Marlo Mendoza is the architect of one of the world's most ambitious regreening programs. His office at the University of the Philippines in Laguna is crammed with books about trees and nature conservation.

Hunched over his desk, he flicks through a glossy government brochure praising his project's successes, with 1.8 billion seedlings planted over 2 million hectares (approximately 4.9 million acres) across the Philippines.

Millions of native trees have been replanted and are now growing into forests, sequestering carbon and supporting wildlife.

Indigenous and farming communities cultivate produce among the forests and former timber cutters now manage tree farms.

This is what Mendoza dreamed of — however, he admits it is far from the reality on the ground.

"We mobilized the entire citizenry to plant, but where are all the trees planted?" Mendoza told DW. "I made the manual; many provisions were not followed."

The Philippines National Greening Program (NGP) was launched in 2011 as an ambitious response to decades of deforestation, which had become a huge issue during the 1970s and 1980s.

But the NGP struggled with natural resource plundering, which depleted the Philippines' forest cover and replaced community and indigenous forests with plantations of invasive exotic species.

An analysis of millions of satellite images suggests that as many as one in every 25 hectares of NGP land experienced a major deforestation event: That is, instead of barren sites being reforested, the opposite occurs — forests are cleared right before........

© Deutsche Welle