Forest Fraud: National Greenwashing Program

Satellite imagery analysis and inside sources reveal deforestation and questionable commodities across the Philippines’ national greening program

As wealthy countries press Southeast Asia to do more to protect and restore its rainforests, they simultaneously import billions of dollars of commodities from agricultural land that not long ago, was pristine forestland. This investigation explores how a reforestation program designed to simultaneously preserve rainforest and promote sustainable agriculture through the planting of 1.8 billion seedlings over 130,000 sites covering over two million hectares across the Philippines, often fails at both.

Lucelle Bonzo, the Executive Director of Davao Today and an Internews Earth Journalism Network Data Journalism Fellow, had long heard rumors that the Philippine’s flagship National Greening Program was not nearly as green as it made out to be. As a Fellow, she tracked down sources within the environmental department who were able to tell her what patterns of greenwashing to look for. We also found a government website where we were able to scrape the shapefiles of over 150,000 regreening sites. With these insider tips and the exact shape and location of the sites, we were able to evaluate whether NGP has really been the success story it claims to be.

A team from DavaoToday, Thibi and Lighthouse Reports used machine learning tools to analyze millions of satellite images to detect deforestation across over a hundred thousand NGP sites. Our investigation reveals that 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. The sites are more often than not managed by communities with only short-term access to the land who will be kicked off after three years. Communities are usually obligated to grow a single cash crop tied to the volatile global commodity markets and that do not generate steady incomes. Many of the designated protected areas have no trees at all, let alone thriving rainforests of indigenous species.

Forest Fraud

This story is the first in a series of articles across Southeast Asia that use remote sensing technology, global supply chain tracking and ground reporting to map deforestation in the protected areas in the region, identifies commodities that have replaced the trees and explores how these products are laundered into global supply chains. As the EU passed its “Deforestation Regulation” (EUDR), meant to curb the world’s second largest source of climate emissions, our investigation looks into how “green” commodities cultivated on land concessions and reforestation areas carved out of forest are being used as convenient cover for continued deforestation. Our remote sensing analysis allows us to pinpoint where illicit deforestation under the guise of protection is happening the fastest and at the largest scale so that the team can go out and identify those who are profiting and reveal actors gearing up to exploit loopholes in EUDR while its compliance demands could shut small farmers out of EU markets.

METHODS

To compile a comprehensive dataset on the National Greening Program (NGP) in the Philippines and gather details such as funded projects, implementation progress, priority commodities, and beneficiaries, multiple sources and methods were utilized.

An FOI request was accordingly furnished to the DENR, through which official reports, statistics, and many others were requested regarding information related to the NGP. Historic and updated forestry statistics from publicly available resources from DENR were analysed in order to understand basic tendencies in reforestation, as well as related investments. The Commission on Audit report for 2019 on the implementation gave crucial insights into financial and implementing challenges.

Pre-existing and new hotspots of deforestation data were sourced from Global Forest Watch to identify those considered causes for alarm. From the data analyzed, Palawan and Agusan del Sur were identified as among those experiencing the most deforestation pressure. Specifically, the reforestation projects of NGP, the engagement of its beneficiaries in those areas, and commodities prioritized were reviewed to analyze how NGP was responding, especially in those particular cases.

The Palawan Network of NGOs, PNNI, was very instrumental in this investigation. The organization provided essential visual evidence, including photos, and shared copies of their filed complaints with the DENR regarding deforestation and illegal activities in areas such as Brooke’s Point, Palawan. These contributions added depth to the dataset by providing firsthand documentation of the environmental challenges on the ground and the efforts to address them.

Satellite imagery was used to validate select NGP sites and corroborate reported reforestation activities. This imagery provided an independent validation of tree cover gain and the progress of greening initiatives in heavily deforested areas.

We obtained the locations, boundaries and data of over 130,000 NGP sites nationally through the DENR’s Forestry Spatial Datasets Portal maintained by the Forest Management Bureau. In addition to geospatial data, other pertinent site attributes such as the zoning designation, establishment year, tenure status, and commodities grown in each site were also included.

Since the dataset could not be downloaded directly through the portal, we queried the underlying public ArcGIS server for the geospatial data. The original site boundaries were shifted about 100m north west of where they should be. Using road intersections and coastlines as reference points, we utilized QGIS’s Georeferencer tool to slightly correct the location of these boundaries.

We used Google Earth Engine to calculate when and how much forest loss occurred in each NGP site. The Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) laboratory at the University of Maryland’s Global Forest Change dataset provided us with annual forest loss data for each 30m x 30m pixel globally between 2000 and 2023. Using the Forest Loss Due to Fire dataset, we discounted any forest loss caused by fires from our analysis. Finally, we combined this forest loss data with the NGP site boundaries in Google Earth Engine to calculate when and how much forest loss occurred in each NGP site. Site-specific forest loss statistics were then analyzed against site attributes using Google Colab.

Qualitative information on the program’s impact was also gathered through in-depth interviews with NGP experts, DENR representatives, and program beneficiaries. Other information on the export and import of forestry products were extracted from government trade databases to determine the economic implication of NGP-priority commodities.

Further research was conducted by scraping news reports, academic publications, and online government resources to fill in the data gaps, such as detailed information on income generation and supply chain processes for timber prioritization. These data from different sources were integrated and cross-checked through a combination of manual and automated data-cleaning techniques.

NGP-related information has been summarized and visualized to present clear and readable information for the readers. Where inconsistencies or gaps existed, supplementation by independent interviews and careful fact-checking against multiple reliable sources were conducted.

STORYLINES

Marlo Mendoza is the architect of one of the world’s most ambitious regreening programs. His office at the University of the Philippines is crammed with books about trees and nature conservation. Hunched over his desk, he flicks through the glossy government brochure praising his project’s successes, with 130,000 sites covering over two million hectares across the Philippines. It appears as if his dream has become a reality.

Millions of native trees have been replanted and growing now into forests where plants and animals thrive. Vast amounts of carbon sequestered. Indigenous and farming communities cultivating produce among the forests and former timber cutters now managing tree farms.

This is exactly what Mendoza dreamed of.

This is what the world sees.

This, he admits, is not at all what is really going on across the two million hectares of National Greening Program land.

“We mobilised the entire citizenry to plant, but where are all the trees planted?” Mendoza lamented when we sat down for this Zoom interview. “I made the manual; many provisions were not followed.”

The Philippines National Greening Program was a response to the government’s seeming failure to stop its forests from being ravished. Deforestation had been massive during the 1970s to 80s. But the touted National Greening Program failed to protect itself from the decades-old problem of natural resource plunder across the Philippines that has robbed it of forest cover and replaced community and indigenous forests with plantations of invasive exotic species.

Our analysis suggests that degreening of NGP sites is not a rare exception, that across the country, sites are becoming less, not more, green. The clearing of forests include communities slashing through forest trees to avail themselves of NGP funds, failed efforts to grow seedlings and shadow plantations that employed slash and burn techniques between planting cycles on previously forested sites.

A major selling point of the re-greening program is that locally 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, most communities give up on applying for long-term tenure and only get access to the land for three years.

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 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. Almost four out of 10 hectares are both untenured and growing a single commodity crop, the least sustainable combination of all. And much of what they produce is exported with the stamp of approval of the National Greening Program.

The regreening program was also intended to regrow and protect native rainforests. Of the 30,000 sites covering over two million hectares across the Philippines, some of the least green sites are those designated as protection areas: where indigenous rainforests and the biodiversity that accompanies them, were meant to thrive. According to the most recently available satellite imagery, over a third of those sites have no tree cover at all.

Reporting for this story was supported by Journalismfund Europe