More than just carbon: the socioeconomic co-benefits of large-scale tree planting

One potential nature-based solution to jointly address poverty and environmental concerns is large-scale tree planting. This study examines the National Greening Program (NGP) in the Philippines, a major tree planting initiative involving more than 102,000 plantation sites that directly or indirectly generated hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The authors find a significant and sizeable reduction in poverty as a result of the initiative, measured using both traditional and remotely sensed indicators. The NGP also induced structural shifts in local economies, reducing agricultural employment while increasing unskilled labour and service-sector jobs. Significant gains were also made in income, non-food expenditures, electricity consumption and durable asset ownership.

The paper reveals that while payments like those made by the NPG to establish forestry plantations by themselves have short-term effects, combining them with income-generating forest assets designed to generate tangible, long-term economic returns yields longer-lasting effects, highlighting how nature-based, multifaceted interventions can support rural economies.

Key points for decision-makers

• From 2011 to 2018, the National Greening Program (NGP) planted billions of trees across the Philippines.
• Using both municipality- and village-level data, the authors’ main empirical strategy compares pre- and post-planting periods between treated NGP units and a pool of untreated units.
• The main results indicate that the NGP reduced traditionally measured poverty by 6 percentage points and decreased the share of settlements without electricity by 8 percentage points.
• The programme also stimulated changes to the structure of local labour markets by decreasing agricultural employment and increasing unskilled manual labour and service sector employment, leading to higher incomes, consumption and asset ownership.
• To distinguish between poverty reductions driven by short-term programme payments and those arising from longer-term forest assets, the authors classify tree-planting sites as productive or protection based on species choice and land-use guidelines. While both site types experienced comparable poverty declines during the three-year payment period, villages with productive sites continued to see sustained and statistically significant poverty reductions after the payments ended, with the average difference between the two sites reaching 5.5 percentage points.
• Short-term payments help kick-start plantations, but lasting poverty reduction depends on forest assets that generate ongoing economic returns after the payment period ends.
• Concerns about tree planting such as loss of cropland and monocultures lacking biodiversity should be kept in mind when designing future projects, but the results of this study show that it is possible through large-scale tree planting to align environmental and poverty reduction policies.

This paper was first published in July 2024. The current version was updated in January 2026.