The Phantom Forests

High-profile initiatives to plant millions of trees are being touted by governments around the world as major contributions to fighting climate change. But scientists say many of these projects are ill-conceived, poorly managed and often fail to grow any forests at all.

More than 9,000 people in Leh, India planted more than 50,000 tree saplings in under an hour on October 10, 2010 and officially established a new Guinness World Record for most trees planted. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guinness_World_Records_for_%22Most_Trees_Planted%22_broken_in_Oct_2010_and_2012.jpg.

In an investigation published last year into extensive government-organized tree planting over several decades in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, Eric Coleman of Florida State University and colleagues found little evidence that it had resulted in more tree cover, carbon uptake, or community benefits.

Excerpt from Contact Report 828:                                                                                                                      

Billy: Good, then listen: environmental protection is useless, because millions and billions invested in it are pointless and useless, because the money is used for things, measures as well as for idiotic machinations that bring nothing and no success to protect the planet and nature as well as fauna and flora, the atmosphere and the climate and slowly let it recover.

The fact that billions in money are released for all kinds of measures for environmental protection is of no use at all, because this way, in order to save the Earth, nature and fauna and flora etc., the money is only thrown into the mud, because it does not stop environmental pollution in the least.

Beneficial alone to stop the environment from being polluted, to save the planet from the depletion of its resources, to protect nature and to save fauna and flora from extinction, is really and only possible by stopping births for many years. https://www.futureofmankind.co.uk/Billy_Meier/Contact_Report_828

Almost two years after the record-breaking tree planting in India, teams of village volunteers in Camarines Sur province on the Filipino island of Luzon sunk over a million mangrove seedlings into coastal mud in just an hour of frenzied activity. The governor declared it a resounding success for his continuing efforts to green the province. At a hasty ceremony on dry land, an official adjudicator from Guinness World Records declared that nobody had ever planted so many trees in such a short time and handed the governor a certificate proclaiming the world record. Plenty of headlines followed.

It was perhaps the most spectacular failed tree planting project ever.

A villager in Peukan Bada, Indonesia plants mangrove trees. Photo – CHAIDEER MAHYUDDIN

Today at the coastline where most of the trees were planted there is no sign of the mangroves that, after a decade of growth, should be close to maturity. An on-the-ground study published in 2020 by British mangrove restoration researcher Dominic Wodehouse, then of Bangor University in Wales, found that fewer than 2 percent of them had survived. The other 98 percent had died or were washed away.

“It was a complete disaster,” agrees Jim Enright, former Asia coordinator of the U.S.-based nonprofit Mangrove Action Project.

In another high-profile case, in November 2019, the Turkish government claimed to have planted more trees on dry land than anyone else in a single hour — 300,000, in the central province of Çorum. It beat a record, also confirmed by Guinness inspectors, set four years before in the Himalayan state of Bhutan. The Çorum planting was part of a National Afforestation Day, when volunteers planted 11 million trees at 2,000 sites across Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was among those wielding a spade.

But two months later, the head of the country’s union of forestry workers reported that a survey by its members had found that as many as 90 percent of the national plantings had died. The government denies this, but experts said its counter-claim that 95 percent of the trees had survived and continued to grow was improbably high. 

Source: Phantom Forests: Why Ambitious Tree Planting Projects Are Failing, by Fred Pearce

Some forest ecologists say creating space to allow nature to do its thing is usually a better approach to restoring forests than planting. Billy has been saying this for years. “Allowing nature to choose which species predominate … allows for local adaptation and higher functional diversity,” argues one advocate, Robin Chazdon of the University of Connecticut, in her book Second Growth.

