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A single surviving tree from the forest restoration project, planted in the flood plains of Kaeng Ko Reservoir in Lampun province. Photo: Peerapon Boonyakiat/HaRDstories
Thailand has turned to forest plantations, developed with private investment, to help meet its carbon offset targets. A HaRDstories investigation into one such project found a flood risk that was never disclosed in official records, and a monitoring commitment that remains unfulfilled.
A Thai cement company planted 400 rai (64 hectares) of native trees inside Mae Ping National Park in June 2022, projecting the young forest would generate carbon credits worth 380 tonnes of CO2 a year. Five months later, the Ping river flooded. Satellite images in December showed more than forty percent of the plantation underwater.
Today, near Ban Ko Village in Lamphun, northern Thailand, what remains is a sunbaked basin of dead branches.
“Most of the trees have already died after the heavy flood. Only a few trees remain on the upper edge of the plot,” said Wichian Mati, village head of Moo 3 Tambon Ban Ko, who was among the community members hired to plant the saplings.
The project promised to assess the plot every four months and replant any missing trees immediately. As of July 2026, the damaged site has not been restored, CPAC’s ESG consultant Sitthipat Yanothai told HaRDstories by phone.
In the emerging carbon market, part of Thailand’s push toward net zero emissions, forests have come to play an important role. Over a hundred forest conservation projects are now registered in the country, offering companies an opportunity to invest in offsetting their own emissions. But can projects like these really capture the carbon they promise?
An (under) estimated risk
Sittipong Kluenkaew, a local officer at Sub-district Ban Ko, glanced over the basin full of dead branches, near the ruins of Wat Ban Kao, a temple abandoned during a 1960s community relocation. Since 2025, those ruins have drawn tourists curious to see a structure still standing above the floodwaters that swallowed the surrounding land.
“We had many storms over the past few years, so the water level in Bhumibol Dam was increasing to its full capacity and flooded the reforestation plots,” Sittipong said.
The Ban Ko reforestation project is jointly operated by Thailand’s Department of National Park, Wildlife and Plant Conservation (DNP) and Concrete Products and Aggregate Co Ltd (CPAC), a subsidiary of cement group Siam Cement Group (SCG).
The plantation plot had been used by the community for maize plantation over the previous 15 years, with a two to four-month harvest cycle. Twenty local tree species were planted, including Thailand’s high-value hardwood Siamese rosewood and Wild almond.
The site sits upstream of Bhumibol Dam, a major hydropower dam, in lowlands that bear water during heavy monsoon seasons. Flooding is rare there, but anticipated: the area has been surveyed as part of the inundated zone since the dam was built, according to Adisak Norkaew, Chief of Mae Ping National Park. Bhumibol Dam expropriated lowlands below 260 metres above mean sea level, with an extending 100 metres; some parts of the plantation sit a few metres below that line.
“According to our recent survey, only 70 rai (11 hectare) of the entire plantation survived from floodings,” Adisak said, just 17.5 percent of the entire plot.
Neither the flood risk nor the site’s location upstream of a mega hydropower dam is mentioned in any forest restoration project document.
“We were aware that the project site is in the flood prone area, but the flood chance is low, as statistical data shows that the area will be flooded just once in 20-30 years, which is within the acceptable threshold,” CPAC’s ESG consultant Sitthipat Yanothai said in a phone interview. “We did not expect that there would be big floods during the past two years.”
The DNP says it flagged the risk before planting began. “We sent the notification to the company warning that those sites were within the flood zone, but the company insisted on conducting reforestation at the areas,” Adisak said. HaRDstories did not see the letter DNP describes.
HaRDstories also contacted Bureau Veritas, the verification company responsible for validating the Ban Ko project, including greenlighting the project report that omits the flood risk, but was denied an interview, with the company citing client confidentiality.
The land problem
Thailand has pledged to reach net zero emissions by mid-century, and forests are one of the country’s main tools for offsetting emissions it cannot yet eliminate directly. The country aims to store 120 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2eq) in forests and other land types by 2037, expanding its forest and green areas from 46 percent of its landmass to 55 percent.
To help meet that target, the Thailand Greenhouse Gas Management Organization (TGO) runs a programme called T-VER, which encourages companies to fund reforestation on degraded land in partnership with local agencies and communities. In return, companies earn carbon credits they can trade or use to offset their own emissions.
But suitable sites are scarce. Speaking at World Environment Day 2026, Seksan Kuayapanik, Director of the Community Forest Management Office, said few locations qualify, since the land must be degraded forest where tree growth can be reliably tracked and measured. Ban Ko is a case in point: according to the chief of Mae Ping National Park, there was no other plot in the park suitable for a carbon forest project.
And that scarcity carries risks of its own. As projects compete for a shrinking pool of eligible land, some end up on ground already used by local communities, a source of tension in its own right. The Ban Ko plot was farmland used by nearby villagers to grow maize before the national park reclaimed it in 2022.
How are forest carbon credits calculated?
Forest carbon credits reward projects, like tree planting, that increase how much carbon a forest absorbs.
Source: TGO
The challenges of reforestation
When CPAC begins the verification process later this year, the plantation’s fifth year, only surviving trees will count toward carbon credits.
