Environmental groups like the World Resources Institute have mistakenly mapped those ecosystems as degraded forests suitable for tree planting in the past, Vetter wrote in an opinion paper published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems in 2020. in grasslands and savannas does irreversible damage to grasslands and savannas,” Rhodes University ecologist Susanne Vetter wrote in an email to The Verge. “Many believe that nothing bad can possibly come from planting trees, but planting trees. They might even harm ecosystems by putting a lot of trees where they don’t belong, like in savannas and grasslands.
Those tree farms don’t offer the same kinds of ecological benefits as natural forests that are teeming with diverse species. That was met with pushback from a cadre of forestry and conservation experts, who warned that aggressive tree-planting campaigns have, at times, led to monocrops of a single species of tree. Last year, for instance, the World Economic Forum launched an initiative to plant a trillion trees. That’s, in part, because of a stream of splashy, new projects to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss.
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There are heated debates flaring up right now around how to conserve and restore ecosystems. “Sort of the best-case scenario is that they waste all the money, and the worst-case scenario is they do a lot of damage.” And that doesn’t work,” says Forrest Fleischman, who teaches natural resources policy at the University of Minnesota. “Organizations like the Bezos Earth Fund have tended to sort of hire people in Seattle to fix Africa. Instead of flinging money into these projects, they’d rather see Bezos cut pollution from the behemoth businesses he’s founded. “The worst-case scenario is they do a lot of damage”īut without safeguards in place, the initiative could potentially harm ecosystems and infringe on local and Indigenous peoples’ rights, some experts say.
The Bezos Earth Fund also says it wants local communities and Indigenous peoples “placed at the heart of conservation programs.” That builds on a commitment Bezos made in September to spend $1 billion to create and manage so-called “protected” areas for conservation. The hope with the new conservation investment is to preserve ecosystems that naturally draw down and store planet-heating carbon dioxide pollution. The other $1 billion will support sustainable agriculture initiatives. There aren’t many details out yet, but the fund says it will funnel $1 billion towards planting trees and “revitalizing” grasslands in Africa, as well as restoring 20 different landscapes across the US. The Bezos Earth Fund announced its latest round of funding on November 1 during a high-profile United Nations climate summit taking place in Glasgow.
This time, he’s facing similar criticisms on a global scale. Last year, after he pledged $10 billion to fight climate change, activists in the US called him out for not doing enough to cut down Amazon’s pollution or work with local communities while crafting his environmental plans. Jeff Bezos’ $2 billion plan, announced last week, to plant trees and restore landscapes across Africa and the US has already raised red flags for some conservation experts and activists.
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