Volunteers plant trees at the edge of China’s Badain Jaran Desert last year. Photo – WANG JIANG

“Every year, millions of dollars are spent on tree-based landscape restoration activities. Over the last five decades, there are few success stories of such interventions and even those do not match the anticipated objectives for which the resources were spent. News articles that announce planting campaigns of millions of seedlings are common. Despite all this, in many countries, vegetation cover has not improved due to poor seedling survival rate. This makes the return on investment low.” – Lalisa Duguma of World Agroforestry, http://apps.worldagroforestry.org/downloads/Publications/PDFS/WP20001.pdf

Such failures often go unnoticed, believes Duguma, because performance indicators measure planting rates not survival rates, and long-term oversight is minimal because projects typically last three years or less. The result is “phantom forests.”

Too often, argues Duguma, tree planting is “greenwashing” aimed at grabbing headlines and promoting an image of governments or corporations as environmentally friendly.

The causes of failure vary but include planting single species of trees that become vulnerable to disease; competing demands for the land; changing climate; planting in areas not previously forested; and a lack of aftercare such as watering saplings.

Trees blackened by the 2021 Bootleg Fire in Oregon, which burned through woodlands; but strangely enough, providing Microsoft with carbon offsets. Nathan Howard / AP

Carbon credits, also known as carbon offsets, are permits that allow the owner to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. One credit permits the emission of one ton of carbon dioxide or the equivalent in other greenhouse gases. The carbon credit is half of a so-called cap-and-trade program.

The mechanism of ‘carbon credits’ or ‘carbon offsets’ was formalized in the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement between more than 170 countries, and the market mechanisms were agreed through the subsequent Marrakesh Accords, aka, The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

An Even More Inconvenient Truth

“I looked at projects going back two decades and spanning the globe and pulled together findings from academic researchers in far-flung forest villages, studies published in obscure journals, foreign government reports and dense technical documents. I enlisted a satellite imagery analysis firm to see how much of the forest remained in a preservation project that started selling credits in 2013. Four years later, only half the project areas were forested.” – from the article, An Even More Inconvenient Truth: Why Carbon Credits for Forest Preservation May Be Worse Than Nothing, by Lisa Song

These before and after pictures are of the province of Aceh, at the northern tip of Sumatra in Indonesia. In the right photo, the shoreline, paddy and prawn farms and all surrounding low-lying areas are engulfed by the sea from flooding, which will leave behind a layer of salt that will prevent crops from growing.

Photo comparison by Fred Pearce, from his book: Earth Then and Now: Amazing Images of Our Changing World.

Above photo shows mining activity adjoining the Jamari National Forest (Brazil) seen in the background. Because the preserved forest is part of the same ecosystem as the destroyed part due to mining, it too will be negatively affected. Nature has never recognized arbitrary man-made boundary lines.

Billy: (From Contact Report 828) And effectively, only when there are fewer and fewer human beings, only then will the legal and illegal deforestation and unnecessary and only wealth-creating enterprises, the corporations and factories and the exploitation of the Earth’s resources disappear, and that because they are no longer needed.

In 2015, a French research center examined 120 projects and found that 37% overlapped with existing protected lands like national parks. Though offsets require an added benefit, the authors concluded REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) was simply layered onto existing conservation plans, reducing it to a “logo to attract financing.”

Then, there are the findings out of Norway, a major exporter of oil and natural gas and the world’s largest supporter of REDD, representing about half of all funding.

Tucked into a little-noticed report published last year by Norway’s Office of the Auditor General was the revelation that the country’s efforts had failed virtually every test:

Despite a decade’s work and $3 billion, results were “delayed and uncertain,” the science of measuring carbon was only “partially in place” and there was “considerable” risk of what’s called “leakage” — when protecting one patch of land leads to deforestation somewhere else. That problem alone creates “considerable uncertainty over the climatic impact,” the report concluded.

Above, fir tree die-off as observed during this year’s aerial survey in the Fremont-Winema National Forest in southern Oregon. (Daniel DePinte / USFS)

Drought-stricken Oregon saw a historic die-off of fir trees in 2022 that left hillsides once lush with green conifers dotted with patches of red, dead trees. The damage to fir trees was so significant researchers took to calling the blighted areas “firmageddon” as they flew overhead during aerial surveys that estimated the die-off’s extent. The surveyors ultimately tallied about 1.1 million acres of Oregon forest with dead firs, the most damage recorded in a single season since surveys began 75 years ago.

