Freetown the Treetown — Digitally-Tracked Municipal Reforestation for Flood & Landslide Resilience

Freetown's mayor, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, launched the #FreetownTheTreeTown campaign in January 2020 after the August 2017 Sugar Loaf Mountain mudslide killed roughly 1,000 people; the city had lost about 70% of its tree cover over the preceding 50 years to unplanned urban sprawl, leaving its steep peninsula terrain increasingly exposed to floods and landslides.
The programme runs a "pay-to-grow" model: residents are paid as tree guardians to plant and monitor seedlings, verified through a digital, geo-tagged tracking platform, with funding drawn partly from tokens sold on private and carbon markets. Over five years the campaign has planted more than 1.2 million trees with a reported 82% survival rate — a meaningfully high figure for urban tree-planting schemes — including coastal mangrove planting against erosion, en route to a stated target of five million trees by 2030. The initiative was a finalist for the 2023 Earthshot Prize.
Caveats are worth stating plainly: the UN's own account frames flood-risk reduction, air-quality gains and carbon capture as programme goals rather than independently measured outcomes, and Freetown's population is projected to exceed 2 million by 2030, adding continued pressure on the forested peninsula the programme depends on. The 82% survival figure and 1.2-million-tree count are self-reported through the programme's own tracking system rather than an independent third-party audit.

Read the full analysis: https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/freetown-planting-five-million-trees-2030