Public and private land carbon 🚧

A carbon claim is, at heart, a property right. When you sponsor trees, the CO2 they capture flows through a chain that runs from the land owner, through the implementing partner, through Tree-Nation, to you. That chain — including the four tenure types we work with and how we prevent double claims — is explained in Project holders and tree ownership. This article builds on it.

The strength of the carbon claim depends on the strength of each link in the chain. But it also depends on the land itself. Land tenure types do not carry the same political-risk profile, and the carbon claim that flows through each type is not equally defensible against future shifts in how host countries treat carbon.

Most of the global carbon market does not draw attention to this. Credits are sold as if they were standardised, fungible, jurisdictionally neutral assets. They are not. The legal infrastructure that determines who owns the carbon — and whether that ownership holds up when conditions change — varies enormously between countries, between regions, and between land types within the same country.

Why this matters now

In most of the world the formal carbon legal infrastructure is still being built. Many countries are copying the architecture used by the large international registries — national designated authorities, project registries, validation procedures — without yet having the institutional capacity to operate it consistently. Rules shift. Jurisdictional claims expand. What counts as your carbon today may not count as your carbon tomorrow. This is not a hypothetical: it is the working reality across most of the carbon market right now.

Mapping land tenure to political risk

Tree-Nation works across four land tenure types. Each carries a different political-risk profile for the carbon claim that flows through it.

• Private ownership. The land owner has clear, exclusive rights to plant and to the outputs of the trees. Authorization is direct, contractual, and held by the owner. The chain is robust against state action. This is the strongest defensibility profile for a carbon claim.
• Private lease. Defensibility is close to private ownership, with the time frame defined by the lease. As long as the lease covers the relevant tree lifespan, the political-risk profile sits next to outright private ownership.
• Agroforestry on smallholder plots. Each plot is privately owned by a smallholder who authorizes planting in writing. The per-plot defensibility is strong. The chain has more authorization layers because many landholders each consent independently, but each layer is private rather than public, so the political-risk profile remains close to private.
• Public tenure. A state or municipal authority grants a concession or permit for reforestation on public land — coastal mangrove zones, riparian corridors along rivers, protected forest reserves, conservation buffer areas, land damaged by wildfire and slated for recovery. The chain depends on the host state continuing to recognise the arrangement. If a government decides at some point to redefine how carbon claims work on land it manages or oversees, public-tenure projects carry that political-risk exposure.

All four tenure types produce real trees. All four sequester real carbon. All four deliver real impact. The difference is what happens to the carbon claim if a host country's framework shifts.

Why public-land work matters

Public land is where most of the world's reforestation need actually sits. The kinds of work that depend on public-land access are the geographies that need trees most urgently:

• Mangrove restoration on damaged coastlines. Mangroves are among the most carbon-dense ecosystems on Earth, sequestering several times the carbon per hectare of tropical rainforest, while protecting coastal communities from storm surge and saltwater intrusion. Almost all viable mangrove restoration sits on state-managed intertidal land, because intertidal zones are held in public trust nearly everywhere they exist.
• Riparian planting along degraded river systems. Riparian buffers stabilise riverbanks, prevent sediment loss into water systems, filter runoff before it reaches drinking water, and concentrate biodiversity disproportionate to their footprint. River corridors are state-managed protection zones in nearly every country. A private negotiation covering an entire watershed is structurally impossible.
• Reforestation on deforested land. Decades of tropical and boreal forest loss have produced enormous areas of degraded public forest available for replanting. The total available area is vast — larger than any other restoration category — and each hectare of recovered forest rebuilds biodiversity, ecological function, and carbon storage lost to deforestation. The land is held by forestry departments and national park services, not by private owners.
• Forest fire replanting. Wildfire frequency and severity have risen sharply across Mediterranean, boreal, and tropical regions, and post-fire recovery is one of the most time-sensitive forms of restoration. Burnt land at meaningful scale is overwhelmingly state-owned because the largest fires occur in public forests and protected areas. Sponsor funding here goes directly into rebuilding ecosystems destroyed within weeks or years.
• Conservation buffer zones. The borders of national parks and protected areas are the most stressed parts of conservation landscapes — pressured by agriculture, weakened by fragmentation, vulnerable to spillover deforestation. Restoring buffer zones extends and protects the ecological core of reserves that the world depends on. The land is state-managed because the protected areas are.
• Drylands restoration and desertification reversal. Across the Sahel, the dry tropics, and arid Central Asia, advancing desertification is destroying soils, water tables, and the livelihoods that depend on them. Restoring drylands requires drought-tolerant native species, specific planting techniques, and large-scale access to public land — programs like the Great Green Wall exist only because that access is possible. Private dryland restoration at meaningful scale does not exist anywhere.

