In principle, tree planting can be an environmentally and socially beneficial activity. However, a large number of negative environmental and social impacts has been associated with a commonly applied model of tree planting: large-scale tree plantations of often exotic fast-growing mono-cultures. These tree plantations can be very detrimental to local communities, destroying both their lands and their livelihoods. In Sarawak, Malaysia, the resistance by local communities against tree plantations is even greater than the resistance against logging companies; once tree plantations companies occupy the lands of these communities, they never leave.

In many countries, Indigenous Peoples are the main victims of large-scale tree plantation development. It is important to focus on Indigenous Peoples in this respect, as they are currently in the awkward situation that their distinctiveness is recognized by international law, but the basic rights which should follow from that recognition are not. Demands and rights like self-determination and land rights are still not clearly recognized in either international law or most national legislations. As stated above, the impact of plantations upon their land claims is particularly severe as the companies do not leave the lands anymore: prior rights are extinguished and their land is lost forever. These impacts are particularly severe on women.

Lately, a number of initiatives have been undertaken by groups and companies like Shell Inc., WWF and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, to develop a set of basic principles concerning tree plantations and Indigenous Peoples. The following principles were adopted by Shell Inc. and WWF:

1. There should be a recognition of the informal rights of Indigenous Peoples;
2. The land tenure of Indigenous Peoples should be secured;
3. Indigenous Peoples should give prior informed consent to tree plantation development on their lands;
4. There should be no evictions of Indigenous Peoples;
5. The Indigenous peoples should have the final say in the selection of species on their lands;
6. The preferred option is to use multiple species instead of monocultures.

Regretfully, despite these good intentions the examples which are often cited as "best practices" by these companies and organizations include highly controversial plantation companies like Aracruz in Brazil and Picop in the Philippines. In both cases, plantations were established on Indigenous Peoples’ lands, and in the conflicts that followed some dreadful forms of violence and other human rights abuses were reported.

A large number of environmental problems are associated with large-scale tree plantations. One of them is the depletion of water resources. The lowering of ground water levels and drying up of streams has been reported around tree plantations in countries as varied as Chile, Thailand, Brazil, India and South Africa, but only in South Africa this problem has been formally recognized and the government has enacted legislation to control water levels. When small streams and ponds dry up due to the high water intake of plantation species like eucalyptus and pine, with them goes the wildlife and fish, which often provides an important source of protein for local communities.

Large-scale plantations also tend to degrade soils due to loss of balance in the recycling of nutrients, loss of nutrients and soil erosion. It should be noted in this respect that commercial tree plantations are seldom located on degraded lands, as it would not be profitable for the companies developing these tree plantations to locate them on non-fertile lands.

The impacts on local flora and fauna are multiple and serious. The fauna and flora of the original ecosystems, whether they are forests as is generally the case in countries like Indonesia, or grassland ecosystems as in Uruguay, is often substantially reduced. Tree plantation development is a major cause of deforestation; it has been found that many of the Indonesian forest fires two years ago were provoked by plantation companies looking for new land to expand their oil palm plantations. Tree plantations companies also tend to use pesticides to remove all the weeds which grow under the trees, but these ‘weeds’ are sometimes essential sources of medicinal and edible plants for local communities. It has sometimes been stated by local communities that even a desert contains more life than a tree plantation.

It is often suggested that tree plantations can help alleviate poverty as they bring employment, but as they often replace forms of land use which are more labour-intensive than tree plantations, they actually lead to a net loss in rural employment. In Southern Bahia in Brazil, for example, three plantation companies claim to have brought 7000 jobs to the area. But the agricultural activities they replaced provided 13000 jobs, so there actually was a net loss of 6000 jobs. Moreover, employment in the plantations industry tends to be of bad quality and the great majority of jobs is temporary.

Another argument which is often used is that tree plantations are more productive than natural forests. But productivity is only defined in terms of timber production. For local communities, the productivity of the natural forests in terms of the numerous timber and non-timber products and services is far more important than the wood productivity alone. Tree plantations hardly produce any non-timber forest products.

Some plantations companies, such as Aracruz, nowadays acknowledge that they do not plant forests -but tree crops- and that their tree plantations can have negative impacts. However, they state that the impacts are not due to the plantations themselves but to bad management practices and that the impacts can be thus avoided or mitigated through good forestry management. But most of the major impacts cannot be corrected, as they are inherent to the model, as for instance the appropriation of lands belonging to local communities, the appropriation and depletion of water and other resources which provide for the livelihood of local peoples.

