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National Greenwashing Program
From Green Dreams
to Barren Realities
By Lucelle Bonzo, Eva Constantaras and Min Lawi Lun
19 May 2025
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 1.8 billion seedlings planted 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.
Marlo Mendoza, architect of the National Greening Program. Photo by: Sipalay City local government
Mendoza designed the NGP manual when he was the undersecretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). There, he was tasked to take on this ambitious greening program, launched in 2011. He believed the Philippines would become an example of how to rein in the climate crisis. The program was meant to rehabilitate land scarred by decades of rampant logging through a consolidated government effort to either transform it into community-managed sustainable agro-forestry sites or by conserving and regrowing protected rainforests in order to reduce poverty; promote food security, environmental stability, and biodiversity conservation; and enhance climate change mitigation and adaptations.
“You learn from nature, you copy nature, you rehabilitate the area,” Mendoza explained.
But 14 years after its launch, with over 130,000 sites covering over two million hectares across many regions at a price tag of $1 billion over nine years, between 2011 and 2019, Mendoza is disappointed that his well-laid plans have not come to fruition.
Using machine learning, a team from DavaoToday, Thibi and Lighthouse Reports analyzed deforestation data derived from millions of satellite images to map forest loss 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 and at the time they would have been kicked off after three years. Communities mostly grow a single cash crop tied to the volatile global commodity markets and that does not generate steady income. Many of the designated protected areas have no trees at all, let alone thriving rainforests of indigenous species.
Through analysis of official government data on the status of regreening sites, interviews with whistleblowers who detail and document how regulations are manipulated to facilitate resource extraction and analysis of government spending on the program the investigation exposes a new pattern of greenwashing: expensive regreening programs that are not actually green.
“We mobilised the entire citizenry to plant, but where are all the trees planted? I made the manual; many provisions were not followed.”
- Marlo Mendoza
“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.” His manual puts faith in the local communities, whom he believed should be involved in caring and managing these trees with schemes such as land stewardship and access rights to public lands. He believed this would foster a sense of ownership among the communities, crucial for the program’s success.
Regrow the forests, save biodiversity, pull communities out of poverty and capture carbon. Mendoza's vision sounds idyllic, particularly for one who had served both at the DENR and in academia. He is now an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Forestry and Forest Governance, at the University of the Philippines Los Baños. The program would have studied each site to identify what trees were grown before and what endemic species would be cultivated. The process would be sensitive to the needs of the local communities so there would be balance between the community needs to sustain itself with livelihood and at the same time act as stewards for the regreening program for environmental conservation.
Instead, the NGP became a convenient cover story, a tool for greenwashing, with planting activities continuing in the NGP sites that government claims are saving the forests and communities.
* One square equals 10,000 hectares
From 1934 to 1988, the Philippines has lost over 9.8 million hectares of forest.
NGP was supposed to fix that with over 130,000 planted sites covering more than 2 million and 57 thousand hectares.
But when you take away sites that have experienced major deforestation you are left with just over 2 million hectares.
When you take away sites where it's probable that they neither contribute to greening nor sustainable local communities, you're left with less than 400 thousand hectares.
When you take away trees that are not indigenous to the Philippines you're left with just under 50 thousand hectares, representing just 1 out of every 50 hectares originally designated for NGP.
* One square equals 10,000 hectares
From 1934 to 1988, the Philippines has lost over 9.8 million hectares of forest.
NGP was supposed to fix that with over 130,000 planted sites covering more than 2 million and 57 thousand hectares.
But when you take away sites that have experienced major deforestation you are left with just over 2 million hectares.
When you take away sites where it's probable that they neither contribute to greening nor sustainable local communities, you're left with less than 400 thousand hectares.
When you take away trees that are not indigenous to the Philippines you're left with just under 50 thousand hectares, representing just 1 out of every 50 hectares originally designated for NGP.
* One square equals 1,000 hectares
From 1934 to 1988, the Philippines has lost over 9.8 million hectares of forest.
NGP was supposed to fix that with over 130,000 planted sites covering more than 2 million and 57 thousand hectares.
But when you take away sites that have experienced major deforestation you are left with just over 2 million hectares.
When you take away sites where it's probable that they neither contribute to greening nor sustainable local communities, you're left with less than 400 thousand hectares.
