Background
Planting trees has become increasingly important as a strategy for achieving negative emissions globally. Trees sequester and store carbon and this is used by actors claiming that their carbon emissions can be offset through tree planting projects. Such actors buy emission reductions from tree planting projects on the global carbon market. Many tree planting projects are located in the global South and in Sweden several projects are marketed focusing specifically on Africa. In many of these projects, local farmers are claimed to benefit equally alongside the global climate, and some also claim to benefit biodiversity conservation. This win-win (or triple-win) narrative hides complex trade-offs, e.g. that carbon is most cost-effectively sequestered through large monoculture plantations of (often) non-native trees, while farmers are best helped by planting a variety of useful local trees exactly where needed.
In an earlier research project (Conservation, Carbon, Communities: Swedish carbon purchases through forest plantations in Uganda), we showed that local effects of tree planting depend on where, how and by whom they are set up, and also on whether the main aim is to assist local farmers or to sequester carbon. Negative impacts on farmers in that case included constrained access to agricultural and grazing land and reduced access to fuelwood. Women and the poorest households were most negatively affected. We also concluded that the assumptions about local deforestation had not been properly verified and that therefore the carbon emission reductions had likely been overestimated.
Read about the previous project Conservation, Carbon, Communities: Swedish carbon purchases through forest plantations in Uganda.
The project
This project aims to explore how Swedish consumers and organisations perceive tree planting projects and how imagined local impacts relate to the realities in host countries. We use five case studies from Uganda and Tanzania of projects selling (in one case wanting to sell) carbon from tree planting (three projects), tree regeneration (one project) and protection of existing tree cover threatened by deforestation (i.e. REDD – one project). The projects all have high stated ambitions to work closely with communities and to promote biodiversity. Three of these projects sell carbon offsets to Sweden. We investigate perceptions along the value chain of actors from consumers in Sweden, through companies selling products that are offset, carbon retailers selling carbon offsets, local organisations designing and implementing projects in Africa – all the way to affected farmers.
Understanding why some projects have negative local impacts is crucial before scaling up this strategy further. Cooperation with students, communication with the studied organisations and public outreach will spread the knowledge from this project widely.
The project’s results were translated into practice through the support of a grant from Formas’ "From Research into Practice" call, trough the development of a tool for assessing social aspects of carbon forestry projects in the Global South: https://www.slu.se/carbonguide.
Publications from the project
Christiansen, K.L., Hajdu, F., Planting Mollaoglu, E., Andrews, A., Carton, W. & Fischer, K. (2023). “Our burgers eat carbon”: Investigating the discourses of corporate net-zero commitments. Environmental science & policy, 142, 79–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2023.01.015
Hajdu, F, Fischer, K, Engström, L, Engvall, T, Linse, L. 2024: ”Vi planterar träd i Afrika”: Om målkonflikter i klimatkompensationsprojekt. In Arora-Jonsson, S, Waldenström, C, Sandström, E, (eds.) Hållbarhetens dimensioner. Stockholm: Verbal förlag. Pp. 311-332.
Popular science text in Swedish: Engvall, T. Hajdu, F. Engström, L. 2024. Är klimatkompensation genom trädplanteringsprojekt verkligen bra för lokalbefolkningen? Ikaros. Tema Växter. vol 2. pp. 36.41. https://www.tidskriftenikaros.fi/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Ikaros-02-2024_Web-Artikel06-Engvall-mfl.pdf
Further articles are being written in 2024-25 from the project.
Master's theses connected to the project
Planting Mollaoglu, Emil, 2020. “Planting Trees is Always Good”: a WPR-analysis of Swedish carbon offsetting initiatives through tree planting projects in the Global South. Uppsala: SLU, Department of Urban and Rural Development.
Engvall, Theresé. 2022. “They told us we have to plant many trees so that we can harvest air”: Hegemony, mistrust and communication failure in a tree planting project in Tanzania. Uppsala: SLU, Department of Urban and Rural Development.
Linse, Linus, 2023. Managing trees and power relations: Analysing power in two tree restoration projects in central Tanzania. Uppsala: SLU, Department of Urban and Rural Development.