“With the flooding, the project will need to refill the missing trees and accept the lower credits are lower than expected,” said Narinthorn Jumwong, a forest researcher at the Forest Research Center, Kasetsart University, who helps develop forest crediting for Thailand’s carbon credit market. “Issuing forest carbon credit is not about planting new trees only, but also taking care of the forest, both actions are important for forest conservation.”
Independent forest researcher Surin On-prom said the case of the Ban Ko project is not an uncommon failure: several other big companies’ forest carbon plots have met a similar fate, owing to a lack of maintenance, poor species selection, unsuitable locations and natural disaster risk.
TGO, Thailand’s greenhouse gas agency, expects high-standard projects to achieve an 80 percent survival rate. But Surin said the reality falls well short. “Reforestation in Thailand is very hard,” he told HaRDstories.“Even the reforestation plots that receive consistent, intensive care often have a survival rate lower than 50 percent.”
“Those big companies’ carbon forest plots mostly left without any further maintenance after planting, so it is unsurprising that these projects end up completely failing.”
Forest plantation has long been a popular CSR activity in Thailand. Many such projects have ended up as monoculture plantings that ignore biodiversity, or become little more than a money-making exercise.
Carbon crediting, beyond conventional CSR, is meant to impose stricter regulation to guarantee project success, particularly around species selection and survival-rate monitoring. But compared with installing solar panels or switching fleets to EVs, forest carbon credit is considered far more challenging, owing to fluctuating natural conditions, and many project developers still fail to grasp the stricter rules involved, according to Narinthorn.
Whether Thailand’s forest carbon credits are working at all remains an open question: most projects are at the same stage as Ban Ko, still waiting for planted saplings to prove their survival before any credits are accredited.
Carbon credits: opportunity or excuse?
Since 2025, Thailand has run an online carbon credit marketplace, connecting companies and individuals who want to offset their emissions with sellers of credits. Forest carbon credits sell at a higher price than other types, making them attractive to investors: forest and agriculture projects are now the third most-accredited sector in the country, behind renewables and energy efficiency.
CPAC invested 4.7 million baht (about 140,000 USD) in the Ban Ko project and, in return, is entitled to 90 percent of any credits it generates. Had the project succeeded, that share would have earned CPAC roughly 380,000 baht (about 11,000 USD) a year, an income that would repeat annually for as long as the forest survived. The remaining ten percent of credits go to the National Park agency, while local residents are paid only when hired to help maintain the plot.
“I see forest carbon credit is an opportunity. Before, people often said that there is no funding to conserve the forest. As everyone is now interested in forest carbon projects, the income from carbon credit can support forest conservation,” said Narinthorn.
But several environmentalists warn that turning conservation into a source of profit carries its own risks: standards can slip, and communities or ecosystems can end up worse off. It may also let companies avoid the harder work of cutting emissions at the source.
SCG, the parent company behind CPAC, emitted 44 million tonnes of CO2 in 2025. Even if the Ban Ko forest had absorbed its full projected amount, that would have offset just 4 minutes and 29 seconds of SCG’s annual emissions, or roughly 0.00085 percent of the total. The company’s sustainability report says it helps conserve more than 500,000 rai (80,000 hectare) of forest across Thailand, but set against emissions on that scale, the impact remains small.
“Greenhouse gas emission solutions must be implemented at the source because we lack sufficient land for carbon offsetting,” forest researcher Surin said. “Rough estimates show that in four Mekong countries, it would take the entire land area of Thailand to offset the emission reduction targets of all four nations.”
The Ban Ko plantation has never been issued a single carbon credit, yet it has already been promoted publicly as a conservation success, creating the impression that carbon has been absorbed when none has yet been verified.
What the community wants
Somkiat Meetham, president of the Orphya Institute, a non-profit that works on conservation and restoration, believes forest carbon projects can succeed for everyone involved, but only if local communities are part of the decision-making and receive a fair share of the benefit.
“I think what is important to make forest carbon projects successful is to design a fair regulation that allows the local communities to take part in decision making and resource management,” Somkiat said. “The local communities are the ones who take care of the forest and they should get benefits from it fairly.”
At Ban Ko, looking after the land is still something people do, whether or not a company pays them to. In April, Sittipong and his neighbours found time in their busy schedules to clean up the temple ruins for the traditional new year, and they spent long hours guarding the surrounding forest against fire. Sittipong has his own idea for how to try again: White Bamboo (Pai Sangmun), a native species he has seen thrive in neighbouring communities. It withstands flooding, gives locals bamboo shoots to harvest, and could still count toward carbon credits.
“We are more than willing to participate in the project, not just planting the saplings but also taking care of them,” Sittipong said. “Since we are putting money into forest restoration, I really hope we make something out of it.”
How we investigated: With the project site coordinates, HaRDstories looked up monthly historical satellite images captured by Sentinel-2 and Landsat via LandViewer Platform from 2022-2026. We visited the area to verify the findings and talk with stakeholders.
This investigation was produced under the Indo-Pacific Media Resilience (IPMR) project supported by Internews.
Pratch Rujivanarom frequently writes about environmental justice and human rights in Thailand. He graduated with a Master’s degree in International Journalism from Birmingham City University, UK.
Nicha Wachpanich is a Bangkok-based journalist covering stories from a rights-based and human-interest perspective. She previously worked with a local environmental news agency under Thai Society of Environmental Journalists.
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