“I tried planting, but the goats ate everything,” says Maria Kanyere, a widow raising three children. “I don’t have time to fence them off.”
Domesticated animals are the bane of reforestation projects worldwide. Simply planting trees is not enough; there needs to be an ethical shift among the population of the area in order to ensure long-term success of both the reforestation project itself and efforts to mitigate climate change and food insecurity.