The business world, increasingly concerned about meeting environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria, has coined a new term: reforestation intelligent. The name intelligent is assigned to companies that dedicate themselves to replanting to sell the “environmental benefits” of this work to another company, which needs them to offset its carbon footprint, that is, the expulsion of carbon dioxide generated by its activity. major. During the process, and to be more efficient in this tree repopulation, they use new technologies ranging from artificial intelligence to satellites, including special pots developed in their innovation departments. The challenge is to know if these initiatives capable of allocating private money to the reforestation of public forests will be enough to reverse the current destruction of forest mass and biodiversity.
Three quarters of Spain are at risk of desertification in the near future, according to the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge (Miteco). One million hectares (2% of the Spanish surface) are at very high risk of becoming desert in just a few years, and another eight million are at high risk. 2023 saw 80,000 hectares of wooded area burn during the fire season—which was relatively mild. The previous year, one of the worst in memory, the area consumed by the flames was three times greater: 310,000 hectares burned in 2022, 40% of that burned throughout the EU during that period.
The reforestation sector is divided into three types of actions: those carried out by NGOs, the projects of large multinationals—Endesa, Iberdrola, Telefónica, CaixaBank, Sanitas, Cisco, Astra Zeneca, among others—, and those of companies specialized in replant and sell the climate benefit that the land provides. It is these last two categories that have embraced the nickname of intelligent. They have names like ReTree, Sylvestris, Land Life or CO2 Revolution, and they sell the amount of carbon dioxide that their projects absorb to companies like Repsol, Arcelor, Enagás or Naturgy, which thus offset their annual volume of emissions harmful to the atmosphere. They use data analysis and algorithms to determine the type of plants and the amount they will use on a specific plot of land. The company CO2 Revolution, for example, has developed the smart seed iSeedwhich spreads with drones created by themselves and allows the launch of up to 100,000 seeds.
“Large-scale reforestation driven by technology,” they announce in Land Life. They have already planted three million trees in 3,372 hectares in different parts of Spain. One of their first projects is in Castilla y León, where they have replantings in Burgos, Palencia, Ávila and León. They have been working with the Board and the corresponding local Administration since 2018 to revive forests depleted by agriculture or fires. The company, of Dutch origin, has its headquarters in Burgos. There it has created mixed forests of native species.
Public engagement
Francisco Purroy Balda, director of Land Life in Spain, describes what the business consists of. First they find a land deforested by agricultural exploitation or fires. They then speak to the owners (normally public entities) of that plot and propose their plan. The City Council or community maintains ownership of the land, they do not pay anything for the reforestation, but they commit to spending “40 years without felling, uprooting or making a use that is incompatible with environmental restoration,” explains Purroy. “The trees are going to be theirs, the products they produce are theirs, the only thing we need to finance ourselves is for them to transmit to us the environmental benefits that that plantation produces,” he adds.
However, Purroy assures that his vision goes much further than selling carbon dioxide. The key word is resilience. “We cannot think about the forest that was there when our grandparents lived, but rather what forest will be able to endure in 40 years. That is why we must generate biodiversity, so that the project is resilient.” And because the changes in temperature that are about to arrive will turn these areas into arid places where the vegetation from 100 years ago no longer adapts. Achieving the desired scale of reforestation has led them to invent instruments such as Cocoona kind of biodegradable pot that is placed under the plant and filled with 25 liters of water that is slowly supplied.
Sandra Magro Ruiz, doctor in Ecological Restoration and co-founder of Creando Redes, a company that collaborates with large companies that want to activate projects to repair natural capital, argues that we should already be in a later phase. “Let reforestation be as intelligent as it needs to be, but, please, let it not be the only solution to mitigate the effects of climate change. We must reduce emissions on other fronts,” she claims. “Restoration is not the panacea, because if you are destroying other ecosystems, what companies should do is recover or restore those environments that are deteriorating, not generate forest spaces,” warns the expert. And that is precisely the work they try to do in her company.
Support for town councils
There is another solution for the conservation of the current tree heritage: helping small municipalities to manage the forest lands they treasure. That is what Marta Corella, project coordinator at the NGO Copade, defends. “I think the smart thing to do now is to manage,” says Corella. The consequences of leaving this task to small towns without resources are the fires that we see every summer, and that feed like never before on the forage that is in the forest floors. “Because if you don't touch it, you don't clean it, like grazing did before, it becomes a mass where no light enters and in the end a plague arrives, or a fire that destroys everything,” laments Corella. “Not everything is about repopulating, we also have to provide funds to manage our forests,” she says.