plant life. If a forest can grow there, it will. Planting trees is extremely dumb, they are already optimized to spread themselves! Also, you can't really plant mature forests; pioneer species need to grow there first.
Some practical steps might include staging (eg. first reduce topsoil loss and create windbreaks with native grasses and ground covers, then start shrubs, then move on to trees, finally seed additional biome), always interplanting a range of species, placing protective rocks or other features for initial microclimate (moisture channeling, moisture retention, part wind protection, shade), and ensuring that all species planted are regionally endemic (greater capability to thrive in location conditions). Things to avoid are plants that depend on artificial irrigation, fertilizer, or pathogen protection.
This reminded me of this biodegradable plant box a company makes to support tree plantings which will not have future water and nutrients supplied. A Shell oil project used the boxes in an Argentina arid steppe. Was interesting to me in their 2018 write-up. They have not yet updated the results. <a href="https://www.groasis.com/en/projects/argentina-the-unconventional-tree-carried-out-by-shell-halkis-and-groatec" rel="nofollow">https://www.groasis.com/en/projects/argentina-the-unconventi...</a>
Maybe the gauge of success isn’t 100% but much lower - a 15% success rate doesn’t seem terrible, as was quoted for several projects. Maybe we better custodianship you can make that better, but I’ve seen quotes elsewhere that even with the most aggressive stewardship up to 70% of planted trees in afforestation efforts die. Maybe carpet bombing with seedlings and being happy with the residual survival is the game and we should be happy? Careful stewardship may not be scaleable, but mass planting is. That 15% delta might be dwarfed by the scale of effort possible.
Carbon credits from tree planting? Similar to the famous bounties on rats in old France. Rat plantations made a few rich. Similarly, institutions can claim credit for planting 'forests' that are pointless and failures.<p>Sure planting trees is generally a low-yield operations, with <50% survival rate typical. But these referenced projects were abysmally low, egregiously low, around a percent or two. Low enough to see that no honest effort was made.
Growing a forest is as much an effort as it is to plant it.
Of course, wherever the forests have ever been present, those places were being controlled by nature automatically. Nothing has ever changed, except for the fact that we have cut down a good majority of those.<p>To replicate a forest means to replicate the entire mechanics and settings that forests thrive in, not just replicating the presence of plants/trees alone.
~10 trees have been planted on my street (in London) over the past few years. Each cost hundreds of pounds and took months to arrange. Every one died this summer.
The folly of monoculture forest planting forms the basis for a subplot in The Overstory.<p>I can't give a wholehearted reccomendation for The Overstory since it was a bit melodramatic for my taste. The narrative cadence of the book goes something like: tragedy, pointless tragedy, ridiculous tragedy, unrealistic tragedy and so forth until the end... with a dash of interesting ecology and history sprinkled throughout. I suppose it should be read as magical realism with "rage against the machine" vibes.
How many of these tree planting projects are funded by carbon credits/offsets?<p>Tree planting seems the be the simplest/cheapest project to do that ostensibly removes CO2.<p>Basically, the carbon offsets serve as a conscience salve for rich people to continue their lifestyle, and then these tree projects exist as a way to say that you are at least trying to do something. Nobody really cares if they are effective or not.
Monocultures of any kind are always fragile, you need diversity to have a resilient ecosystem. These projects should benefit from an understanding of permaculture, which is a discipline that aims to create the right conditions for healthy systems. Everything from succession (pioneer leguminous species that can fix nitrogen and improve soil, slowly replaced by other species), trying to slow down and catch water where it falls to prevent soil erosion and runoff and much more. I've heard (unsubstantiated) claims that initiatives in China have already started to take these into account and have succeeded where other monoculture forests failed.<p>A side effect is that you can end up with productive species. Imagine forests where many trees bear fruits, others have acorns that pigs can feed on, fruit vines and understory herbs that animals can graze on, large lakes with edible fish. This is the future I'd be excited for and it's all currently possible with the right policies.