Felix, the schoolboy, is always presented to the outside world as the head of the movement. Former employees of the foundation and companions of Frithjof Finkbeiner, however, say that during these years, it was primarily his father who was the driving force behind PftP. They describe him, among other things, as a "visionary without a connection to reality," a man with a strong need for recognition who built "castles in the air." His life, according to press articles, is the story of a successful entrepreneur who, in 1994, sold his company after a speech by Al Gore to devote himself to climate change. Various articles published about father and son give the impression that Frithjof Finkbeiner himself is the source of this conversion story. When asked, he declined to comment. However, there is another incident from this time that suggests other motives. In that year, 1994, several of Finkbeiner's companies went bankrupt, and Finkbeiner later became insolvent. At one point, in 2003, he had private debts amounting to almost 3.9 million euros, according to a document obtained by ZEIT.

A narrative that sounds convincing

Finkbeiner became successful in the environmental scene. In the decades that followed, he gained access to a group of prominent Germans who set the tone in environmental and development policy: Klaus Töpfer, who was also the UN's chief of development, his successor Achim Steiner, and the current Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, Gerd Müller. Since 2019, Frithjof Finkbeiner has left the board of PftP, but continues to act as a founder. His son Felix now represents the board, establishes new partnerships with companies, and advocates for more trees around the world at the World Economic Forum.

With the Fridays for Future movement, demand for CO₂ offsets – and for trees – is exploding. In 2019, PftP raised almost seven million euros, more than double the amount in previous years. Companies now want to become sustainable. And while trees are not yet traded as official certificates on the emissions markets, many companies are selling themselves as climate-neutral by donating to forest projects – the tree creates a green image. It makes a hopeful promise to businesses and their customers: climate change can be slowed through consumption. Even McDonald's is now planting trees in Madagascar, and the oil company Shell offers its customers the opportunity to offset CO₂ emissions through tree projects in Peru and Indonesia.

According to the foundation, all tree donations for PftP now go to Mexico. Since 2015, the organization has been planting primarily in Yucatán. For this purpose, it claims to have acquired four areas in the Calakmul region – together larger than Liechtenstein. PftP states that it is planting "on fallow land" and in "degraded forest areas," meaning existing, damaged forests where reforestation is common. Felix Finkbeiner describes the areas in an article as "22,500 hectares of destroyed rainforest."

It's a story that sounds convincing, were it not for its many inconsistencies. US forester Forrest Fleischman says that Yucatán has had "incredibly stable and dense forests for decades compared to other parts of the tropics." Maps from the Washington-based World Resources Institute also show this. The area around Calakmul is known for its impressive Mayan ruins, which, however, attract few tourists—and for one of Mexico's largest biosphere reserves.

In fact, satellite images of the region show that the two largest areas, totaling 19,000 hectares, advertised by PftP were not actually vacant or destroyed, but had long been forested when PftP arrived in Mexico with its project in 2013. The largest of the two areas, where reforestation is yet to begin, is actually located within the protected biosphere reserve. Fallow land? The reserve is recognized by UNESCO. However, when asked, Felix Finkbeiner says it "exists primarily on paper." He says that "many valuable trees" are being illegally cleared there. These statements irritate scientists who have long been researching the reserve. In their opinion, reforestation there would hardly make sense, as the forests are intact. Even individual illegal clearings, according to Fleischman, could not change that.

In addition, PftP has not yet received permission to reforest the reserve. The reserve's director even told ZEIT that he had never heard of the organization. PftP explains that applications for reforestation in the reserve have yet to be submitted. This is not currently planned. In other words, PftP is soliciting donations for areas where it doesn't even yet know whether it is permitted to plant trees.

There are also inconsistencies elsewhere. Not far from the two large areas, there are two other, smaller areas. Over five million trees are said to have been planted there since 2015, of which an astonishing 94 percent grew after the first year – "more than four times the usual rate in the region." This makes them "the leader in Mexico." But when you look into the details, the claim seems implausible. According to PftP, two million trees are said to have been planted since 2015 in one area alone, where trees belonging to companies such as SAP, eBay, and Edeka are located, among others. "For every hectare, we can prove whose help it was planted with," PftP explains in a digital information brochure from May 2020, providing a map showing the company forests hectare by hectare. But where the map locates the newly planted Ritter Sport forest, according to current satellite data, there is already predominantly forest. Or where parts of the Peugeot Forest are said to have originated. Or parts of the Rewe Forest.

Not every tree survives

When asked, Felix Finkbeiner doesn't speak of existing forests, but says that "trees are planted between individual trees." PftP itself writes in a photo of its planting area that new forest is being created next to "old forest." Planting into existing forests is common and sensible for increasing tree density and biodiversity, but it is also particularly challenging because significantly fewer young trees survive there, say forestry scientists. The "fantastically good survival rate" of the trees that PftP promises therefore seems unlikely.

It's even more unlikely in the second area, where three million trees are said to have been planted: There, too, parts of mature forest exist, often even bushland several meters high, says Melvin Lippe, an expert in forest data analysis at the Thünen Institute, the Federal Research Institute for Rural Areas, Forestry, and Fisheries. "You can enrich such areas with new trees, but the survival rates of these seedlings are far from 94 percent. Their growth is also much slower than in the open area." In bushland, they compete with other plants for light, water, and nutrients. While a high planting rate can easily be achieved this way, the associated climate promise cannot.