When you take away trees that are not indigenous to the Philippines you're left with just under 50 thousand hectares, representing just 1 out of every 50 hectares originally designated for NGP.
The Philippines’ Fast-Shrinking Forests
The 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 as the Marcos Sr. administration promoted commercial logging for exports while other Southeast Asian countries developed industrial scale agriculture that replaced forests with productive plantations. 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, poisoned and dried its waters and replaced community and indigenous forests with plantations of invasive exotic species.
Despite a nationwide logging ban in the early 1990s and various regreening programs, on average nearly 177 hectares of trees have been felled every day for the last 20 years.
Philippines has suffered decades of deforestation
Despite mounting international pressure, forests continue to disappear
Source: Global Forest Watch
A third of tree loss occurred in just five provinces. Losing such a large number of trees in such a short amount of time has made citizens more exposed to climate disasters, caused biodiversity to plummet and in many cases, corresponded to communities becoming poorer.
National Greening Program: Saving the Trees, the People and the Planet
The NGP was one of hundreds of global initiatives to slow the impending climate catastrophe that has already hit the Philippines harder and makes it higher risk than many other countries in the world.
An ambitious program formalised through Presidential Executive Order 26 in February 2011, the greening program had a goal of planting 1.5 billion trees across 1.5 million hectares within six years, from 2011 to 2016 and has since expanded. These trees would be a combination of indigenous rainforest and sustainable commodity crops cultivated by local communities.
This program was, in a way, ahead of its time. It was a vision of environmental protection not as a zero-sum game between market forces and conservationists, but a sustainable process to balance the needs of the people and the environment. Proponents say it could become a model for how to tackle both poverty and climate change, an antidote to the pitch battle between the market and the environment playing out in many countries, with carbon credits utilized by big polluters to buy their way out of taking responsibility for cutting emissions.
The program brought together the DENR with the Department of Agriculture (DA) and the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) for its implementation. This collaboration extended to local government units, people's organisations, academic institutions, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector, all working toward the program’s ambitious goals of reforestation alongside providing livelihood opportunities for communities.
It focused on two provinces with the highest tree cover loss in the past 20 years-- Agusan del Sur in Mindanao and Palawan in Luzon. Agusan del Sur has over 7,000 NGP sites and Palawan has nearly 2,000, many of them much bigger than Agusan del Sur sites.
Palawan province has experienced the fastest shrinking forests in that timeframe—roughly 200,000 hectares. That is equivalent to an average of felling 25 hectares of forest every day. In Palawan, in 2010, nearly 1.2 million hectares of forests covered the province. But fast forward to 2023, the province has lost one-eighth of that, resulting in over 80 million tons of CO₂ emissions.
The province with the second highest rate of deforestation was Agusan del Sur in Mindanao. Agusan del Sur is a huge contributor to the country’s timber industry—it produced a whopping 4.7 million cubic meters of logs in the decade since 2010 or just under half of log production nationally—and has lost over 3 out of every 20 hectares of its forests in the last 20 years. Yet, the province is one of the poorest provinces both in the region of Caraga and historically, also in the country.
Community groups known as People’s Organizations (POs) play a crucial role in the regreening program. Every eight in 10 sites in Agusan del Sur and just over five in 10 sites in Palawan are managed by POs. Nationally, seven in 10 sites are managed by POs.
On paper, the scale of this initiative and collaboration with stakeholders painted a picture of a government finally addressing the problem of deforestation. Illegal timber trade and slash and burn cutting to make way for plantations would be replaced by organized, deliberate cultivation of commodity crops that are managed by local communities.
This is how the NGP worked in practice in Agusan del Sur:
* One square equals 1,000 hectares
NGP sites are designated as either Protection or Production Zones. Protection is meant to preserve or regrow native forests and no one is allowed to cut them down. Production zones are intended to enable local communities to harvest them and make a living from them, in part as an alternative to illegal logging.
NGP sites are often managed by communities who come together to form People's organizations that are granted access, but only for three years. These are called untenured sites. This means they often prepare the site and plant the trees but they lose rights before they are able to harvest in the case of production sites or maintain fledgling native trees in protection sites.
Some NGP sites only grow single commodities, making them vulnerable to market volatility, crop failure and other risks that local communities are not able to withstand.
