Why do most tree planting projects fail, and what separates the ones that do not?

The counting problem

Almost every failed plantation project in India failed the same way, and it is not a failure of botany.

Money is released against saplings planted. A photograph is taken on planting day. Everyone involved has met their obligation, the report is filed, and the funding cycle closes. What happens over the following four years is nobody’s responsibility, because nobody is being paid to be there.

Planting is the cheapest part of establishing a forest and by far the easiest to photograph. Protecting a block through a failed monsoon, a grazing incursion and a fire season, repeatedly, for a decade, is the expensive part and produces no images anybody wants to share. When the funding is attached to the first and not the second, the outcome is not surprising.

The four mechanisms of failure

Water was never the plan. Land is usually degraded for a reason, and often that reason is water. A species list drawn up in an office rather than from the site produces plantings that need more water than the site receives. They survive the first year on establishment watering and then do not survive the second. This single mistake accounts for an enormous share of losses, and it is completely predictable at the design stage.

Nothing protected the block. Free grazing, fire, and collection for fuel will remove a young planting in one season. Protection means fencing or a watchman or an agreement with the surrounding community, all of which cost money every year. Projects budgeted around sapling cost tend to have nothing left for the recurring line, which is the one that actually determines survival.

The species were chosen for the report. Fast growing exotics produce impressive early canopy and photograph well within eighteen months. They also support little local biodiversity and, in some cases, draw down groundwater the surrounding farms depend on. They are chosen because they make the project look successful on the timescale the project is judged over.

Nobody was there in year four. This is the mechanism underneath all the others. Every one of the failures above is preventable by someone who is present, has resources, and has a reason to care. That role costs money and almost no plantation structure funds it, because the contract ended when the planting did.

Why survival data is so rarely published

It is worth being direct about this, because it explains why the sector’s numbers cannot be taken at face value.

Survival is expensive to measure honestly. It requires fixed sample plots recorded by coordinates, revisited on a schedule, with the planted count known in advance so there is a real denominator. Doing this produces a number that can embarrass the organisation that paid for it, and no contract requires it.

The result is that planting figures are abundant and survival figures are scarce. When you encounter a project reporting hectares planted but no survival rate measured after a dry season, the absence is the finding.

What a project built for year fifteen looks like

The fix is structural rather than technical. Everyone in this field already knows how to plant a tree.

Whoever plants must own the outcome. If the party doing the work holds a long lease and owns what grows on it, survival becomes their asset rather than someone else’s audit finding. That single change in structure does more for survival than any planting technique.

Revenue has to arrive before the trees mature. A project with no income until year fifteen has to raise money fourteen times before then, and will eventually fail to. Fast growing rows harvested on a short cycle, or crops grown between the trees, pay for the protection that keeps the slow canopy alive. The commercial layer is not a compromise of the ecological goal, it is what funds it.

The site chooses the species. Assessment of soil, rainfall and water availability comes before the species list, not after. On dry blocks that means arid horticulture and low water medicinal and aromatic crops rather than the water demanding species that appear in most proposals.

Measurement is designed in from the start. Boundary recorded, planted count recorded, sample plots fixed and revisited, and the count after a full dry season treated as the real one. A project that decides how it will be measured after planting has already decided not to be measured.

The uncomfortable conclusion

If you are funding restoration, the most useful question you can ask is not how many trees will be planted. It is who will be standing on this block in year five, what they are paid, and what happens to them if the block dies.

If that question has no clear answer, the trees are already gone. They just have not found out yet.

This is why we lease land rather than contract to plant on it, and why our measurement method is published before the numbers are.

Related questions

What is a good survival rate for a plantation?

There is no single answer, because it depends on rainfall, species, site condition and protection. What matters more than the number is the method behind it. A survival rate measured on fixed sample plots after a full dry season, reported with its sample size, is meaningful. A rate quoted without a method behind it carries no information at all.

Why do plantation projects not publish survival data?

Usually because nobody is contractually required to collect it. When a project is paid on saplings planted, the money has already changed hands before survival can be assessed, so measuring it creates risk for the person measuring and no benefit.

Is planting native species always better than fast growing species?

Native species generally support more biodiversity and hold carbon for longer, but they also grow slowly and produce no income for many years. A project planted entirely with slow natives and no revenue plan often runs out of money before the trees mature. Mixing fast growing rows with a slow native canopy addresses both problems at once.