By Stewart Mior in Interview — Dec 4, 2024

Are Tree Plantations Sustainable? With Gianluca Cerullo

Planting trees isn’t always eco-friendly. Gianluca Cerullo urges scrutiny of plantations to combat greenwashing in an interview with Ground Truth.

Gianluca Cerullo, as quoted by us.

Planting Trees to Save the Planet

Planting trees is often touted as an easy and photogenic method of carbon sequestration, with international calls to plant one trillion trees and Project Drawdown listing it as the fifth best solution for avoiding the worst-case scenario for climate change.

However, both experts and the public are increasingly skeptical of tree-planting programs. They are particularly sour on the dreaded term "monoculture" and its equally reviled sibling, "plantation."

What is a Plantation?

Plantations are large-scale, managed systems often designed to produce timber, biofuels, or sequester carbon efficiently. Unlike diverse, natural ecosystems, plantations are typically monocultures, consisting of a single species. While they may meet specific industrial or economic needs, they often fail to replicate the intricate web of biodiversity and resilience found in natural forests.

The Disadvantages of Plantations

We’ve described the differences between plantations and environmental planting before in this guide. This presents a conundrum for individuals eager to contribute to climate solutions. For instance, donating to tree-planting campaigns might seem like a small but meaningful act. Yet without knowing the goals and outcomes of a project, these well-intentioned efforts might inadvertently support plantations that contribute little to true ecological restoration.

It’s a dilemma I’ve faced personally. I spent my twenties planting trees across Canada. Some of these efforts were part of restoration projects, but the vast majority were plantations. Looking back, I can’t help but ask: Was it all for nothing?

Are Plantations Always Bad?

As environmental advocate Gianluca Cerullo pointed out in Mongabay , the growing popularity of tree-planting initiatives demands careful scrutiny. Transparency in project goals and robust performance metrics are essential—not just to assess whether projects meet objectives like carbon sequestration, biodiversity restoration, or livelihood improvements, but also to separate genuinely beneficial efforts from greenwashing.

Access to accurate project data plays a critical role here. Emerging technologies such as remote sensing offer powerful tools to monitor and evaluate outcomes, helping stakeholders identify which projects contribute to real ecological restoration and which merely create the appearance of progress. Cerullo emphasizes that without openly shared data, we risk rewarding ineffective efforts and missing opportunities to replicate successful strategies.

“Wouldn’t it be great,” Cerullo suggests, “if instead of wanting to fund another round of snazzy tree-planting efforts, companies, governments, and the public funneled resources towards recovering ecosystems in places where this would have the greatest biodiversity and climate benefits?”

If we want to halt #biodiversity loss and stop #ClimateChange, we need #NatureBasedSolutions

🌳🌴#Reforestation could be a solution🌲🌳

Here are some phenomenal examples of how countries around the 🌍 are planting trees to protect our environmentpic.twitter.com/bwD69adu1n
— ipbes (@IPBES) April 10, 2021

Evidence-Based Approaches: A Third Way

The debate over plantations isn’t a binary choice between “good” and “bad.” As Cerullo points out, their impact depends on the goals and methods behind them. Projects grounded in science, transparency, and local ecological context can provide value—but blanket endorsements or dismissals miss the point entirely.

Uncritically championing every tree-planting project is as misguided as dismissing all of them as mere greenwashing. The solution to misinformation about reforestation isn’t cynicism; it’s better information. As advocates for evidence-driven solutions, this is a core principle of our mission at Ground Truth.

By embracing transparency and rigorous data, we can hold tree-planting initiatives accountable and steer them toward meaningful outcomes. An informed public—equipped with facts and motivated by rational inquiry—has the power to cut through misinformation and demand reforestation projects that truly address our most urgent environmental challenges.

Gianluca was kind enough to answer a few of my questions expounding on the topic, as seen below:

Public Scrutiny and Data-Driven Forest Monitoring

In your article, you mentioned, “As tree-planting projects proliferate, we sure need to keep an eye on them.” When you say “we,” are you referring to academia, industry, government, the broader public, or perhaps all of these groups?

It’s up to all of us to ensure that restoration projects deliver the environmental benefits they promise. Scientists can help monitor progress towards stated restoration goals. Governments can influence the trajectory of national restoration agendas. And industries can ensure that restoration is guided by the best science and is not used to greenwash continued exploitation of ecosystems. We all have a role to play.

In your opinion, what metrics are most important to track in these projects, and who should have access to this information? Is technology like drones and satellites the key to gathering this data, or are there other approaches?