People's organizations and other groups are meant to go through a daunting registration progress to get tenured, then they can enter into Community-Based Forest Management Agreements (CBFMA), agreements that give them rights to larger tracts of land for 25 years. As we can see, not many make it this far.
Taking away all the production sites that are not managed by a community group with tenure and all the sites that are mono-cropping we are left with a small area where, in theory, community groups could sow, reap and harvest a sustainable mix of products over the long term as the NGP was envisioned.
This is how the NGP worked in practice in Agusan del Sur:
* One square equals 1,000 hectares
NGP sites are designated as either Protection or Production Zones. Protection is meant to preserve or regrow native forests and no one is allowed to cut them down. Production zones are intended to enable local communities to harvest them and make a living from them, in part as an alternative to illegal logging.
NGP sites are often managed by communities who come together to form People's organizations that are granted access, but only for three years. These are called untenured sites. This means they often prepare the site and plant the trees but they lose rights before they are able to harvest in the case of production sites or maintain fledgling native trees in protection sites.
Some NGP sites only grow single commodities, making them vulnerable to market volatility, crop failure and other risks that local communities are not able to withstand.
People's organizations and other groups are meant to go through a daunting registration progress to get tenured, then they can enter into Community-Based Forest Management Agreements (CBFMA), agreements that give them rights to larger tracts of land for 25 years. As we can see, not many make it this far.
Taking away all the production sites that are not managed by a community group with tenure and all the sites that are mono-cropping we are left with a small area where, in theory, community groups could sow, reap and harvest a sustainable mix of products over the long term as the NGP was envisioned.
This is how the NGP worked in practice in Agusan del Sur:
* One square equals 1,000 hectares
NGP sites are designated as either Protection or Production Zones. Protection is meant to preserve or regrow native forests and no one is allowed to cut them down. Production zones are intended to enable local communities to harvest them and make a living from them, in part as an alternative to illegal logging.
NGP sites are often managed by communities who come together to form People's organizations that are granted access, but only for three years. These are called untenured sites. This means they often prepare the site and plant the trees but they lose rights before they are able to harvest in the case of production sites or maintain fledgling native trees in protection sites.
Some NGP sites only grow single commodities, making them vulnerable to market volatility, crop failure and other risks that local communities are not able to withstand.
People's organizations and other groups are meant to go through a daunting registration progress to get tenured, then they can enter into Community-Based Forest Management Agreements (CBFMA), agreements that give them rights to larger tracts of land for 25 years. As we can see, not many make it this far.
Taking away all the production sites that are not managed by a community group with tenure and all the sites that are mono-cropping we are left with a small area where, in theory, community groups could sow, reap and harvest a sustainable mix of products over the long term as the NGP was envisioned.
The Great Scam
It did not take long for Mendoza’s good intentions to be exploited. A deeper dive into Mount Mantalingahan Protected Landscape (MMPL), which has been on UNESCO’s Tentative List of World Heritage sites in Palawan, demonstrates how a well intentioned program can be manipulated to replace native forests with exotic timber in the name of conservation. And how local environmental authorities are powerless to stop it. A key biodiversity area, MMPL is home to critically endangered species including the Philippine cockatoo, Palawan bearcat, and Palawan peacock-pheasant. It is also the ancestral home of over 12,000 indigenous Palawans who consider the forest sacred. This is what happened when one part became an NGP site in 2017.
Calasaguen in Brooke's Point already bore some scars of illegal forestation of rainforest in 2016 when it became a candidate for NGP.
Once the Calasaguen Shore Coconut Based Association applied to run it, deforestation spread rapidly westward.
Clearing of the site westward continued another year under the oversight of Emmanuel E. Jalocon, the association manager as crops fill in where rainforest was cleared.
By the time the tenure of the NGP site ends, deforested areas have been completely covered over by commodity crops.
Although still green, the NGP site has lost almost 20% of the rainforest since applying to become a regreening site, losing more trees than it had in the 10 years before NGP.
Cases of greenwashing in the NGP sites have been reported anecdotally, where native forests were cleared to make way for the program’s production of cash crops. For the first time, remote sensing has enabled us to pinpoint deforestation and greenwashing across 130,000 NGP sites. A third of the loss in Palawan occurred in sites in Bataraza and Brooke's Point.
