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Restoration is often considered in numbers, hectares planted, saplings distributed, villages covered. But genuine impact cannot be measured by numbers alone. It requires rigour, systems, transparency, and an honest assessment of what is actually happening on the ground. This is where independent monitoring and verification become critical.
EcoNiche conducted a third-party evaluation of plantation work supported by One Tree Planted (OTP), a global non-profit dedicated to reforestation. Between 2019 and 2022, OTP and its local partners planted more than 1.37 million trees across West Bengal, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh, involving 11,600 farmers across 190 villages. Our role was to independently assess the quality, survival, and social value of these plantations, not as implementers, but as objective evaluators.
Why Independent Verification Matters.​
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When projects prioritise hitting plantation targets, quality is the first casualty. Operational urgency often eclipses the larger ecological vision, shifting attention away from what actually matters, establishing healthy, functioning ecosystems that can sustain themselves over time. With independent verification, projects that have drifted can be redirected toward their original ecological and social goals.
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Objectivity in a sector driven by targets: Large-scale plantations involve multiple organisations, farmers, and landowners. Each plays a different role in planning, planting, maintaining, and reporting. Without an independent lens, reporting can unintentionally become optimistic or incomplete. Third-party verification ensures that assessment is grounded in reality, not expectations.
Accountability and trust for funders, communities, and partners: When funders invest in planting hundreds of thousands of trees, they need assurance that the work is real, functional, and aligned with ecological and social goals. Independent monitoring provides this reassurance, strengthening donor confidence and validating the efforts of local partners who are doing the work well.
External expertise improves project design: Independent evaluators bring a range of technical capabilities: ecological understanding, remote-sensing interpretation, MEAL frameworks, field-based verification experience, and an understanding of socio-ecological systems. This outside perspective helps identify gaps that internal teams may simply be too close to see.
A systems approach, not a plantation-counting exercise: EcoNiche’s work emphasises how and why restoration happens, not just how much. Independent verification connects project-level realities to organisational systems: monitoring indicators, data flows, reporting structures, and learning loops. It strengthens the backbone of restoration work and supports scaling that is responsible, not merely numerical.
Our Work With One Tree Planted (OTP).​
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EcoNiche began by conducting a thorough desk review and data assessment. This included analysing socio-economic and biodiversity data generated by partner organisations, reviewing drone and satellite imagery, and examining donor reports. Triangulating these multiple sources of information allowed us to establish an evidence baseline before stepping into the field.
We then undertook extensive field verification, visiting 40 agroforestry and mangrove plantation sites across North and East India. These ranged from riverine belts to coastal zones, agricultural lands, and peri-urban edges. Seeing plantations in such diverse ecological and social settings enabled us to validate the presence, health, survival, and overall ecological condition of the trees against what had been reported.
Beyond the numbers, we prioritised people-centred verification. Through individual and group discussions with farmers, landowners, labourers, and local partners, we explored how species were selected, who maintains the trees, how benefits are shared, the challenges encountered, and how plantations contribute to livelihood security and resilience. This grounded understanding is essential because restoration outcomes are not only ecological, they are also social and economic.
In cyclone-prone regions of Odisha and West Bengal, we assessed the role of plantations in building climate resilience. This included examining whether the trees offered physical protection to homes and embankments, reduced salinity stress, stabilised soils, and supported income security following climate shocks. These insights helped determine the real contribution of plantations to post-disaster recovery.
Finally, we consolidated our findings into recommendations to strengthen future project design and monitoring systems. This spanned improvements in site selection, species choice, plantation spacing, monitoring indicators, reporting processes, agroforestry practices, and implementation approaches. These recommendations ensure that lessons from the field translate into more effective, accountable, and impactful restoration investments over time.​
Why This Matters For Restoration In India.​
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India’s ecosystems are under unprecedented pressure from erosion, expanding aquaculture, salinity intrusion, repeated storms, and fragmented restoration efforts. In this context, ensuring that mangrove plantations generate meaningful ecological and social value depends on transparency, accountability, technical rigour, and continuous learning across organisations. Independent verification is not a procedural requirement, it is a fundamental safeguard for ecosystem health, community well-being, and long-term donor confidence.
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Planting a sapling is arguably the easiest part of restoration. Ensuring it survives, supports biodiversity, strengthens livelihoods, and contributes to climate resilience requires science, strong systems, and honest evaluation. Independent verification sits at the core of that integrity.
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This work reflects the core of what EcoNiche does. Ecosystem restoration frequently faces challenges such as fragmented monitoring systems, inconsistent data, unrealistic targets, and poorly documented outcomes, making clear problem definition essential. EcoNiche identifies these gaps and supports organisations in establishing what meaningful success should look like. Our approach is grounded in evidence-driven systems: strong monitoring frameworks, well-defined impact indicators, and reliable data flows that allow independent verification to feed directly into an organisation’s MEAL and long-term learning processes. We also ensure that restoration efforts are understood within the full system, from planning and implementation to monitoring, evaluation, and reporting, rather than as isolated, stand-alone projects. Ultimately, our goal extends beyond assessing project performance; we work to strengthen organisations from within, equipping teams with the structures, insights, and capacities needed to scale restoration efforts responsibly and sustainably.
