Monday 02 / June / 2025
Manila: Marlo Mendoza is the architect of one of the world's most ambitious regreening programmes. His office at the University of the Philippines in Laguna is crammed with books about trees and nature conservation.
Hunched over his desk, he flicks through a glossy government brochure praising his project's successes, with 1.8 billion seedlings planted over 2 million hectares (approximately 4.9 million acres) across the Philippines.
Millions of native trees have been replanted and are now growing into forests, sequestering carbon and supporting wildlife.
Indigenous and farming communities cultivate produce among the forests and former timber cutters now manage tree farms.
Communities sidelined in reforestation effort
This is what Mendoza dreamed of — however, he admits it is far from the reality on the ground.
"We mobilised the entire citizenry to plant, but where are all the trees planted?" Mendoza told DW. "I made the manual; many provisions were not followed."
The Philippines National Greening Programme (NGP) was launched in 2011 as an ambitious response to decades of deforestation, which had become a huge issue during the 1970s and 1980s.
But the NGP struggled with natural resource plundering, which depleted the Philippines' forest cover and replaced community and indigenous forests with plantations of invasive exotic species.
An analysis of millions of satellite images suggests that as many as one in every 25 hectares of NGP land experienced a major deforestation event: That is, instead of barren sites being reforested, the opposite occurs — forests are cleared right before or during regreening efforts.
More often than not, the sites are managed by communities with only short-term access to the land. They are required to grow single cash crops tied to the volatile global commodity markets, which do not provide a steady income.
A group of environmental investigators that carried out the analysis said the results expose a new pattern of "greenwashing" — a marketing tactic used to make a product or service appear better for the environment than it is.
The most common commodities grown on the sites, including timber and fruit, have a green stamp of approval, potentially eligible for export across the world.
This includes the EU, despite the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), which requires traders to prove that products do not come from land that was deforested after 2020.
Much of the EUDR's attention has focused on small farmers' challenges with proving that their land has not been associated with previous deforestation.
Investigators said the image analysis suggests commodities on these sites have been falsely grown under the sustainable banner.
Native trees cleared to grow cash crops
Additionally, the analysis suggested that forest loss on NGP sites may be more widespread than previously understood.
The clearing of forests included communities trying to take advantage of NGP funds.
Eduardo Corona, a forest ranger in Palawan, an area of the Philippines covered in re-greening program sites, said that one of the most frustrating parts of his job was seeing the NGP used to clear native forests and being powerless to stop it, despite trying to raise the alarm.
Corona was able to obtain one of the complaints he filed with his superiors, which relates to the UNESCO-recognised Mount Mantalingahan Protected Landscape.
The DENR Forest Management Bureau (FMB) told investigators that some forest clearing occurred as part of site preparation, particularly in areas dominated by invasive species. They claimed the clearing was a necessary step taken under technical supervision to allow native species to thrive.
The bureau also explained that the monitoring of the program beyond the three-year planting contracts is limited by the scale of the programme and budget constraints, with site inspections done by sampling rather than full verification.
In cases where sites failed to meet survival rates, they attributed the underutilized funds to community partners' non-compliance, rather than flaws in program design.
The investigation said independent audits and field reports suggest that deeper issues — including poor site selection, limited community support, and weak long-term sustainability planning — remain unaddressed.
A major selling point of the re-greening program is that local communities would be given unused land to grow crops, so they would no longer need to chop down forests to survive.
But the process for applying is so complicated that most communities give up seeking long-term tenure and only get access to the land for three years.
Mendoza recounted cases where community groups were given access to land but not harvest rights. Many became overwhelmed with the application process and finally gave up on trying to get long-term access.
This led to despair and sometimes illegal logging activities. "The [community group] may get frustrated then [they] enter into illegal selling transactions and [are] forced to cut trees illegally," he noted.
Monoculture undermines sustainable livelihoods
The regreening programme was also designed so that communities would be able to grow local produce for their own consumption. Instead, most are forced to grow risky cash crops for export, including exports to the European Union.
According to Mendoza, communities would need both time and choices to make NGP work as intended, to figure out a sustainable mix of crops to guarantee income for their families. They got neither.
For those who did manage to secure tenure, which guarantees 25-year access to the land, the government's usual mandate for community groups to grow a single cash crop often precluded any hopes for successfully living off the land.
Single crop sites — often fast-growing, cheap timber trees — are vulnerable to market crashes, disease and all the other problems that monoculture brings with it, including the loss of biodiversity.
Just over half of the 1 million hectares of designated production sites are tenured. Six out of 10 hectares are monoculture — sites that are growing just one commodity crop — which is widely considered unsustainable for local communities.
A third of land under the NGP is both untenured and growing a single commodity crop, the least sustainable combination of all.
The regreening programme was also intended to regrow and protect native rainforests.
Of the 130,000 sites covering over 2 million hectares across the Philippines, some sites designated as protection areas — where indigenous rainforests and the biodiversity that accompanies them were meant to thrive — have little to no tree cover.
According to the latest satellite imagery, over a third of those sites have no tree cover at all.