Our analysis suggests that degreening of NGP sites is not a rare exception, that as many as one in every 25 hectares of NGP land experienced a major deforestation event. 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.
Some re-greening sites saw rapid tree loss, not gain
Designed to replant lost trees, many National Greening Program sites were green before establishment and then lost tree cover instead
Source: Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) laboratory
Eduardo Corona, chief para-enforcer of the Palawan NGO Network Inc. (PNNI) said that one of the most frustrating parts of his job was seeing the NGP used to clear native forests and being powerless to stop it. Though he tried to raise the alarm by submitting complaints to the DENR.
Corona witnessed big native trees cut down and burned for charcoal and replaced with mahogany and tropical fruits in the name of NGP. He said this all occurred with the sign off of the barangay captains. “There are times that I passed by the NGP area that was planted in a forested area,” he said of NGP sites that used to be native forest but were cleared to qualify for NGP funding. “To give way to one planted tree, they will remove three trees. I do not agree with that.”
He explained in an interview with us the details of the case of the UNESCO recognized Mount Mantalingahan Protected Landscape. Instead of protecting the forest, the local government of Brooke's Point destroyed it and then planted commodity crops with NGP funding. The PNNI filed a complaint with the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development (PCSD), an administrative body composed of national and local government officials and representatives from the military, indigenous communities, NGOs and private sector, on June 18, 2019 raising concerns on illegal logging in an NGP site in Brooke’s Point.
When they did not receive a response, the PNNI filed a follow up complaint with both the PCSD and the Provincial Environment and Natural Resources Office in April 2021 but was excluded from the subsequent site inspection. As far as PNNI is aware, DENR took over temporary management of the site.
A Freedom Of Information request filed in June 2024 to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) seeking access to case records related to implementation issues in regreening programs in Palawan and Agusan del Sur has gone unanswered. This outcome contrasts with an earlier FOI request to the same agency regarding the National Greening Program (NGP) and official forestry statistics, which was met with a reply directing the requester to the DENR’s official website. Follow up letters to provincial authorities resulted in inconclusive responses and eventually, no responses at all. Davao Today was eventually able to secure a scanned copy of the original complaint, including the accompanying photographic evidence through PNNI, the environmental NGO. The week before publication, various local DENR officials finally called in response to the June 2024 request but without providing answers to the original request.
A complaint addressed to the local environmental body by a network of non-profits catalogue cases of illegal logging along with inaction from local authorities. Source: Palawan Network of NGOs Inc., highlights by author (PNNI).
Another para-enforcer for three municipalities in Palawan, Teofilo Tredez, also observed that the NGP funds were often allocated to land that was forested to begin with. Communities then cut down trees to plant fruit seedlings with the government’s support.
“The negative outweighs the positive,” he observes. “The forests should not be destroyed to plant new trees. The budget should have been allocated to enforcement to ensure that they are protected because Palawan still has 60% forests with a low percentage of degradation,” Tredez pointed out.
Teofilo Tredez, a para-enforcer of the Palawan Network of NGOs, inspects a confiscated chainsaw used in illegal logging during an operation in the forests of Brooke's Point, Palawan. Tredez is part of a grassroots initiative to protect the region's forests and safeguard the ancestral lands of Indigenous Peoples. Photo by: Palawan Network of NGOs Inc. (PNNI).
Shortly before publication, the national office of the DENR Forest Management Bureau (FMB) finally replied with a written response to questions on the problems raised by the whistleblowers. The DENR-FMB said that complaints must be reported to them with evidence so they can conduct a thorough investigation, which in the case of the 2021 complaint to the provincial office of the DENR we obtained, they were. The bureau also acknowledged instances where forest areas are cleared on certain cases as part of their site preparation, which is not the type of forest loss captured by our analysis or denounced by the whistleblowers.
“There are also some site preparation activities where our partners opted to clear some portions of the area if the vegetation is covered by invasive species, especially in degraded vegetation. With the supervision and recommendation of our technical personnel, these areas are cleared and replaced/replanted with appropriate species to restore its ecological balance,” their letter stated. They also said there were instances that they conducted “grass/weed strip brushing, ring weeding and hole digging… (to) improve the environmental condition of the site for faster growth of the seedlings.”
