Ten per cent of our profits go to tree planting

Ten per cent of profit, not revenue. We want to be exact about that, because the two are nowhere near the same thing, and profit is the weaker-sounding promise. It is also the honest one.

A safari operator's revenue is mostly other people's money passing through the account: park entry, gorilla permits, lodges, fuel, guides, vehicles, salaries. Ten per cent of revenue would be a number we could not actually pay, which is exactly why it is an easy number to announce. Ten per cent of what remains after everyone is paid and tax is settled is a number we can pay in every year we earn it.

What is already decided

• The figure is 10% of net profit after tax, calculated per financial year.
• It applies to every financial year in which the company makes a profit, beginning with the first.
• We publish the profit figure and the 10% figure on this page annually — including the years when the answer is zero.
• The money is ring-fenced for tree planting on community and degraded land in Uganda, with survival reported back to us. It is not a general "environment" line we can spend on anything green.
• An accountant from outside the company signs off the profit figure before we publish it.

What is not decided

• Which organisation receives it. We have a shortlist and no agreements. The shortlist is published further down this page so that it is on the record before we choose, rather than announced afterwards.
• Which accountant verifies it. We have committed to independent sign-off; we have not appointed the firm. When we do, we will name it here.
• Whether the sum will be meaningful in year one. A new operator's first profit is small, and ten per cent of a small number is a smaller number. We are not going to pretend otherwise to make this page feel better.

Uganda's official figures show forest cover rising after 2015: 12.3% in 2017 and 13.3% in 2019. It would be easy to put that on this page as evidence that planting works. We are not going to, because the government's own report does not read it that way.

NEMA records that the rise to 12.3% was attributed by sceptics to a methodological adjustment — bias-area corrections made for REDD+ reporting. The 13.3% figure it describes as acknowledged on the ground, but tempered by methodological nuances in how percentage cover is calculated. In plain terms: part of that recovery is a change in how the forest was counted, not new forest. Anyone presenting the rebound as an achievement of tree planting is going further than Uganda's own environment authority will.

Two further things worth knowing before you trust any percentage on this subject.

• The definition decides the number. Uganda's reporting to the UNFCCC counts land as forest at a minimum of one hectare, 30% crown cover, and trees able to reach four metres. Move any of those thresholds and the national percentage moves without a single tree changing.
• Two Ugandan government documents disagree about the same year. For 2015, NEMA's table gives 9.5% and the National Forestry Authority says 9%, while the Ministry of Water and Environment's UNFCCC submission gives around 12%. No source we found reconciles them; the differing forest definition is the likely cause. We cite the NEMA series throughout this page and do not mix the two.

The widely repeated FAO and World Bank series is not a set of annual measurements either. The FAO country report states that the entire 1990–2020 series was produced by interpolating and extrapolating from two measured points, 2000 and 2015. That is why its 1990 figure disagrees with Uganda's own mapped one.

We also could not find an official Ugandan forest-cover figure for the current year in any primary source. If you see "Uganda's forest cover is X% today" quoted anywhere, including on a competitor's site, ask where it came from. The most recent figure we can stand behind is 13.3% for 2019.

Five steps, in this order, every year. Nothing here has run yet — the first cycle begins with our first profitable financial year.

1. We close the books and calculate profit Net profit after all costs and after Ugandan tax, for the financial year. Not a marketing figure, the one in the accounts.
2. An independent accountant verifies the figure Someone outside the company checks that the profit stated is the profit earned, and that 10% of it is the sum transferred. We have committed to this; we have not yet appointed the firm, and we will name it here when we do.
3. We publish the numbers on this page Profit, the 10% figure, the date, and the recipient. Published whether it is a good year, a bad year, or a loss. A zero is a result and we will show it as one.
4. The money goes to a named partner under a written agreement Not a donation into a general fund. A specific agreement naming the site, the species, the number of seedlings, who maintains them, for how long, and what gets reported back to us and when.
5. We publish what came back Survival counts at twelve months and at three years, species, location. If the partner does not report, we publish that instead. A missing report is information about the partner, and you are entitled to it.

We are not going to print a line like "your safari plants forty trees". Here is the arithmetic behind that decision.

The most credible benchmark we found comes from Trillion Trees, a partnership of BirdLife International, the Wildlife Conservation Society and WWF. It states plainly that one dollar per tree significantly under-estimates the real cost of delivering restoration, and that a project funded at that level has probably not considered what keeping the forest alive requires. Its two East and Central African worked examples are a WCS woodlot project in Tanzania at USD 2.00 per tree, around USD 1,600 per hectare, and natural forest restoration at Nyungwe in Rwanda at USD 3.75 per tree, around USD 3,000 per hectare. About 1,000 trees per hectare is typical in the tropics.

The wider literature range is enormous and worth seeing: from roughly USD 14 per hectare at an absolute minimum, through about USD 1,400 per hectare for natural regeneration, up to USD 34,000 per hectare for large-scale active restoration, with a recent global average near USD 2,328 per hectare. Farmer-managed natural regeneration in parts of Africa has been costed at USD 14 to 153 per hectare, in cases where farmers supply the labour unpaid. The same source cautions that these generally cover establishment only, not the years of management that follow.

Two caveats we will not bury. Those are East and Central African figures, not Ugandan ones — we could not find a credible Ugandan cost-per-tree-to-survival in any authoritative source, and we would rather say so than borrow a number from a neighbouring country and call it local. And a per-tree price is a poor unit in the first place, because the expensive part is the decade after the hole is dug.

What that means in practice: until we have a signed partner and a real quoted cost, we will publish the sum we gave and what it bought, and let you do the division yourself.

We have no partners. Nothing is signed. Nobody on this list has agreed to work with us, and some of them may say no. This is the shortlist from our own research, published before we choose rather than announced after — so that if we end up somewhere unexpected, you can see the change.

The questions we are putting to each of them

• What is your seedling survival rate at twelve months and at three years, and who measured it?
• Which species, and why those species on that particular site?
• Who owns the land, and what happens to the trees if the household's circumstances change?
• How long are you funded to maintain the planting, and how long is the grower contracted to keep it? Are those the same number of years?
• May we see your most recent third-party verification report?

Two things we found while researching, which we would rather say now

ECOTRUST's Trees for Global Benefits is among the longest-running schemes of its kind in Uganda and an obvious first call. It is also the subject of an August 2026 investigation by the Danish newspaper Politiken, reported via REDD-Monitor, in which former project coordinators and farmers describe trees being felled before contracts ended. That reporting notes that farmers are paid across ten years while contracted to maintain trees for twenty-five, and that a 2018–2022 third-party verification had not been released. We have not verified any of that ourselves and we are not repeating it as established fact. We are raising it with ECOTRUST directly, and we will publish what we are told.

Kijani Forestry publishes large totals on its own website — millions of trees, tens of thousands of farmers, thousands of nursery hubs. Those are company-reported figures and we have not seen independently monitored survival data behind them, so we will not repeat them as verified. We are asking for third-party monitoring before we would fund anything.

We are not singling these two out. They are simply the two where our own research turned something up, and it would be dishonest to list them without it.