Are eucalyptus plantations good or bad?
I’ve been wondering about this one for a while. Back in 2010, I wrote about my mother-in-law’s eucalypts near Limuru in Kenya. She had been tending and coppicing them for years, and they were her main source of firewood. When part of the plantation was felled by government decree, she considered planting indigenous trees, but eucalypts were, as I put it then, “too fast-growing to give up altogether.”
Two new studies make the same point rather more systematically. In Uganda, eucalyptus plantations appear to have some positive effects on livelihood, including higher cattle holdings than among households near pine plantations, without producing the sweeping negative effects sometimes attributed to them. In Brazil, mixed eucalyptus–native plantations (as a transitional stage in restoration) produced substantially more biomass than native-only plantings, while allowing native trees to regenerate. The timber income also covered a significant proportion of restoration costs.
So the value of eucalyptus depends on what it’s doing there, what it replaced, what else is growing with it, and what people are getting from it. A plantation replacing native forest is one thing. Eucalyptus providing firewood to my mother-in-law, generating income from degraded land, or helping pay for ecological restoration is another.
The tree is the same. The story isn’t.