The UN Climate Change conference kicks off this week when civil society and subsidiary bodies of the UN Framework on Climate Change (UNFCC) meet in Bonn, Germany, in preparation for the ultimate climate talks - COP27 in November this year. As usual, conversations will circulate on how to allocate funds across equally important climate adaptation and mitigation agendas, so it is not surprising that an initiative like tree planting has gained so much attention globally. After all, what is better than dually achieving mitigation and adaptation objectives all in a single measure? By planting trees, we reap carbon sequestration benefits all whilst enjoying enhanced flood control, increased groundwater resource retention, and improved soil health–the very nature-based solutions needed to revive the lost livelihoods of thousands otherwise forced to migrate in search of economic alternatives to agriculture in the face of climate disruption.
Recognizing this potential, stakeholders placed a heavy emphasis on the importance of tree planting at the recent COP26 summit in Glasgow, with over 100 world leaders promising to end and reverse deforestation by 2030 in the first major deal brokered at the summit. And pledges are still being made. In April 2022, Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity met to determine the post-2020 global biodiversity framework to halt biodiversity loss by 2030 and achieve recovery by 2050 through investments in nature equivalent to between 0.7 and 1% of annual global GDP.
All of this sounds like laudable progress, right? But who will do the work? After all, planting billions of trees on both publicly and privately held land spanning virtually every corner of the globe is no small feat. Governments can set the policies, sure, but implementation at the scale needed can only be achieved through massive mobilization of communities to come together and start planting. To date, this mobilization has largely been the role of community-based organizations and other NGOs working with communities on the frontlines. But after speaking with a handful of them myself, I’ve come to realize that the task is not as simple as purely sensitizing community members on the “benefits of tree planting” and hoping they’ll hop on board for the ride. Because communities will ask themselves, and rightly so: “benefits for whom?”
In the words of Mary* of Water Mission Uganda, “our communities are set in the thinking that ‘I invest where I see change’. So if you tell me that trees bring about rainfall, when I construct, let’s say, a hectare of trees, I should be in a position to see rain next year. Or in the next three years. HERE. And that just doesn’t happen with climate change.”
Sure, there is science to back the claim that planting trees will bring more rainfall on the net whole, which is essential for drought-prone communities. But where will this rain fall? In the general region in which I plant? Maybe. On my exact plot of land? Probably not. Or at least not immediately. And if my crops are at risk of failing if there’s no rainfall before the end of the month, leaving my family with nothing to eat, why bother investing my time and resources on some utopian endeavor that will, in an unknown number of years, (probability but not certainly) reap net climate benefits for the “global community” at large–a community my family may not even survive to be part of?
“Because climate change is a global issue, our interventions here might not be visible there. Of course, from a global point of view, they are doing something. But people struggling to survive are not only thinking globally,” says Mary.
My own interactions with village members in the climate-vulnerable lakeside community of Mabinju, located in Western Kenya, are a case in point. Faced with a scarcity of land from which to generate a decreasingly reliable harvest, when asked to share her thoughts on the Kenyan government’s mandate that each home allocate 10% of their land to tree planting, one woman told me “Sure, I get that this is “good for the environment, but I need to feed my family, and that comes first”.
Understandably, planting trees has been sacrificed by most Mabinju community members needing to ration their small land plots for growing food crops–their sole source of both household nutrition and income.
But what if planting trees, feeding one’s family, and generating an income didn’t need to be mutually exclusive? Wouldn’t the incentive structure suddenly change completely? Indeed, it would, as many successful community-engaged agroforestry initiatives have already shown.
Agroforestry involves a wide range of trees that are protected, regenerated, planted or managed in agricultural landscapes so that they interact synergistically with annual crops, livestock, and wildlife. Not only is agroforestry positioned to enhance general crop yields through regenerative farming techniques, but fruit and other trees planted can themselves be used to generate food and other commercially marketable products, such as timber, fodder for livestock, fuel, and medicinal herbs. By improving both food and economic security–arguably the biggest consequences of climate disruption and the greatest drivers of climate migration globally–agroforestry embodies adaptation in the most holistic sense of the term. Not to mention, of course, the mitigation objectives that can be achieved simultaneously. In fact, when done on a sufficiently large scale, carbon credits can be tapped to provide a direct source of finance to those communities leading the change.
As Grace* said, who leads the Uganda chapter of the Lake Victoria Basin Commission’s climate adaptation program, “as soon as communities see there is something in it for them, the engagement reaches a whole new level.” This sentiment was backed by another representative I spoke with running a large tree planting campaign in Eldoret, Kenya, who affirmed that
“tree planting can only be successful when the livelihood component is given primary consideration.”
So where does this all lead us? Well, first and foremost, governments must revamp their national reforestation goals to include agroforestry as a central part of the process. Meanwhile, community-based organizations must be equipped with the knowledge, resources, and funding to conduct large-scale training in agroforestry at the community level, so the technical skills can be accrued to make widespread agroforestry a reality, at least in settings where conditions are favorable. And above all, it is time to do away with blanket tree planting orders in communities struggling to meet their daily needs, on the sole basis of an intangible global vision of “sustainability.” The latter approach will never work. And we will fall short of reaching both adaptation and mitigation benchmarks because of it.
names have been changed to ensure confidentiality
Hannah Marcus is a contributing writer at Climate Refugees. She is currently pursuing an MSc in Public Health at the University of Alberta School of Public Health. She has long had an interest in environmental health, and particularly in understanding the growing intersections between climate change, planetary health, community well-being, and societal resiliency. Last year Hannah completed her field field placement in Kenya for her MSc thesis on "Climate-Resilient WASH Sector Planning in the Lake Victoria Basin."