Until recently, PftP stated on its website that one planted tree offsets 200 kilograms of CO₂, roughly equivalent to one person's economy flight from Frankfurt to London. However, PftP plants in so-called dry forests, which, according to studies, do not bind particularly much CO₂. "To achieve an average of 200 kilograms of CO₂ per tree, the areas would first have to be empty and the growing conditions ideal," says Michael Köhl, a forestry scientist at the University of Hamburg who has been supporting reforestation projects in tropical regions for years. That is not the case. Of course, one could plant many trees between trees that remain small and thin. "But that would be pointless in the fight against climate change."

Confronted with the contradictions, Felix Finkbeiner says the 200 kilos of CO₂ per tree doesn't refer to PftP's trees at all, but to trees in Latin America in general. It's an average value. Of course, not every single tree survives. However, PftP hopes to achieve an average of 200 kilos per tree even in the "worst theoretical case." Melvin Lippe of the Thünen Institute, however, says this is "an absolute ideal scenario." The areas would have to be empty, and nothing could go wrong.

Where Finkbeiner gets his self-confidence from is particularly difficult to understand at the moment, because things are going terribly wrong at one planting site. In an area where young forests are said to have been planted by private donors and companies, the survival of hundreds of thousands of trees is in question. A large portion of this planting area has been under water virtually continuously since June, according to satellite data. In a video recently uploaded to Instagram by a Mexican ecologist, Felix Finkbeiner and a few men are driving a blue motorboat across a lake of flooded trees. Every few meters, the bare crowns of the trees planted by PftP protrude from the water. PftP claimed on its website this summer to have "mastered" a flood – since then, there has been no indication that numerous donated trees have been submerged for months. Only after ZEIT confronted the organization did it publish a blog post about it. When contacted, Finkbeiner wrote that he "cannot yet determine the extent of the damage." A participant who was on the boat, as well as several forestry experts, gives the trees little chance of survival.

Could the organization have anticipated this? In any case, Yucatán is located in a hurricane zone, and the part of the planting area is in a depression that, according to PftP, was previously intended for rice cultivation. Melvin Lippe of the Thünen Institute is irritated when he sees the satellite images: "This is a controversial choice of location." He is unaware "of anyone trying to plant forest where a rice field should once have been." PftP explains that there has been no reason to assume that the area should not be reforested. Floods like this year "have not occurred in this region."

So the survival rate of 94 percent can't be right, can it? When asked about the alleged success rate, PftP explains that it is the result of a 2016 study involving 4,700 trees. In the area where the majority of the trees were planted, "no specific survival rate has yet been recorded." Now the figure with which PftP declared itself the Mexican leader has completely vanished into thin air.

Trees at a low price

The promise to offset CO₂ emissions with trees relies on trust. Shutting down a power plant reduces CO₂ emissions overnight; planting trees, on the other hand, only offsets most of it in 20 years, when the trees are fully grown—and even then, only perhaps. The trees can fall victim to storms, floods, or fires. Or they are felled and burned. This makes it all the more important for donors to be able to accurately understand how realistic the positive climate impact really is.

Doubts about the seriousness and sincerity of Plant for the Planet arose in 2019 when the German newspaper ZEIT reported that the organization was selling the efforts of other initiatives and countries as its own success. After the foundation succeeded the UN campaign in 2011, it repeatedly created the impression that it had planted 14 billion trees since its founding by children and young people, while over 13 billion trees were planted as part of the UN project. Other trees were entered into the tree counter by third parties. More than a billion trees turned out to be simply fake entries.

The founder, Frithjof Finkbeiner, said in an interview with ZEIT last year: "We are the ultimate transparent people!" Until shortly before the ZEIT report, PftP cited the Mexican forestry authority Conafor on its website as proof of its own transparency, which "confirms" the "ongoing progress" of the plantings. However, the forestry authority told ZEIT that it could not find any corresponding reports. Upon inquiry, PftP revealed that the foundation compiles the tree counts itself and then receives the corresponding certificate from the Mexican authority. Individual employees of the forestry authority carried out random checks of the planting areas until 2018, but have not done so since then due to budget cuts.

The organization's website also stated that the plantings in Yucatán are being "scientifically monitored" by the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich. The research group, which focuses on forest ecology, describes itself as a "partner" of the organization. Scientist Thomas Crowther chairs PftP's "Scientific Advisory Board," and Felix Finkbeiner, a bachelor's graduate in International Relations, holds a doctoral position at the lab. However, at the Crowther Lab, one learns that monitoring is not yet established, even though millions of trees are said to have been planted since 2015. The research is currently "in an early stage of developing the methodology and data collection." ETH Zurich has not yet "produced any reports." Following the inquiry in Zurich, PftP initially changed the wording on its website; it now states that ETH is evaluating the data collected by PftP and can thus monitor the activities.

