The demand for tree planting: an over idealized quick-fix or a promising nature-based solution?

Abstract

In recent decades, tree planting has gained momentum as a nature based solution to global challenges of climate change and to tackling the consequences of deforestation. Consequently, tree planting has been incorporated in policy and governance as a strategy to address these issues (e.g. EU Green Deal). Additionally, multinational corporations are also initiating or partnering with tree planting programs to improve their sustainability image and/or using the opportunity to gain or purchase carbon credits from the voluntary carbon market. A variety of studies indicate concerns where locations of non-forest terrestrial ecosystems have been proposed to upscale tree planting efforts. Therefore, this thesis seeks to answer to what extent current tree planting project sites adhere to sustainable practices and measures to ensure optimized net carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation and local water management. Moreover, what recommendations of best practices should be made to ensure the sustainability of tree planting? This research study investigates these two key issues with a data inventory of 113 tree planting project sites associated with 20 different tree planting programs. Both qualitative and qualitative methods were used, involving a literature review and interviews. The programs were sampled through website links of multinational corporations, as well as through network connections when data was inaccessible or where time was a constraint. It was found that there were some misconceptions of key term definitions, where some projects labelled as “afforestation” were for the primary objective of forest restoration and additionally some projects labelled “reforestation” were found to be located within a non-forest terrestrial ecosystem. Furthermore, it was discovered that a majority of project sites did not monitor for local water management and this was also the case for biodiversity monitoring. Despite this, a large majority of the tree planting projects demonstrated to have mixed species planting, and most projects used solely native tree species. The results of this study have indicated the complexity of tree planting as a sustainable nature based solution, that it is very dependent on the project site, and that it involves a variety of different trade-offs. Nonetheless, this research has highlighted that there needs to be more biodiversity and local water management monitoring implemented for tree planting project sites, or at the very least, programs need to be more transparent about their project site measures and actions online.