It should be noted that these negative impacts do not only occur in developing countries. It is often stated that "there is no problem" with the tree plantations in Europe, as "you cannot cut them all, then you would have no forest left". It is true, that NGOs who argue for a clear distinction between tree plantations and forests often classify Sweden in the list of low forest-cover countries. A more important point is that the recognition that European tree plantations are undesirable, unstable systems, will provide an even stronger incentive for the many efforts already underway in countries like Denmark and the Netherlands to increase natural values in these plantations and slowly turn them into real forests again. Or, as stated in a paper submitted by the Danish government to the Planted Forests workshop in Chile (April 1999) "In Northwestern Europe we have learned from experience, that it takes a long time and costs a lot of resources to rehabilitate a destroyed forest resource....For those who have the opportunity it might be worthwhile to choose the direct road from an intact forest resource to sustainable management of this forest resource, instead of walking the long detour through deforestation and plantations."

The Netherlands forms another example of the undesirable sides of tree plantations. Interestingly, the first wave of tree plantation development in the Netherlands took place in the mid nineteenth century, when it was believed that tree plantations would enrich the soil, so that degraded lands could be used for agriculture again. This strategy failed completely, as the soil turned out to be just as poor after 25 years. The 1930’s saw another large wave of tree plantation development, often on lands which would nowadays be considered valuable nature reserves in the Netherlands. It should be noted in this respect that while forest regeneration takes a lot of time in the temperate zones, even in the Netherlands some remarkable cases of spontaneous nature development have been reported on so-called "degraded" lands which were deliberately or accidentally set aside. The most well-known spot, the Oostvaarderseplassen, was a forgotten wasteland in 1960 which nowadays features on the Ramsar Convention list.

Nowadays, a large number of worthwhile initiatives have been taken by the privatized state forest service and other stakeholders to reintroduce forest values into the old tree plantations, but these strategies tend to be quite costly. So the "direct road" as recommended by the Danish paper is definitely a more valid option for other countries.

Last but not least, large-scale tree plantation development would not happen if there are no beneficiaries. The owners of the plantation companies themselves are an obvious beneficiary, although it should be noted that much of their profits tend to be the result of direct and indirect subsidies from national governments and bilateral and multilateral donors like SIDA, CIDA, GTZ, and the World Bank. Other beneficiaries are, often Northern, consultancy firms and suppliers of machinery and other forms of technology. The FAO plays an important role in providing scientific advice to tree plantation developers and the foresters community in general with their corporate associates tend to benefit from this economic activity which raises the profile of their profession.

Chile is often mentioned as a country where a successful model of forest development was implemented. The growth of forest exports with more than 400% in the last twenty years (from 40 to 2500 million US$) is indeed impressive. Plantation cover has expanded from 200,000 ha. in the 1970s to more than 2,500,000 ha. today. Enormous investments in industrial infrastructure have contributed to the fact that the forest sector in 2000 produces 11% of the gross national product.

On the other side of the coin, however, the Chilean forestry model has generated extensive environmental and social impacts. Despite the fact that some 13,000,000 ha. of one of the most diverse temperate forests on earth with high potential for sustainable forest management is still available in Chile, the forestry model is almost exclusively based upon the promotion of large-scale monoculture tree plantations, composed mainly of monterrey pine and eucalyptus.

This forestry model was developed during the dictatorship of the ‘70s, without any participation of civil society. The forestry sector benefited heavily from direct and indirect subsidies from the government. Most of these subsidies went into the hands of a few companies, often companies with close ties to the ruling dictatorship. Meanwhile, no subsidies were available for the sustainable management of native forests.

The environmental impacts of this forestry model include the destruction and fragmentation of native forests by their substitution for tree plantations. Between 85 – 94, 63% of native forest reduction was due to substitution for tree plantations, between 95 – 98, this figure rose to 80%. Other impacts are the change in landscape pattern affecting cultural values and tourism, the change of natural water and nutrient cycles, affecting the water availability and fertility of soils, and water pollution by pesticides affecting human health, wildlife and domestic cattle.

All these environmental impacts have also seriously impacted upon the lives and livelihoods of Indigenous Peoples and other local communities. Today, most of the forest land is in the hands of a few big companies. The changes in the pattern of land tenure have lead to rural migration from the countryside to towns due to loss of local employment among other causes. The changes in land tenure have also lead to loss of cultural identity, the concentration of local political power in the hands of a small group of people related with the forest industry sector, loss of the possibility of product diversification and expulsion of peasants. Social tensions have lead to a major conflict between the Mapuche Peoples and plantation companies over the ownership of the land.

