What we checked before we picked a reforestation partner

We spent about six weeks choosing where our reforestation budget would go. Rather than write another post about why trees matter, it seemed more useful to publish what we actually looked at, including the parts that did not go smoothly.

Most writing about this market is either supplier marketing or campaign takedown. There is very little in between, which is unhelpful, because in between is where buyers have to make a decision.

We ended up funding 40,000 trees through Evertreen in March 2026, and we buy verified credits separately. Here is the diligence, in the order we did it.

We started from the assumption that the numbers were wrong

Not out of cynicism about any particular supplier, but because this market has earned that default. The 2023 investigations into REDD+ projects and the 2024 Nature Sustainability paper — which found cookstove methodologies over-credited by roughly nine times on average, and more than twenty times for some — mean the sensible starting position is that a headline figure is marketing until you can reproduce it.

So our first question to every supplier was not "how many trees can we get for this budget" but "pick one number on your website and show me how you calculated it". Two of the five we approached could not answer that in writing. One sent a PDF that turned out to be a competitor's methodology with the logo changed. We stopped there.

The per-tree CO₂ figure

A tree does not absorb a fixed amount of carbon. It depends on species, climate, soil, age, management and whether it survives at all. Any supplier quoting a crisp per-tree number without stating the basis is either confused or relying on you not asking.

Evertreen's figure is a lifetime estimate — the total a tree is expected to absorb across its whole functional life, often several decades, rather than per year. The method is published: species-specific allometric equations from GlobAllomeTree, the FAO/CIRAD database; biomass-to-carbon and root-to-shoot ratios from the IPCC 2006 guidelines; carbon multiplied by 3.67 to reach CO₂. Around 0.8 tonnes over an entire life is unremarkable on that basis.

We are not qualified to audit the model, and we want to be honest that we did not. What we could establish is that it exists, that it is written down, and that it uses standard published sources rather than an internal spreadsheet. Their explanation of the per-tree calculation also states what the number is not — not a guarantee, not a substitute for cutting our own emissions, and not the same thing as a verified carbon credit.

That last distinction turned out to matter more than anything else we learned.

The registry check

For the certified-credit side, we did the only check that really counts: we looked the projects up somewhere the supplier does not control.

Each Verra project is published with its VCS ID and a link to the registry. We opened them ourselves rather than taking the links on trust. Katingan Mentaya (VCS 1477) shows as Registered, with proponent, methodology, crediting period and issuance history visible on Verra's own site.

Two things we would flag for anyone doing this. First, check that the ID resolves to the project you think you are buying — we found unrelated errors elsewhere in the market where a published ID belonged to a different project entirely, and it is not something you catch without clicking. Second, ask for the retirement serial numbers for your own purchase, not just the project ID. A project being real is not the same as your specific tonnes having been retired.

We asked for the serials covering our own purchase and received them within a fortnight.

The criticism

We would rather address this than have a reader find it and assume we missed it.

In December 2025, REDD-Monitor published a critical article about Evertreen, questioning its transparency, its tree counting and its carbon claims. We read it before signing. REDD-Monitor has been right about enough things over the years that we were not inclined to dismiss it, and the piece is still online.

What we found on checking was that several of its central points were answerable. The per-tree CO₂ figure it criticised is a lifetime number, and the comparison drawn was against a young tree's annual uptake — different units. The refund clause it quoted came from terms that had since been superseded; the current terms give a 14-day statutory cooling-off period and a full refund before a contribution is committed to a planting cycle. The specific projects it named as problematic were no longer being sold.

Evertreen's transparency page now answers the article point by point and names it directly, which is not the usual corporate response to criticism. That page also names the operating company — CG Green Solutions Ltd, UK company number 12581125 — and states that Evertreen is an intermediary that does not own or operate the certified projects it sources from.

We want to be careful here. Checking a criticism is not the same as disproving it, and we are a customer, not an auditor. Some of the broader concerns the piece raises about the voluntary market as a whole are, in our view, entirely valid and remain unresolved — not by Evertreen, not by anyone. What changed our position was not that the criticism evaporated. It was that every specific claim we could test turned out to be testable, and the answers pointed somewhere we could verify independently.

The small-company question

The most reasonable internal objection we heard was: this is not a large organisation, so how can it possibly verify work across that many countries?

The honest answer is that it does not do the planting. Local partners and farmers do, through implementing organisations, and Evertreen says so rather than implying a global field operation. Verification runs through GPS boundary mapping, permanent photo points, drone mapping, forest-inventory plots measuring survivorship, community surveys and satellite monitoring.

That is a reasonable protocol. It is also, necessarily, a protocol executed largely by other people, and there is a limit to how far any buyer can see down that chain. We concluded that a supplier being straightforward about being an intermediary was worth more than one implying it owns everything — vagueness about who does the work is a far worse signal than a small headcount. But we would not pretend we have independently verified conditions in Madagascar, because we have not.

What we would do differently

Two things.

We would have asked for retirement documentation earlier in the process rather than after committing, purely because it would have shortened the internal approval conversation.

And we spent too long comparing per-tree prices across suppliers before understanding that we were often comparing different products — a contribution to planting against a registered credit. Those are not substitutes and the price gap between them is not a discount. Working that out first would have saved us about two weeks.

What we did not conclude

We did not conclude that funding trees offsets our emissions. It does not, and we would be wary of any supplier who let us believe otherwise. Our reduction target is a 42% absolute cut in Scope 1 and 2 by 2030 against a 2021 baseline, validated by the SBTi, and this sits alongside it, not instead of it.

If you want a defensible carbon claim you want verified credits with a registry ID, serial numbers and retirement documentation — a different product at a different price. Conflating the two was the most common failure we saw while shopping, and in a couple of cases the supplier was the one doing the conflating.

Where we landed

We funded 40,000 trees in the Vohidahy Forest project in Madagascar, and we can point to the project, the species and the method behind the number. That is a more modest claim than most companies make in this space. It is one we can support in front of an auditor, which is the only test that mattered to us.

The signal we ended up relying on was simple: when we asked an awkward question, did the answer get more specific or less? With most suppliers it got less. That is not proof of anything on its own, but after six weeks it was the most reliable thing we had.

We are an Evertreen customer. This post was not paid for. We were asked whether we would be willing to describe the process, and agreed on the condition that we wrote it ourselves and could include the parts that were critical.

Written by Ms. Arlet Salguero, Sustainability Director.