Private-tenure projects fall into three main shapes.

Restoration on larger commercial farms. Farm forestry, windbreaks, native species restoration on degraded sections of larger agricultural or forestry properties. The carbon-rights position is clean, the work is real, and the scale per project can be meaningful. The geography is bounded — mostly the developed world and parts of Latin America where commercial farming meets restoration appetite.

Privately-held conservation land. Estates and reserves owned by an individual, a family, or a family foundation, kept for nature out of the owner's own resources. These projects are typically self-funded by the owner and rarely depend on sponsor crowdfunding to happen at all.

Smallholder agroforestry. Trees planted across many privately-owned smallholder farms in a single project, each landholder authorising planting on their own plot. Aggregate scale can be substantial — hundreds or thousands of participating farms combine into projects that deliver meaningful volume. The chain runs through each plot's individual consent, and we verify it by sampling a representative cross-section of participating landholders, as described in Project holders and tree ownership.

Even taken together, the global volume available across these three private-tenure shapes is a fraction of what public-land work offers.

If political-risk concerns drove sponsors out of public-land projects entirely, the consequence would be straightforward: the cheapest, highest-impact, largest-scale tree planting in the world would stop. The trees most likely to actually exist fifteen years from now are public-land trees, because that is where the planting happens at meaningful scale and at accessible cost. Abandoning them is not a safer choice. It is a smaller choice.

How Tree-Nation manages this

Tree-Nation's response to the political-risk dimension is structural rather than promotional. Two choices in our methodology address it directly.

A conservative reserve in the calculation. We cap our CO2 calculations at ten years of tree growth, even though trees absorb carbon for decades. The unclaimed long tail is deliberate — it acts as built-in insurance. We credit less than the trees deliver, so the number you receive stays defensible even when conditions shift in ways no one predicted. The mechanics are explained in our calculation methodology article.

A land-type label on every project. Each project page indicates which tenure category the project falls into. The label is not just a description of where the trees are planted — it tells you the political-risk profile of the carbon claim attached to that project. Sponsors who want maximum protection against political-risk shifts on the property-rights layer can choose private-tenure projects, which sit at a higher price reflecting the higher defensibility of the carbon claim and the narrower scope of land they can be done on. Sponsors who care primarily about scale and impact and accept the residual political-risk exposure can choose public-tenure projects at the standard price. The choice is visible, the trade-off is explicit, and the price reflects the difference.

The point of labeling is not to push sponsors toward private-land projects. It is to make the trade-off visible so each sponsor can fund what matches their priorities. A sponsor who chooses public-land projects after reading this is choosing the largest possible climate impact per euro while accepting that the property-rights layer carries dependency on host-state framework stability. A sponsor who chooses private-land projects is choosing maximum carbon-claim defensibility at higher cost and narrower geographic scope. Both choices are legitimate. The portfolio that funds climate action at the scale the planet needs has both in it.

The carbon market's instability will not resolve soon. Some sponsors will respond by retreating from carbon-related action entirely. Others will want to keep funding tree planting on terms that are honest about what is and is not being claimed. Tree-Nation's labeling is built for the second group. Whatever you choose, the trees we fund are real, the methodology stays conservative, and the structural reserve protects against the political-risk dimension regardless of category.

Trees are what the climate physics requires. The geographies that need them most are mostly public. The label exists so you can fund this work knowingly, not so you can step away from it.