Planting Trees to Cool the Planet:

Tse-Xin Organic Agriculture Foundation

Doing what needs to be done

Tse-Xin woke up to the urgency of coastal re­forestation after attending a workshop held by the Forestry Bureau. “As an island, Taiwan faces erosion by the sea on all sides, while economic activity has been destroying coastal woodland. Windbreak forests do not grow easily in nature, and once they are destroyed they are usually gone for good,” explains Cheng Li-yi, director of Tse-Xin’s coastal tree planting initiative. The Forestry Bureau is the government agency responsible for tree planting nationwide, but its budget is limited. “This is where the private sector can pitch in. If we lead the way in bringing in non-­governmental resources, we can accelerate improvements,” says Cheng.

However, planting trees in coastal areas is fraught with challenges, such as the powerful sea winds, subsidence causing salination of groundwater, difficulties sourcing water for irrigation, and the many typhoons that strike Taiwan. “But Tse-Xin’s founder, Master Jih-chang, once said, ‘Don’t ask if something is difficult, only ask if it should be done.’”

Cheng Li-yi, who leads the tree-planting initiative of the Tse-Xin Organic Agriculture Foundation, upholds the spirit of “Don’t ask if something is difficult, only ask if it should be done.” Her team has planted trees in 12 of Taiwan’s coastal cities and counties over the past four years.

The trials of coastal tree planting

Tse-Xin started their planting campaign on an area of land reclaimed from the sea on the coast of Yunlin County’s Taixi Township, where they were faced with saline soil and a lack of freshwater sources. Yunlin is low-lying to begin with, and subsidence caused by overextraction of groundwater meant that at high tide seawater flooded over the site, and when the tide receded it left behind pools of water which evaporated and left the ground white with salt. This created extreme difficulties for Cheng’s program.

Cheng sought advice far and wide, and found wetlands expert Zhang Wenxian to help. Zhang dug out a freshwater pond on the land to store rainwater and so provide trees with needed water, and also installed a drainage system to reduce soil salination. These steps enabled Tse-Xin to create an oasis where there had been a wasteland. Since then, Cheng has spent four years planting trees in 12 coastal cities and counties in Taiwan.

Tse-Xin’s tree planting program has transformed reclaimed land in Yunlin’s Taixi Township a green space and made the saline soil fertile. (courtesy of TOAF) 

A green wall

After their success on the barren soil of the Taixi reclamation zone, businesses began to take notice of Tse-Xin’s reforestation efforts. One day Cheng Li-yi got a call from Hotai Motor (Toyota’s partner in Taiwan) offering financial support for planting one tree for every vehicle sold in Taiwan. When Cheng asked how many vehicles they sold in a year, the reply was 100,000. Suddenly saddled with the task of planting 100,000 trees a year, she sought support from the Forestry Bureau. Thereafter more enterprises joined in and Cheng and her team gradually built up their skills in coastal reforestation. In this way a “Great Wall” of coastal greenery was built one tree at a time.

Successfully growing trees is not just a matter of praying for the right weather conditions: the approach taken must be adapted to suit each locality. Cheng details the challenges of each area in Taiwan: The Northeast Coast is exposed to northeasterly monsoon winds, so windbreak fencing is required to protect saplings. Yilan, also affected by northeasterly monsoons, has more than adequate rainfall, but also many typhoons, so Tse-Xin must plant trees that can withstand strong winds. In Central and Southern Taiwan there is the problem of soil salination, calling for salt-tolerant plants. On the coast of Pingtung County they remove the invasive river tamarind (Leucaena leucocephala) and replant with native acacia and china­berry (Melia azedarach). As there is only a thin layer of soil on top of the underlying raised coral strata, one has to choose trees that don’t put down deep roots.

Seaside reforestation protects the coastline from erosion and provides habitats for plants and animals.

On the coastal front lines

On the coast of New Taipei City’s Wanli District, Tse-Xin tree planting specialist Ding Yu-fong takes us to see a nearly two-kilometer stretch of windbreak trees growing in the sand. These are trees that Tse-Xin planted in 2015, and Ding notes that the woodland provides a habitat for birds and has already developed its own little ecosystem.

Ding points out squares of bamboo fencing on the beach and explains that before planting trees at this location it is essential to first install “windbreak fences” and “sand fences.” Windbreak fences are the first line of defense for coastal plantings, protecting saplings from strong winds. Sand fences are placed in front of the windbreak fences to capture sand that is blown about by autumn and winter winds, slowly forming dunes. Thus they keep large amounts of sand in place on the constantly receding coastline, gradu­ally extending the coastline outwards and laying the foundations for coastal reforestation. Behind the windbreak fencing we see rows of thatch screwpine (Pandanus tectorius) at the front, beach naupaka (Scaevola taccada) in the middle, and taller whistling pine (Casuarina equisetifolia) in the rear.

Thatch screwpine (top) and beach naupaka (bottom) are well-adapted to coastal weather conditions and are commonly used species for windbreak forests.