The current plantation scheme is inequitable in terms of the distribution of the benefits it has generated and its impact on land tenure. It is obvious plantation development has not been a tool to reduce the pressure on native forests, to the contrary, it has formed one of the major causes of forest loss in Chile. The only reason why the Chilean model seems competitive is because it has failed to include the numerous environmental and social externalities. It will be an enormous challenge to reorient this forest model in Chile, but there are signs that the new government is willing to take it up.

It was noted that due to the fact that plantations are about politics, the economic and social impacts are often much harder to correct than the environmental impacts. There is a greater interest in small-scale plantations nowadays. Not all tree planting is by definition bad and not all carbon money is by definition bad. Tree planting can be a very beneficial activity when it is part of an effort to rehabilitate degraded ecosystems as long as customary users’ rights and priorities are respected. However, as the IFF Intersessional on Planted Forests in Chile recommended, all criteria for sustainable forest management should be applied at all levels. In certain cases, where intervention is kept to the minimum, small-scale native tree plantations can even regenerate into natural forests.

The main question is: How can we support local communities to restore and protect their forest lands in a way that meets their needs. It should be taken into account in this respect that many poor local communities cannot wait for 100 years until they benefit from a land rehabilitation project. These community forests need to produce a variety of products and services from the early years on. Meanwhile, commercial tree plantations often ban local communities from having access. In South Africa, women sometimes have to walk for miles to gather fuelwood as they cannot enter the eucalyptus plantation which has occupied the lands where they used to get their fuelwood from.

3. The Carbon Shop

Tree plantations of crops like oil-palm, rubber and timber for industrial roundwood have been causing evictions and poverty amongst local communities for centuries. "Carbon" plantations are the latest in this list of crops, which are by and large produced for the North on Southern lands. Many NGOs and IPOs are uncomfortable with the idea of carbon ‘offset’ tree planting. It should be admitted that there is a logic behind it, though:

First, it cannot be denied that growing trees can act for a time as carbon sinks other things being equal;

• Tree planting can also form a great public relations activity for large corporations, particularly corporations which normally do not have a very green image, such as car companies and oil companies;
• For Northern countries and corporations, tree planting forms a great opportunity to dodge their obligations to cut their own CO2-emissions;
• For Southern countries, finally, there is the promise of financial flows from the CDM.

NGOs fear that the carbon market will function as yet another mechanism to redistribute the resources from the poor, in terms of their land, soil and water, to the rich. Meanwhile, Northern consumers and companies, gathered in coalitions like the Climate Neutral network, can "compensate for" their responsibility for climate change with large-scale tree plantations. Thus, a company or consumer which emits large amounts of CO2 but has the resources to buy large amounts of lands to plant trees, can promote itself as "carbon-neutral" even as it seriously increases its ecological pressure upon the globe. As land tends to be cheaper in developing countries, most of the land occupied will be in the South, thus leading to land pressure, increased poverty and more evictions of local people. In this way, the carbon shop will only increase the ecological footprint of the North.

There are also many concerns about the accounting method for forestry and land use change projects. The problem is that accounting is done through carbon equivalents. But while carbon emissions can be measured reasonably accurately, there are many methodological uncertainties around measuring the impacts of forest conservation or tree plantation development on carbon emissions. There are no unquestioned methodologies accounting for long-term interactions among soil, undergrowth, trees and atmosphere. More importantly, most scientific studies of the impact of tree plantations on the atmosphere do not take into account their effect on the "carbon-behaviour" of human communities living on or near the plantations. For example, will they move to other parts of the country and deforest areas to replace their agricultural land? And what about the effect of plantations on the "carbon-behaviour" of people living far from the plantations? To what extent, for instance, do carbon plantations provide a disincentive for Northern countries and consumers to change their habits and reduce their carbon emissions?

Nor is there any system of plantation "carbon-accounting" which could prove that what would have happened without the plantations would not have been more beneficial to the carbon balance. Some carbon-plantation areas, for example, might have been allowed to regenerate into natural forest if the plantation had not been established.

Even organizations and companies which implement carbon ‘offset’ projects themselves admit that tree plantations can only provide a temporary storage and that the net effect after the project has finished and the trees are cut is small. They often defend their projects with the argument that they form a temporary solution until energy efficiency technologies have been put in place. But the fact that these projects offer a cheap way for Northern governments and consumers to cut their carbon emissions, implies that they will form an incentive to postpone emission reduction policies and measures. It is important to note in this respect that even in a scenario in which the maximum area of carbon plantations currently planned are working in a way with maximum efficiency, they can only store between one and two gigatonnes per year. The current surplus of carbon in the atmosphere is estimated at 175 gigatonnes and an additional six gigatonnes of carbon per year is added to this figure. Moreover, tree plantations tend to be more fire and pest prone than natural forests. Until now, the question who is liable when a tree plantation is destroyed by human-induced or non-human-induced factors has been avoided.

