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

Jeffrey Pagel and Lorenzo Sileci

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: 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 80,522 localized projects that directly or indirectly generated hundreds of thousands of jobs. Utilizing a dynamic difference-in-differences approach that leverages the staggered implementation of the NGP, we find a significant and sizable reduction in poverty, measured via traditional and remotely sensed indicators. The NGP also spurred structural shifts, notably decreasing agricultural employment while boosting unskilled labor and service sector jobs. Our analysis estimates that the NGP sequestered 71.4 to 303 MtCO2 over a decade, achieving a cost efficiency of $2 to $10 per averted tCO2. These findings underscore the potential of tree planting as a dual-purpose strategy for climate mitigation and poverty alleviation.

JEL-codes: Q10 Q50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 74 pages
Date: 2024-07-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-sea
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