Guiding private afforestation to raise public goods provision: Understanding farmers' multi-dimensional preferences for trees in India

Many tree-planting initiatives on private lands in the Global South do not appear to deliver intended public carbon, biodiversity, and livelihoods benefits, in part because many trees die before reaching maturity. Further, even if tree survival were improved, societal benefits vary substantially with species planted and spatial patterns. To inform designs with public goods and private benefits of adoption, we studied smallholders' preferences for afforestation in a discrete-choice experiment. Outside of two National Parks in Southern India, an NGO has a tree-planting program with multiple objectives related to biodiversity, carbon, and livelihoods. We find that farmers are interested in tree planting. Yet, on average, they do not prefer the options with greater ecoservices. Those often require compensation. However, the size of required transfers varies, or vanishes, across options and farmers. Thus, programs can use observed characteristics to target incentives where needed. Going beyond that, we find that unobserved characteristics – revealed through choice – greatly shift willingness (controlling for observables). Thus, letting farmers select options from menus could raise participation and trees per farmer. Our results suggest afforestation initiatives can increase impacts by engaging farmers, before finalizing programs, and that designs integrating farmer choice with payments for ecoservices could raise public goods, globally, from afforestation on private lands.