A community regreening program too complex for communities
Mendoza explained that above all, communities needed to have security of tenure for any kind of greening program or food security program to be successful. That’s not what happened. Instead, as in the past, people tried to find ways to exploit the land as fast as they could for the short time they had access to it, whether it had trees on it to begin with or not.
“Security of tenure is important for a farmer and an informal settler. At the same time, you plant in the upland, you know that it's public and owned by the government. The government can take … that land away from you anytime,” Mendoza explained. “But if you have access rights, you have security of tenure, you have an agreement for 25 years, renewable for another 25 years, so you take care of what is planted.”
Many grassroots organisations had good intentions but struggled with the bureaucratic processes required to participate in the NGP. People’s organizations were required to qualify to enter into Community-Based Forest Management (CBFM) agreements. Poorer communities had neither the money nor understanding of how to register as a formal cooperative to enter into an agreement that would secure tenure for 25 years instead of the three years allowed to POs, barely enough time to squeeze out a single harvest for some crops.
The FMB acknowledges the difficulty for POs to secure tenure for their reforestation sites. Currently, the only available options for NGP partners are Community-Based Forest Management Agreements (CBFMA) and Socialized Industrial Forest Management Agreements (SIFMA). While the DENR assists in facilitating the process for interested groups in securing the necessary documentation, free and prior informed consent remains a significant challenge, particularly in communities that are deemed ancestral domains, they explained. These are the legal requirements designed to ensure that communities are fully informed of any project that impacts Indigenous People’s lands or communities to allow their traditions, rights, and welfare to be respected in their entirety, which can be difficult considering the convoluted process of applying to manage an NGP site.
Most production sites grow a single crop
Experts recommend crop diversification that enables communities to eat some of what they grow themselves and sell some cash crops.
Source: Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR)
Mendoza recounted cases where POs were given access to land but not the legal rights to harvest what they had planted. This led to frustration and sometimes illegal logging activities. “The PO may get frustrated then (they) enter into illegal selling transactions and be forced to cut trees illegally,” he noted.
So many People’s Organizations, while they were granted temporary access to NGP sites, were forced to prioritize immediate survival over long-term environmental stewardship. Most had the rights to plant the seeds, but not the right to reap what they sowed as they got bogged down and finally gave up on the process of gaining the official status needed to get long term access to the land.
Nida Collado is a farmer and President of the Macatumbalen Community Based Forest and Coastal Management Association. She was one of the awardees of the Philippine Resilience Awards for Women by the Climate Change Commission for her leadership in community-based sustainable forest management. She registered her organization for tenure and is helping other POs navigate the paperwork, but she doubts if this is worth the trouble because of challenges in maintaining registration in the system.
“Grassroots POs are poor, they do not have the capacity for … [CBFM] registration or form a cooperative,” Collado points out on the complicated process of securing tenure. She has tried to help 16 POs through the process. Three of every five hectares of NGP land are tenured under CBFM agreements. But on the other hand, she wonders whether when the current agreements expire developers will rush in to snap up the land they have nurtured for years.
Monoculture undermines sustainable livelihoods
In retrospect the idealism of Mendoza’s plan seems evident. The program's success hinges not only on the participation and goodwill of local communities but also on the government’s interest and ability to sit down with communities to understand their unique needs over the long term. These needs might range from the need for firewood, wood for housing materials, gardens to grow fruits and vegetables for consumption, space for livestock and most likely, a careful balance of many of those competing needs to secure long term livelihoods through diversification. Communities would need both time and choices to make NGP work as intended. They got neither.
For those who did manage to secure 25-year access to the land, the government usually mandates community groups to grow a single cash crop often precluded any hopes for successfully living off the land. Single crop sites 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. A third of land under the NGP is both untenured and growing a single commodity crop, the least sustainable combination of all.
Understanding who is responsible for greening sites
A vast majority of sites are managed by communities temporarily.
Source: Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR)
Sites with community access limited to three years are usually growing a single crop
The financial benefits of growing a single crop can often take much longer because of planting, growing and harvesting cycles
Source: Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR)
Despite advances in satellite imagery, what is happening across the 130,000 NGP sites is not regularly monitored and the official success story stands. Official data relies heavily on the number of seedlings shipped out for planting and assumes that most of them survive. The people tasked with ground truthing and reporting back on what is happening on NGP sites are afraid to contradict the official narrative and even when they do speak up and complain about the most egregious cases, they are often ignored.
