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Many countries have adopted large-scale tree planting programmes as a climate mitigation strategy and to support local livelihoods. We evaluate a series of large-scale tree planting programmes using data collected from historical Landsat imagery in the state of Himachal Pradesh in Northern India. Using this panel dataset, we use an event study design to estimate the socioeconomic and biophysical impacts over decades of these programmes. We find that tree plantings have not, on average, increased the proportion of forest canopy cover and have modestly shifted forest composition away from the broadleaf varieties valued by local people. Further cross-sectional analysis, from a household livelihood survey, shows that tree planting supports little direct use by local people. We conclude that decades of expensive tree planting programmes in this region have not proved effective. This result suggests that large-scale tree planting may sometimes fail to achieve its climate mitigation and livelihood goals. Large-scale tree planting programmes have been implemented or planned for areas around the world suffering from deforestation, but this study presents evidence that such efforts may not necessarily deliver the desired environmental and economic outcomes.

Interest in forest-based carbon storage has led to growth in financing for carbon forestry. Most financial strategies rest on strong assumptions which are not valid in many parts of the world. We use cases drawn from tribal forestry in the US and government forestry in India to illustrate how carbon finance relies on the presence of enforceable rights, representative and accountable institutions, clear incentives, and symmetrical power relations. In the absence of these conditions, carbon finance provides perverse incentives that undermine biodiversity and human rights without storing carbon. We suggest that for forest-based carbon storage to be successful, more attention needs to be paid to underlying political reforms, as well as to policies that are not reliant on finance.

Scientists, corporations, mystics, and movie stars have convinced policymakers around the world that a massive campaign to plant trees should be an essential element of global climate policy. Public dialogue has emphasized potential benefits of tree planting while downplaying pitfalls and limitations that are well established by social and ecological research. We argue that if natural climate solutions are to succeed while economies decarbonize (Griscom et al. 2017), policymakers must recognize and avoid the expense, risk, and damage that poorly designed and hastily implemented tree plantings impose on ecosystems and people.

The effectiveness of protected areas at achieving nature conservation goals varies widely, but the reasons for this variation are understudied. We argue that an important, but often neglected, factor is the history of institutional development that pre-dates protected area establishment. Through a comparative analysis of pathways of institutional development in Calakmul and Maya Biosphere Reserves, internationally adjoining protected areas in Mexico and Guatemala, we demonstrate that differences in farmer and community-level conservation behavior between the two reserves are the result of differences in land tenure systems that pre-date reserve establishment. Differences in land tenure systems resulted in a lower population density, greater tenure security, and greater economic and political equality in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. All of these factors influenced farmers and communities in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve to have more favorable attitudes towards conservation, conserve more forest on both individual and community managed land, and to create more conservation reserves on both land types. These differences are rooted in the system of land distribution and political organization during the 1970s and 1980s, before protected area establishment, when both areas were agricultural frontiers. As a result of these political processes that pre-date reserve creation, farmers and communities in Calakmul hold more land and hold it more equitably, have less access to surplus labor for expanding commercial production, and have a political system that shares benefits from forest conservation more equitably when compared to Maya. Our work highlights the value of understanding historical political and institutional conditions in the design and development of effective protected areas. Protected areas located in areas with greater economic and political equality may be more effective at conserving nature.

The development of climate adaptation strategies to address social problems derived from climate change is pressing. Yet, in addition to providing means to minimise the impact of climate variability and change on livelihoods, climate adaptation strategies might exacerbate environmental change and cause negative social impacts. Systematic research has not addressed the impacts of adaptation on environmental change. In this paper, I focus on land use change as a specific type of environmental change and on three adaptation strategies: diversification, pooling and out-migration. I analyse the influence of adaptation strategies on land use change by drawing on interviews with the managers of 56 internationally adjoining protected areas in 18 countries in the Americas. The findings indicate that the impact of adaptation depends on the adaptation strategy people choose. When people out-migrate, land use change increases. Community elite control for decision-making, shorter distances between communities and markets and more communities in and around the protected areas also increase land use change. These findings show that adaptation can be a driver of further environmental change, and thus further study is needed to understand the likely impacts of adaptation on conservation.