Case study of
#00006 Expand and target urban tree canopy on the hottest, lowest-canopy streets
Freetown, Sierra Leone
#00053
Implementer
Freetown City Council (Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr) with Greenstand (TreeTracker) and Western Area Rural District Council
Timeline
Since Jan 1, 2020
Location
Description
#FreetownTheTreeTown is a community-driven reforestation program in a rapidly urbanising coastal city that lost roughly 12% of its canopy per year between 2011 and 2018, raising landslide and flood risk. Community growers plant and steward trees, logging each one in the TreeTracker app as a geotagged record with a photo; once a quarter, surviving trees are verified and growers receive mobile-money micropayments. Each verified tree is tokenised and linked to carbon-offset contracts, an attempt to make reforestation self-financing rather than purely grant-dependent. The program sits within Freetown's wider Transform Freetown climate strategy.
Metrics
5Funding
Lessons learned
- Paying growers on verified survival rather than on planting produced a >80% survival rate; the app's geotag-plus-photo record makes verification auditable and reduces fraud.
- Tokenising trees and linking them to carbon-offset buyers aims to make reforestation self-financing, but the self-sustaining model is not yet proven at scale.
- Independent analysis warns the model is not a clean copy-paste for other cities — it depends on Freetown's specific forest geography, governance, and donor backing.
Sources
3Links
1Documented Jun 9, 2026