Tredez said that as para-enforcer, he would routinely be handed a tidy file reporting the success of an NGP site, with data of seedling planted, cultivated and thriving. But when he inspected the site, there was nothing there: no trees, only grassland.
He could not report what he found because it would mean calling into question the accuracy of past reports and the performance of the program overall.
He suspects officials bypassed the long process of identifying POs to take on the project and simply scouted an empty forested area and claimed it had been planted .
“Maybe that is their strategy to open up forests because it would be easy for them because there are no inhabitants in the area compared to open areas in which you have to negotiate who is willing to plant. When you are time-bound, with limited time for planting, to meet the [quotas], they opened up forests and plant seedlings then report it as accomplishment,” Corona explained.
External observers agree that taking shortcuts would be expedient. “The process of the NGP or any greening program should have social preparation, negotiation with the claimant [People’s Organization], but if the manpower is limited, [with] limited resources and time for social preparation, the resort strategy is to shift to open forests, no claimants … planting would be easy,” said Eric Buduan of the Forest Foundation of the Philippines.
The FMB did not respond to the charge of monitors reporting reforestation where none exists. Instead they explained that monitoring the plantations beyond the three-year contract is “not that easy given the magnitude of the plantations established and the budget requirement that would entail.” Due to this limited budget, the monitoring of plantations is only done for a rotating sample of sites, they explained.
Though frustrated by what he sees, there is little Corona can do. “Accountability should be demanded for those who were mistaken. The local authorities should tighten their monitoring,” he said. “DENR remains silent. Money of the government is wasted.”
A Fortune Spent on Fictional Forests
The NGP was allotted over PHP 47 billion in its first 9 years
Spending peaked in 2015 with over PHP 8 billion in just one year
Source: Commission on Audit
The amount of money disbursed for NGP is staggering, with PHP 47 billion or $1 billion allotted between 2011 and 2019. The program’s first year saw its lowest budget at PHP 1.4 billion, and its highest allocation at PHP 8.2 billion in 2015 and 2016.
On average, the program was supposed to spend PHP 4.5 billion each year, the equivalent of around 21 pesos for each seed that was eventually sent out for planting."
According to most recently available data, the program actually spent PHP 36 billion in its first 8 years, leaving a significant portion of around 2.8 billion pesos underutilized, or not spent effectively. Problems ranged from land which was supposed to be reforested never got the funding, equipment or supplies were not sent to the right place, money sat around unspent when there were needs for seedlings and preparation of new sites and maintenance costs to be covered.
The 2019 Commission on Audit report criticized the program for a fast-tracked approach with unattainable goals that were set without proper planning and consultation with the communities. It also cited low participation at the local level, the large number of untenured sites and the ineffective management of seedling production, specifically very expensive mechanized nurseries catering to the needs of only a small share of organizations. It concluded that the seedlings that survived tended to be from agroforestry species that collectively contributed little to building up forest cover.
The huge sum raised concerns from local stakeholders and partner NGOs about the efficiency and management of the country’s most ambitious regreening program.
Critics argue that such financial mismanagement undermined the program’s potential to deliver its goal particularly in Agusan del Sur, where deforestation has continued unabated.
The FMB acknowledged the 2019 audit report and blamed the underspending on NGP sites where trees failed to thrive and community groups not living up to their obligations, not any intrinsic flaws in the program.
“The issue of underutilization raised in the 2019 COA report…is caused by the non-payment of maintenance and protection fees for plantations that did not meet the required 85% survival rate, as well as the payment for the 10% retention fee,” their letter said. “These issues arise from the need for People’s Organizations (POs) or partners to comply with the terms outlined in the respective agreement. Non-compliance, coupled with restrictive financial procedures, disrupts planned activities and results in unspent funds until the required conditions are met. In cases where non-compliance is due to external factors or unforeseen circumstances, such as project withdrawals, our field offices allow sufficient time for partner POs to recover and complete the projects, as well as find qualified partners who are willing to take over,” the bureau further elaborated.