The metrics used for tracking project impacts should align with the reported goals of the project, which can vary considerably (e.g. carbon, biodiversity, timber production, livelihood benefits etc). Ideally, projects should disclose these goals openly and then work with social and environmental scientists to determine the best performance metrics. For sure there is a role for technological innovations and improved metrics. Remote sensing is already transforming our ability to trace the carbon impacts of restoration projects at unprecedented resolutions and scales, for example.

Planting Trees = Greenwashing?

Do you think that part of the challenge in securing long-term financing for nature-based solutions is due to concerns over transparency and the perceptions of greenwashing?

Many of the challenges for financing restoration are the same as have existed for traditional conservation efforts for decades. Certainly, (misguided) scepticism about the potential for nature-based solutions to deliver at scale partly underpins this – you only need to look at what has happened to investor confidence in carbon markets to see that this is the case.

Another key challenge for long-term financing of restoration is that very few people want to pay to support nature to heal itself. Across the world, lots of forests are regrowing naturally but are having their potential cut short. This is often because policies directly disincentivise letting ecosystems regenerate naturally. Wouldn’t it be great if instead of wanting to fund another round of snazzy tree-planting efforts, companies, governments and the public instead funnelled resources towards recovering ecosystems in places where this would have the greatest biodiversity and climate benefits?

It’s often said that some corporate reforestation efforts may function more as public relations exercises than genuine environmental solutions. How do you think the general public can differentiate between authentic restoration efforts and instances of greenwashing, especially when companies promote monoculture plantations as effective reforestation?

If a company has significant climate impacts in its daily operations and is not taking aggressive steps to mitigate those impacts, it’s completely reasonable for the public to be sceptical about its restoration efforts. Authentic restoration should be part of a broader strategy to reduce overall environmental harm, not a standalone effort to offset ongoing damage.

There’s been a lot of discussion around how insufficient regulation and oversight may allow corporations to pursue suboptimal reforestation practices, such as monoculture plantations. How crucial do you think regulatory frameworks are in ensuring that reforestation projects genuinely promote biodiversity and climate resilience?

Regulations that prevent greenwashing by bad actors should go hand-in-hand with incentives that promote biodiverse and carbon-dense restoration efforts over large scales. Crucially, incentives should beware of inadvertently displacing food production or of pulling attention away from the more crucial task of protecting existing ecosystems.

Cool animated image of Gianluca Cerullo walking through jungle. Animated — Cool pic from gianlucacerullo.com

The Complexity of Monocultures

There’s growing concern that when people become aware of the unintended negative consequences of well-meaning initiatives (like monocultures), it can lead to disillusionment or even complete nihilism about environmental activism. In your view, how can we sustain public trust and optimism in reforestation and restoration efforts, despite these complexities?

Monocultures have their place – they can produce wood very effectively. But maintaining public trust in reforestation and restoration efforts ultimately relies on having an engaged and ecologically literate public that knows the difference when walking in a homogenous plantation versus a complex, interconnected forest ecosystem.

In your article, you highlight the blurred lines between plantations and restoration. Do you think greater transparency and open access to reforestation data could help improve accountability and foster more diverse, cross-sector collaborations in these efforts?

Yes. There is clearly a need for restoration projects to be transparent both about their goals and the outcomes of their restoration. Otherwise, no lessons can be learnt and each new restoration project must reinvent the wheel.

You’ve noted that the effectiveness of different types of planting often depends on the local context. For instance, though monocultures are generally discouraged, one expert mentioned their use in former pasturelands in Costa Rica where they don’t displace natural resources. Where can investors and the general public go to learn more about these specific local contexts?

Often natural regeneration can have far better ecological outcomes than tree planting, and at a fraction of the cost. That said, understanding which restoration actions to prioritise where depends on many ecological and socioeconomic forces. There is no substitute for robust scientific approaches and participatory stakeholder engagement.

How the Public Can Get Involved

If someone wanted to get involved—whether by donating, volunteering, or working with restoration initiatives that are genuinely impactful in terms of biodiversity and carbon sequestration—what would you recommend as good starting points? I’ve personally planted trees for projects in Canada, but such opportunities can be hard to find.

Projects that promote or assist natural regeneration of forests in global biodiversity hotspots can provide some of the best “bang-for-the-buck” in terms of reducing species extinction risks and climate change.

You can follow Gianluca Cerullo on X (formerly Twitter) .