Putting up windbreak fences and sand fences is an essential first step in coastal reforestation. You can see the strength of ocean winds by looking at these blown-down bamboo fences; clearly this is a hostile environment for plants to survive in.

Water-storing seedling pots

The first problem to solve in coastal tree planting is sourcing water. Although “self-watering” pots and planters are used abroad, they are made of plastic. Tse-Xin got together with Zen Zhou Social Enterprise to develop a Taiwanese version made of recycled paper pulp. These “water-storing seedling pots”—actually small water tanks that surround and shelter the saplings—can each hold 15 liters of water, enough for a sapling for at least a month. Wicks carry the water to the roots by capillary action, and a lid keeps the water from evaporating. The pots also reduce the soil temperature by blocking out sunshine. They de­compose naturally after about a year.

The water-storing seedling pots are now part of the arsenal of coastal tree growers, and this year they have been used on the offshore islands of Kinmen and Penghu, where water is difficult to access. With their help, the survival rate of trees planted on these islands has reached 70%. In 2021 the seedling pot won three awards at Japan’s crQlr Awards for circular economy design: a Bio-Renewal Prize, a Regeneration Award, and a Pioneer Pot Prize. It also won a Special Annual Award for Circular Design at Taiwan’s Golden Pin Design Awards, garnering special praise from jury member Tom Dixon, a leading British designer, for its low-cost, low-tech design that enables tree planting in adverse environments, as well as for its unpretentious design spirit.

The self-watering planters developed by Tse-Xin and Zen Zhou Social Enterprise have greatly increased the survival rate of trees planted along coastlines. Made from recycled paper pulp, they naturally decompose over time to avoid them becoming an additional source of harm to the environment.

Patch by Planting

The Patch by Planting initiative brings together volunteers from various backgrounds. Liu Che-wei (left) is a landscape planner, while Lí Su-hiân (right) is an expert in computer programming.

Finding urban land to plant trees

The innovative idea behind the Patch by Planting initiative is to use satellite remote ­imaging and geographic mapping data to make an inventory of areas of public land where the rate of green vegetation cover could be increased. It includes a platform for finding land available for tree planting throughout Taiwan and co­ordinating with businesses willing to commit resources to reforestation.

The Patch by Planting team now has eight or nine members, with diverse backgrounds including ecology, landscape planning, and software design. Founder Liu Che-wei is a community planner involved in many spatial planning initi­atives. Programmer Lin Haowen, who works in the UK, designed a program incorporating weather, daily hours of sunshine, wind direction, and topo­graphy to assist in landscape design decisions. Lí Su-hiân, who works at the Academia Sinica, used his expertise in programming to build a data page for each piece of land identified by the project inventory, integrating openly available government information, such as the guide to Taiwanese endemic plant species published by the Forestry Bureau, in an easy-to-search visual format.

They submitted their plan to the 2020 Presidential Hakathon and were named a “Team of Excellence.” The Taoyuan City Government adopted their idea, inventoried the publicly owned land within its borders, and set up an integrated platform so that businesses or groups who want to plant trees can find suitable land to do so.

The Patch by Planting program combines satellite remote sensing data with map data to discover public land where green cover can be increased.

The relationship between trees and people

Tree planting is a process involving multiple parties, with government, businesses, and even local communities having their own ideas. Enterprises’ corporate social responsibility departments each have their own orientations, with some focusing on quantity, some on ecological regeneration, and some on interaction with the community. Liu Che-wei points to outdoor wearable GPS device maker Garmin, which has a factory in Taoyuan, as an example: They hoped to work with local schools and communities and integrate environmental edu­cation into their tree planting activities, to build a commitment to post-planting maintenance and sustainability among local people.

The project team initially estimated that Taiwan still has room for planting an additional 2.7 million trees. But Liu explains that they don’t want to fill all that space with trees, but rather to utilize the unique features of each piece of land. “In a way we are speaking on behalf of the land,” so that tree planting is not an end in itself but aims at realizing a vision of “blending trees into daily life.”

Planting hope

In early spring, at a sewage treatment plant in Tamsui, a tree planting activity was held on a piece of land reclaimed from the sea. The Patch by Planting team took the initiative to coordinate adoption of the trees by the sewage plant and the Rotary Club, and irrigation water was drawn from the outflow of the sewage plant. As whole families planted saplings together, they were doing more than just growing trees—they were sowing the seeds of a new relationship between humankind and nature.

When Cheng Li-yi represented Taiwan at the Trillion Tree Campaign event in Monaco in 2018, she misspoke and set Tse-Xin the goal of planting 1 billion trees, ten times more than she intended. But Cheng says that this is not an impossible target. A counter on the Tse-Xin website records more than 110,000 individual participations in tree planting events, with over 710,000 trees planted in coastal areas alone and involvement by more than 50 enter­prises. She recounts how her passion for tree planting was inspired while she was studying in the US, by a visit to a coastal forest in California where her internship director had come every month for several decades to plant trees. She says: “People who plant trees have to stay at it to see results.” When coastlines are covered with green as far as the eye can see, her dream will have come true.

Through tree planting, the environmental vision of making trees a part of everyday life can be realized.