Oregon’s dead firs are a visceral example of how drought is reshaping landscapes in Western states that have been experiencing extreme heat conditions. “When I looked at it and crunched the numbers, it was almost twice as bad as far as acres impacted than anything we had previously documented,” said Danny DePinte, an aerial survey program manager for the U.S. Forest Service.

“We’ve been hearing about climate change for some time. Climate change is happening. We’re now feeling it,” said Christine Buhl, a forest entomologist with the Oregon Department of Forestry. “These summers are getting warm and long. We’re seeing evidence on the landscape. We needed to pay more attention decades ago, but we didn’t.“

Source: ‘Firmageddon’: Researchers find 1.1 million acres of dead trees in Oregon, by Evan Bush.

But the madness continues. Displayed proudly on the billboard above is a planned massive urban development project to be built in Accra, Ghana and consequently permanently destroy miles of shoreline ecosystems.

Stunned. Worry. Sadness. Fear. Anger. Bewilderment. Frustration. Disgust. These are some of the emotions expressed by scientists about the climate crisis on the, Is This How You Feel? website. Above is a screenshot showing a small sample of their handwritten letters.

And so many questions! “Why wasn’t climate change being more widely taught in our schools and universities? Why weren’t we listening to the scientists? Why wasn’t our Government acting? Why wasn’t the international community working together more? What were all our leaders doing? Were we fooling ourselves in not taking this issue seriously?” Source: https://www.isthishowyoufeel.com/

So many questions. And yet Billy has answered them all over the decades and has repeatedly explained that the real problem is overpopulation and its’ solution is a controlled birth stop which Ptaah has confirmed in a recent contact.

Ptaah: (Excerpt from Contact Report 827)

22. Under these circumstances of destruction, the planet Earth cannot and will not continue to exist as long as it has grown old up to now, and that is if it continues to exist at the present rate and if Earth’s humanity is not drastically reduced to a level of less than one billion by a worldwide and multi-year birth stop.

23. So if we continue as before and Earth-humans are not significantly reduced to a planetarily and naturally tolerable level in the foreseeable future by a controlled birth stop, then Earth-humans will bring about their own end. https://www.futureofmankind.co.uk/Billy_Meier/Contact_Report_827

WHAT CAN I DO?

1. Help to spread the message by downloading a free online copy of Billy’s booklet, A FIGHT AGAINST OVERPOPULATION. Read Billy Meier’s Important Appeal which appears at the beginning and is reproduced below. Distribute the booklet. Here is the link: https://shop.figu.org/sites/default/files/a_fight_against_overpopulation_1.pdf

2. Petition: You can participate by signing an online petition whose goal is to curb overpopulation by making birth regulations binding worldwide. This petition to the United Nations was started by Achim Wolf of FIGU – Landesgruppe Germany. Here is the link: https://www.change.org/p/united-nations-introduce-obligatory-world-wide-birth-controls

The chart above dramatically illustrates the population explosion on the Earth that has occurred over just the last few decades which Billy Meier has so adamantly been warning about. The source of the chart is the FIGU – Landesgruppe Germany website: https://de.figu.org/ueberbevoelkerung

Here is the link to The Ten Million Club Foundation in the Netherlands. This website is referred to from the FIGU – Switzerland website and serves as an excellent model for other countries to create similar websites – https://www.overpopulationawareness.org/en/

You may download this overpopulation quotes poster above for free from the FIGU – Landesgruppe Germany website at this link: https://de.figu.org/sites/default/files/shop/poster/Poster-%C3%9Cberbev%C3%B6lkerung-englisch_neu2.pdf

Guest Author

Robert Dawson