FROM LSE: More than just carbon: the socioeconomic co-benefits of large-scale tree planting

Jeffrey Pagel

Associate

Lorenzo Sileci

Research Officer

One potential nature-based solution to jointly address poverty and environmental concerns is large-scale tree planting. This study examines the National Greening Program (NGP) in the Philippines, a major tree planting initiative involving more than 80,500 localised projects that have directly or indirectly generated hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The authors find a significant and sizable reduction in poverty as a result of the initiative, measured via traditional and remotely sensed indicators. The NGP has also spurred structural shifts, notably decreasing agricultural employment while boosting unskilled labour and service sector jobs. In terms of climate change mitigation, the analysis estimates that the NGP sequestered 71.4 to 303 million tonnes of CO2 over a decade.

These findings underscore the potential of tree planting as a dual-purpose strategy for climate mitigation and poverty alleviation.

Key points for decision-makers

• The National Greening Program (NGP) planted billions of trees in the Philippines from 2011 to 2016.
• The authors compare pre-planting and post-planting periods between NGP municipalities that received tree planting earlier in the period and a pool of municipalities that have either not yet been included or will not be included in the program.
• The main results show that the NGP led to a reduction in traditionally measured poverty of 6 percentage points, and a decrease in the percentage of settlements without electricity (‘unlit’ settlements) of 8 percentage points.
• The results also indicate that conservation programs can lead to structural changes in the economy as the NGP shifted individuals away from the agriculture sector into unskilled manual labour and services.
• At the plantation level, the authors calculate that the NGP achieves a reduction in CO2 at a cost of $2–10 per ton of CO2 and that the average carbon sequestration benefits surpassed the implementation costs between years 6 and 9.
• Concerns about tree planting such as loss of cropland and monocultures lacking biodiversity should be kept in mind when designing future projects, but the results of this study show that it is possible through large-scale tree planting to align climate mitigation and poverty reduction policies.