More Than Just Carbon: The Socioeconomic Impact of Large-Scale Tree Planting
Presented by:
Jeffrey Pagel
Environmental Economics
London School of Economics
Thursday, March 7, 2024
3:45 pm-5:00 pm
Taylor-Hibbard Seminar Room (Rm103)
One potential nature-based solution to jointly address poverty and environmental concerns is through tree planting. In this paper, we focus on the National Greening Program (NGP) in the Philippines, which planted hundreds of thousands of hectares of trees through 82,916 localized projects, and directly or indirectly generated hundreds of thousands of jobs. We leverage the staggered roll-out of the NGP with a dynamic differences-in-differences identification strategy to quantify the impact tree planting has on socioeconomic outcomes. We find that the program led to a significant and sizable reduction in poverty, mirrored by a similar increase in remotely sensed economic activity. The NGP induced broader structural changes as treated municipalities experienced reductions in the percentage of individuals working in the agriculture sector and increases in the percentage of individuals working in unskilled manual labor and services. A cost-to-carbon calculation shows that the NGP sequestered 72.7 MtCO2 to 308 MtCO2 over 10 years, with an estimated cost of $2.3 to $10 per averted tCO2. The results provide evidence towards the current global enthusiasm around tree planting as a nature-based solution that could potentially align the policy goals of climate mitigation and poverty reduction