Why does PftP plant in existing forests and bush areas, and why in Yucatán at all, where the forests are relatively less threatened? When asked about the reason for the choice of location, Frithjof Finkbeiner writes that this was where they saw the greatest opportunities "to realize ecologically sound reforestation on a large scale in a socially acceptable and economically viable manner." During the research, however, the impression grew that the choice of location also had something to do with the Finkbeiner family's entrepreneurial activities. They have been working in urban development on the Yucatán Peninsula for 20 years and, according to information from ZEIT, operate road and civil engineering projects in the tourist resort of Playa del Carmen. Did the Finkbeiners simply choose an area they frequently visit anyway? According to the commercial register, Karolin Finkbeiner, Frithjof's wife, founded a company there in 2002 – her co-partner is the current honorary president of PftP Mexico, Raúl Negrete Cetina, who works in the real estate industry. He occasionally flies to the planting area in the rainforest by private plane. When he transports PftP guests, the Climate Foundation even covers the fuel costs.

Frithjof Finkbeiner has built the organization like a company that sells trees at a bargain price. According to its annual reports, the foundation has raised 27 million euros to date. However, the organization itself seems unsure about the purpose of its one-euro trees. For years, its website has talked about climate neutrality through CO₂-compensating trees. They promised to care for them until they "guaranteed the amount of CO₂ to be compensated." Now the organization suddenly says of its project: "Reforestation as an official CO₂ offset makes little sense." PftP's focus "is simply to plant trees." This is also what it recently stated on its website. There is no explanation for the change of heart.

Anyone who delves into the organization's statements also finds indications that PftP could later cut down the planted trees itself. "The first trees can be harvested and processed into furniture wood in just 17 years," states an earlier brochure; similar statements can still be found on some partners' websites. Elsewhere, PftP stated that it plans to "establish a cooperative for forestry and timber management in the region" in Yucatán. Are these activities related? "The family business in Mexico has nothing to do with forests, trees, or timber," says Frithjof Finkbeiner. However, US expert Forrest Fleischman, with regard to the tree species PftP plants, says: "It looks as if they want to establish a commercial timber plantation." When asked whether PftP intends to cut down trees or not, Felix Finkbeiner downplays the issue: "We don't yet know whether we'll ever harvest a tree." In any case, he will not establish a timber plantation, but will only cut down trees when it makes "ecological sense" to "make room for other trees."

"Magic machines" against climate change

But what would be ecologically sensible is not nearly as clear-cut as it sounds. PftP therefore wanted to determine the benefits of global reforestation in the fight against climate change and found a renowned partner: ETH Zurich. As early as 2017, Frithjof Finkbeiner, together with the up-and-coming scientist Thomas Crowther, who later became PftP's scientific advisor, submitted an application for research funding to the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. They wanted to use $1.2 million to determine the global potential for new trees. This would be of enormous benefit to PftP – the foundation would contribute $110,000 according to the application. Reforestation, the two argued to the BMZ, was an "effective means" of combating both the climate and refugee crises in one fell swoop. The ministry approved the application. Crowther's study caused an earthquake and was published in the renowned scientific journal Science . There is enough potential forest area in the world to absorb two-thirds of the CO₂ emissions produced to date by humans without competing with agriculture. Global reforestation is nothing less than "our most effective solution to climate change today." The study becomes a media hit, with Greta Thunberg filming a viral video about trees, the "magic machines" against climate change. Even Al Gore cites the work.

Felix Finkbeiner presented the results together with Development Minister Gerd Müller at the Federal Press Conference in July 2019. At the Federal Press House, he thanked the minister for underscoring the importance of this study with his presence. He called the collaboration with the BMZ "incredibly valuable." The Finkbeiners now stand side by side with the Federal Government.

Shortly thereafter, serious doubts about the study became public. Over fifty scientists, writing in Science , the same magazine in which it was published, pointed out serious errors in the calculation of CO₂ offsetting. Even Crowther's institute director was among the critics. The gist of the argument was that the impact of trees in combating the climate crisis was much smaller. The thesis that reforestation was the most effective means of combating climate change was described as "scientifically incorrect and dangerously misleading," and the authors were forced to retract the statement.

Critics of the study doubt that the world has enough space for new trees. Instead of growing in places where trees thrive, they often end up in places where they barely survive. This is the crux of the problem when trying to solve the problem of consumption with consumption: There's money, but not enough space. The story of PftP demonstrates this: promises of millions, followed by donations of millions for trees struggling to survive in a small space. Many scientists therefore believe it's more economical to protect existing forests than to plant trees.

Such protection would also be helpful for PftP. Observing satellite data of the area where three million trees are supposed to be planted, one can see how existing forest has been disappearing in one small patch over the years. Is PftP clearing it? Felix Finkbeiner initially explains that the area is not on PftP's territory, even though the organization itself designates it. Upon further inquiry, he writes that they have now discovered that the neighbor has encroached on the foundation's land with slash-and-burn practices. So, while Plant for the Planet was soliciting donations for new trees with grand promises, the foundation missed a crucial detail: its forest is burning.

Collaboration: Lilia Balam

Source: https://www.zeit.de/2020/53/plant-for-the-planet-klimaschutz-organisation-mexiko-spendengelder