Two Forests, One Ledger

The Green Legacy spectacle plants for the cameras and counts its own success. The money, meanwhile, is earned in a place the cameras never point — and the only restoration that came through a war intact was the one nobody owned but the people who did it.

Every rainy season the Republic performs a sacrament. The Prime Minister — the soft-spoken lieutenant-colonel who rose through intelligence and the old EPRDF machine before rebranding himself, and the state, in the green of renewal — takes a sapling and a ceremonial spade, and behind him a phalanx of ministers, diplomats and visiting heads of state do the same. There are drone shots. There is a record to be broken. In 2019 the figure offered to the world was 350 million seedlings in a single day, a number that obliterated India’s previous record and was reported, more or less credulously, across the planet. This year’s ceremony was opened in the presence of Nigeria’s Vice-President; the theme was “Renewal Through Planting,” and the Prime Minister promised that once the campaign was complete, Ethiopia would never again accept food aid. It is, as theatre, genuinely impressive. The question this newspaper is interested in is what happens after the cameras are packed away — and, more pointedly, who profits, who counts, and which of the country’s two competing forests is actually real.

Because there are two. There is the forest above ground: the seedlings, the planting days, the billions announced — somewhere between twenty-five and forty billion, depending on which official accounting one accepts — and the claim that national tree cover has climbed from 17.2 per cent in 2019 to 23.6 per cent today. And there is the forest below ground: the slower, quieter, far less photogenic restoration carried out by villagers, agronomists and a handful of non-governmental organisations, who in many cases did not plant a single seedling and produced more durable results than the spectacle ever has. To understand the politics of አረንጓዴ አሻራ — the Green Legacy — one has to keep both forests in view at once, and notice which one the state shows you and which one it would rather you did not look at too closely.

What the state actually gets

Strip away the foliage and the benefits to the government fall into three baskets, only one of which is environmental. The first is domestic legitimacy. A regime that has presided over civil war, mass displacement and a battered currency can, for the length of a planting day, preside instead over an image of national renewal in which millions of citizens — twenty million, the state says — participate as one. The second is foreign policy. Green Legacy is Ethiopia’s most exportable soft-power product, a Pan-African brand that places Addis Ababa in the same sentence as Kenya, Rwanda and Ghana, draws visiting dignitaries into the photograph, and earns applause at climate summits where the country otherwise arrives as a supplicant. The pledge to end food aid “by next year” is aimed squarely at this audience.

The third basket is money, and it is here that public understanding is thinnest — partly by design. The popular impression is that the planting days themselves are converted, somehow, into cash: plant the billions, sell the carbon, bank the proceeds. That is not how it works, and the gap between how it is imagined and how it actually functions is the most revealing thing about the entire enterprise.

The carbon money, broken down

The headline carbon finance does not flow from the seedlings the Prime Minister plants on camera. It flows through a separate, technical, almost deliberately unglamorous instrument called the Oromia Forested Landscape Programme — a jurisdictional REDD+ scheme covering the entire Oromia region, prepared with the World Bank since 2017. On 9 February 2023, the Federal Government and the World Bank’s BioCarbon Fund signed an Emission Reductions Purchase Agreement worth up to 40 million US dollars, payable against roughly four million tonnes of carbon-dioxide-equivalent reductions to be delivered through 2030.

Read that mechanism carefully, because the sleight of hand lives in the detail. REDD+ does not pay you for trees you plant. It pays you for emissions you can demonstrate you avoided — deforestation that did not happen, degradation that was slowed, carbon stocks that were left standing — across a whole jurisdiction, measured against a baseline. The unit of value is not a sapling in a photograph; it is a tonne of carbon that an independent third-party auditor, working to the Bank’s methodology, certifies as not having entered the atmosphere. The programme’s first monitoring report is, at the time of writing, undergoing exactly that external verification, with an initial payment anticipated in early 2026, to be distributed through a negotiated Benefit-Sharing Plan.

The money is earned precisely where the cameras are not. The spectacle is the marketing; REDD+ is the invoice — and the invoice is audited by someone the government does not control.

This produces a quiet irony the state is in no hurry to advertise. The one part of the whole edifice subjected to genuine outside scrutiny — the carbon ledger — measures something almost entirely distinct from the planting spectacle it is popularly credited to. State media have separately claimed something nearer 70 million dollars from carbon trading overall, an aggregate figure that bundles various bilateral and multilateral arrangements and should be treated as a government claim rather than an audited fact. The verifiable instrument is the 40-million-dollar Oromia agreement, and it rewards the boring, durable work of keeping existing forest standing — not the boom of a record-breaking planting day.

How many trees lived — and who is allowed to count?

This is the question the spectacle is built to deflect. The government’s position is consistent: survival rates above 80 per cent, sometimes 85. For the 7.5 billion seedlings it says were planted between July 2022 and July 2023, the official survival figure was 85 per cent. The difficulty is that nobody outside the state is permitted to confirm it, and almost everyone who has tried has arrived at a lower number.

Sources inside Ethiopia’s own Environmental Commission told one investigation that the real survival rate for that cohort may not exceed 50 per cent. United Nations field data put survival in the Amhara and Tigray highlands at around 55 and 58 per cent respectively, undone by heat, thin rainfall and absent follow-up care. A peer-reviewed governance study was blunter still: these campaigns, it found, are not formally monitored, and field observation suggests survival well below the official claim. The historical record offers little comfort — Ethiopian planting programmes of the 1970s to 1990s recorded survival under 20 per cent — and the global pattern is worse: mass-planting campaigns routinely fail at rates between 60 and 90 per cent. Turkey’s celebrated 11-million-tree day in 2019 had, by its own foresters’ association’s reckoning, lost as many as nine in ten within months.