Despite all these uncertainties, there is a substantial chance the carbon shop will be opened, as financial flows tend to create heavy incentives to formulate false scientific theories and invalid techniques.

It is often suggested that tree plantations reduce the pressure upon real forests. But the great majority of tree plantations produces for the global market for industrial roundwood. The more timber is produced for that market, the more the prices will be depressed. This will only take away the incentives for sustainable forest management. As the demand-side of timber products is elastic, more production will simply lead to an increase of demand. The current over-supply of raw pulp and sawnwood also destroys the market for reused and recycled forest products.

The majority of industrial tree plantations produce pulp, which is destined for the paper and paperboard-market. In fact, most pulp ends up in packaging materials. Another important part is used for paper-based advertisements: the average US family receives some 535 pieces of junkmail per year. The amount of packaging and paper waste one buys with one cup of coffee in the US, or the nightly piles of waste paper on the streets of New York, show how much paper in the US is actually wasted. And the USA deserves to be highlighted in this case as it consumes 31% of the world’s paper and paperboard, with only 7% of the world’s population. In fact, it has been estimated that paper consumption will rise to 241 kilogram per person per year in the industrialized countries by 2010, but in the USA it was already 332 kilogram per person per year in 1995! Overall, industrialized countries consume more than 10 times more paper per capita than developing countries and this gap is only expected to increase.

Is it cynical to note in this respect that the report of the Intergovernmental Forum on Forests as it stands now mentions poverty as an underlying cause of deforestation, but completely ignores unsustainable consumption patterns? Thus, once again, the South is being blamed for a problem which is rooted in the North.

The Global Visioning process being undertaken within the framework of the WWF-World Bank Alliance has also seen intensification of natural forest management and the establishment of large-scale tree plantations as a way of meeting expected demand for industrial roundwood. According to this vision, 200 million hectare of the 3.2 billion hectare forests left will be lost to agriculture anyhow. A further 1.5 billion hectare is considered to be inaccessible, and thus safe. If roundwood consumption increases as expected it is estimated that there is a need to develop 300-600 million hectare of intensive tree plantations, in order to save the rest of the forest, that is, maintain it as a protected area or under FSC-regime.

Regrettably, the non-industrial roundwood needs of some 2 billion people were more or less overlooked in this visioning, which is now being revised to take account of social considerations. It is recognized nowadays that fuelwood collection by rural communities is not a major cause of deforestation or forest degradation, from a global point of view, but there is nevertheless a clear need to meet this demand. It should be taken into account in this respect that many rural households in developing countries do not have the budget to buy their fuel. There is a clear need to support such communities in their efforts to develop small-scale, biologically diverse agroforestry systems, forest gardens and tree plantations which provide a diversity of goods and services to the community, including fuelwood, medicinal plants, soil fertility, wildlife, and construction materials. These communities also need market access for the sustainable products they produce, but inappropriate campaigns by Northern organizations to change consumption patterns sometimes also limit their market access.

A related problem is that many Northern Governments and NGOs do not want to address overconsumption. The Forest Stewardship Council is playing a problematic role in this respect. According to principle 10 of the FSC large-scale plantations can be certified and as a consequence they have certified some very controversial plantations like those of Klabin in Brazil. NGOs working within the framework of FSC should definitely campaign to change this principle.

The demand for paper and paperboard has far more negative impacts upon the world’s forests and sustainable development in general than the demand for fuelwood. Despite worthwhile recycling programs in many countries still 57% of the fiber used in paper comes from virgin wood. While only 25% of the world’s industrial wood is destined for pulpwood, this figure is much higher for large-scale tree plantations. The great majority of timber produced in these soft-wood plantations is destined for the pulpmill.

Of course, there are many opportunities to change unsustainable consumption patterns of forest products. Consumption of wood and paper should first of all be reduced (which of course does not mean replaced by less sustainable materials like concrete and aluminium). Wood and paper should be reused as much as possible, and when that is not possible, recycled. Governments and other stakeholders can play a role in changing consumption patterns through imposing legislation, proper economic incentives, and education. The role of subsidies should be highlighted again here: without the overwhelming subsidies for tree plantation development, which can run up to 75% for the first three years of operation in several Latin American countries, prices for pulp wood be much higher and demand would undoubtedly be lower.