The survival rate is one of the basic challenges of the NGP—not to plant millions of trees, but to get them to take root and survive. Both para-enforces ticked off a litany of mistakes: seedlings sent to places where no NGP site had been declared, seedlings sent to locations that had already been planted, multiple agencies sending seeds to the same location and seeds left to rot in nurseries.
The 2019 Commission on Audit (COA) report laid the blame not with the POs but instead said that many of the plantations failed due to poor site selection, poor maintenance and use of improper tree species.
Barren legacy
Much of the area designated to protect and regrow native forests is barren in most recent images
A fraction of national regreening sites are dedicated to protecting indigenous forests and of those, many are deforested
Source: Tropical Tree Cover dataset by the World Resources Institute (WRI), Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR)
Mendoza looks back and acknowledges flaws, such as the lack of follow-up and tracking of the survival rates of these seedlings over the years. And with no means of verifying what is actually happening across the program, the fantasy could live on. According to satellite imagery analysis from 2020, the most recent available tree cover data, little over a third of NGP land was barren.
“We only measure the areas, expected areas where these seedlings are planted but we do not measure how many survived and lived,” he said while holding a copy of one of the NGP reports.
This oversight meant that the program could claim on paper its success of having planted trees without ensuring that they grew into mature forests.
This was also raised by one of the program’s partners, Forest Foundation, when they visited the NGP areas.
“When we visited the areas, we can see that they remain grasslands and some forests still remain barren. Some say that these areas were supported by the NGP but as we
can see there were no significant changes,” Senior Program Officer of the Forest Foundation Philippines Eric Buduan said.
Officials currently managing the NGP program, and its newer incarnation, the eNGP program, remain grimly optimistic. “We are not saddened that after ten to fifteen years only 50% have survived,” explained Percival Cardona,Chief of Reforestation and Rehabilitation Division of the Forest Management Bureau (FMB).
He rattles off a list of reasons for sites to fail: typhoons, climate change, clumping, all leading to “dynamic data.” “It’s a natural thing that there’s an elimination process just like Darwin’s theory of natural selection … Even if after 12 years only 50% survived, seeing how the tree has grown, depending whether it's for production or protection, we are delighted with that, as long as we achieve that kind of cover and the volume we expect from what was planted: that is ideal.”
Mendoza is worried about what will happen to the program when technology catches up and tarnishes the projection of NGP and the program will go the way of so many individual NGP sites. “When the funding has diminished, no one will take care of it anymore,” he said. “If there is no steward, the bigger chance that it is doomed to fail.”
Across the country, large swaths of national greening program sites are deforested
The government considers them green because seedlings were sent for planting
Source: Tropical Tree Cover dataset by the World Resources Institute (WRI), Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR)
The NGP has been extended up to 2028, but NGOs, local communities, and even Mendoza raised concerns.
Mendoza said the government should basically start over: go back to the original objectives of the program. There is also urgency as the climate crisis exacerbated the impact of El Niño early this year followed by severe floods. Carrying on as if the program is doing fine will only result in failure, Mendoza insisted.
Disasters have further hindered the already troubled National Greening Program, according to a Commission on Audit report. Typhoon Lando in Central Luzon in 2015 destroyed reforested areas of NGP, killing hundreds of thousands of seedlings and crippling its reforestation efforts. Meanwhile, drought conditions brought about by El Niño in Mindanao resulted in mass die offs of seedlings. These environmental setbacks expose the vulnerability of the program to extreme weather conditions and the failure to integrate resilience in the strategies adopted by the DENR to ensure that plants are able to survive long enough to act as a buffer against disasters.
Methodology and references
Credits
Authors\ Lucelle Bonzo, Eva Constantaras, Min Lawi Lun
Editors\ Eva Constantaras, Tyrone Velez
Contributing Editor\ Thin Lei Win
Project Manager\ Paul Nicholas Soriano
Data\ Lucelle Bonzo, Min Lawi Lun, T.W.H.
Code\ Thin Thinzar Htet, Sirui Zhu
Design\ Angie Khin
Reporting for this story was supported by Journalismfund Europe and the Environmental Data Journalism Academy, a program of Internews’ Earth Journalism Network and Thibi.
This story is the first of the Forest Fraud investigation, a series of articles across Southeast Asia that uses remote sensing technology, global supply chain tracking and ground reporting to expose the drivers of deforestation across protected areas in the region.
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