The structural problem is not that trees die; trees always die in some proportion. The problem is that, in the Green Legacy model, a single actor sets the target, mobilises the planting, performs the count, declares the result and then markets it to the world. There is no transparent public tracking system. There is no published breakdown of how many of the billions were hardy indigenous species and how many were eucalyptus — that thirsty colonial import that drains the very water tables a degraded landscape is gasping for. The state both takes the photograph and writes the caption. The only outside auditor in the entire system, as we have seen, is the carbon-finance verifier — and he is measuring avoided deforestation across Oromia, not whether the sapling the minister pressed into the ground in July was alive by December. The survival of the spectacle is, in the end, self-certified.

The forest that was already there

Now consider the other forest — the one that does not photograph well. In the Desa highlands of Tigray, on the lip of the escarpment that falls towards the Danakil, a dry afromontane forest that had lost roughly forty per cent of its closed canopy has been coming back. The organisation WeForest, working under a 2019 memorandum with the regional Bureau of Agriculture across some 38,000 hectares, did something the planting campaigns never do: before putting anything in the ground, it fixed the ground. Villagers dug contour trenches and infiltration pits and stacked hundreds of kilometres of stone bunds by hand — what the project came to call “planting the rain.” Across Tigray as a whole, communities have moved an estimated 90 million tonnes of soil and rock by hand to restore around a million hectares, one of the largest hand-built engineering efforts in modern African history, and one almost no one outside the country has heard of.

The second move was stranger still. In much of this landscape the forest was never dead — it was underground. Native junipers and African olives, browsed and burned to the ground a hundred times over, survive as living rootstocks, ancient biological batteries waiting beneath the surface. The technique of coaxing them back up — pruning the strongest shoots from an existing rootstock rather than buying and planting a nursery seedling — is called Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration. The Australian agronomist Tony Rinaudo formalised it in Niger in 1983, after years of failed planting, when he stopped to look properly at a roadside “shrub” and realised it was the crown of a felled tree whose roots were still alive. He received the Right Livelihood Award — the alternative Nobel — in 2018. In Niger alone the method has regreened five million hectares and some 200 million trees, benefiting two and a half million people, at a cost of roughly twenty dollars a hectare.

Hold that last figure against the spectacle’s own arithmetic. By a cost reported in state media and attributed to the initiative’s own steering committee, Green Legacy has been spending in the order of twenty dollars per seedling. If that number is anywhere near accurate, the same twenty dollars either buys one photogenic sapling with a coin-toss chance of survival, or restores an entire hectare of forest from the roots already in the soil, with survival rates that in well-run regeneration projects exceed ninety per cent. That is the whole argument of this article compressed into a single comparison.

“The land was never dead. We just stopped listening to it.”

And then came the test no policy paper could have designed. When war engulfed Tigray in November 2020, the international organisations evacuated, the financing collapsed, the technical assistance vanished. Most foreign-funded projects in the region simply stopped. The Desa work did not. The trenches were still dug, the bunds still repaired, the rootstocks still pruned — because by then the knowledge of what to do no longer sat with an NGO or a ministry. It sat with the people who lived on the land. Post-war assessment found that many of the most intensively restored areas had not merely survived the war but continued to advance through it, with no external support at all. A restoration owned by its community proved more durable than a two-year war. That is a sentence the Green Legacy spectacle, for all its billions, cannot write about itself.

The honest ledger

None of this makes Green Legacy worthless, and the Tribune will not pretend otherwise. The campaign has shifted, sensibly, towards fruit and fodder agroforestry that pays communities directly; it has created rural work; it has done real good for public awareness in a country that genuinely needed to plant. The Oromia programme itself runs through more than 350 community cooperatives and a roster of NGOs — Farm Africa, World Vision, the wetlands association — which is to say the state and the community model are not always enemies. Indigenous-species trials in Addis Ababa have logged survival between 82 and 96 per cent when the unglamorous work of mulching, watering and protection is actually done. The point is not that the spectacle achieves nothing. The point is that it is audited least precisely where it performs most, and audited most precisely where it performs least.

So this is a tale of two forests, and they are not equally real. One is measured in declarations, planting-day records and the presence of foreign dignitaries; its survival is taken on the state’s word, and its carbon is, conveniently, accounted for somewhere else entirely. The other is measured in springs that ran again after thirty dry years, in birds that returned to the survey logs, in a forest that walked up out of its own roots and held its ground through a war. The deepest irony is that the carbon money the government is so keen to collect ultimately depends on the logic of the second forest — real standing trees, real avoided loss, verified by an outsider — even as the marketing rewards the first. The land, an elder in Desa told an interviewer, was never dead. The Republic’s remaining task is the one he named: to stop performing, and start listening.

Sources include the World Bank BioCarbon Fund / ISFL (Oromia Forested Landscape Programme and the February 2023 ERPA), Dialogue Earth, UNEP field data reported in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, peer-reviewed governance research on Ethiopian tree-planting (Kassa et al.), the Right Livelihood Foundation, and reporting on the WeForest Desa programme and Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration. Figures attributed to the Green Legacy Initiative — including seedling totals, tree-cover percentages and per-seedling cost — are government claims and are presented as such; independent verification of the planting tallies does not, at present, exist.