Freetown the Treetown Mobile Token System
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
9 sourced claims on this page, none individually verified yet — turn on “Sources in the text” to see each one.
How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means · The full record behind this page
✎ Corrected 27 Aug 2026 Publication date recorded for 5 sources. What changed →
Freetown lost 70% of its tree cover. Growers now get paid in tokens they exchange for cash for every geotagged tree that survives — more than a million planted since 2020, five million the target for 2030.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ Freetown city profile · 🌫️ Air quality guide · 🌱 Environment projects
Freetown lost about 70% of its tree cover to unplanned development, and a 2017 landslide on the deforested peninsula killed about 1,100 people. Since 2020 the city has paid community growers, largely women and young people, through Greenstand's TreeTracker app: each sapling is geotagged and photographed as it grows, and payments arrive quarterly as tokens that can be exchanged for cash. More than a million trees have been planted, against a target of five million by 2030 and twenty million by 2050. The funding is not yet the carbon market it is meant to be — the project has taken almost US$3 million since 2020, largely from the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility, and is supposed to start covering its own costs by selling carbon-offset tokens.
📊 Impact
More than a million trees planted since 2020 with a reported survival rate of over 80%, which the city and the Earthshot Prize both attribute to the community of growers rather than to the app. The figure is a project self-report repeated by others; no source describes how survival is audited.
🎓 Lesson
The technology is the cheapest part of this and the payment is the point: a geotagged photograph is only worth taking because a quarterly payment depends on the tree still being there. That is also the least transferable ingredient, which is why the 'highly replicable' framing has been challenged — a researcher writing in 2025 argues the scheme rests on Freetown's particular history and community structures. The financing carries the sharper problem: almost all the money so far is donor money, and the intended replacement is carbon-offset tokens, which work by letting a buyer elsewhere claim the reduction. A city with among the lowest emissions in the world would then be selling the right to keep emitting to someone with among the highest.
Sources
Show your work What this page rests on and what it can’t tell you · all 9 claims with their sources · the forensic record
Evidence Passport · public beta 9 addressable claims, 5 source dossiers, one permanent baseline. The passport is unreviewed — an AI-assisted structural migration, not a human or expert endorsement. Every revision keeps a permanent copy under revision history.
Inspect the claims, one by one — verbatim text, sources and caveats for all 9
The text below is copied verbatim from the published record. Each claim names the source dossiers that carry it; caveats stay attached to the claim they qualify.
clm-d3b3426eb1ce4680
quantitative
Freetown lost about 70% of its tree cover to unplanned development
Sources carrying this claim
clm-61984bcb9962d285
quantitative
a 2017 landslide on the deforested peninsula killed about 1,100 people
Sources carrying this claim
clm-2da9db86748c5bfc
quantitative
Since 2020 the city has paid community growers, largely women and young people, through Greenstand's TreeTracker app: each sapling is geotagged and photographed as it grows, and payments arrive quarterly as tokens that can be exchanged for cash
Sources carrying this claim
clm-8da838521e0a70bb
quantitative
More than a million trees have been planted, against a target of five million by 2030 and twenty million by 2050
Sources carrying this claim
clm-9e52d3ac2438ceb9
quantitative
the project has taken almost US$3 million since 2020, largely from the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility, and is supposed to start covering its own costs by selling carbon-offset tokens
Sources carrying this claim
clm-a07f4b54e463fd59
quantitative
More than a million trees planted since 2020 with a reported survival rate of over 80%, which the city and the Earthshot Prize both attribute to the community of growers rather than to the app
Sources carrying this claim
clm-665efecbc1c387c3
descriptive
no source describes how survival is audited
Sources carrying this claim
clm-5b8e42aae49c7581
quantitative
the 'highly replicable' framing has been challenged — a researcher writing in 2025 argues the scheme rests on Freetown's particular history and community structures
Sources carrying this claim
clm-5beeb946bbf393a4
descriptive
the intended replacement is carbon-offset tokens, which work by letting a buyer elsewhere claim the reduction
Sources carrying this claim
Forensic record — source dossiers, gaps, hashes and the exact revision this page renders
This layer records what is known about each source, what is still missing, and the exact snapshot this page is rendering. A missing date, archive or hash stays visible as missing.
Awaiting operator and domain-expert review; publication of this revision implies neither.
sha256:c09663d20eb235de68bc4b274ca3dcc5ac935c4bc7e0d1c3bedf98c22d1d777e
- 9
- of 9 claims mapped
- 5
- source dossiers
- 2
- publication dates recorded
- 0
- archives linked
- 0
- exact locators
- 0
- content captures hashed
Governance facts carried by the record
- Operator
- Freetown City Council
- Actor types
- city-government
- Funding model
- mixed
- Funding description
- Not recorded
- Cost
- Not recorded
- Ownership
- Not recorded
- Decision rights
- Not recorded
- Exit conditions
- Not recorded
5 source dossiers
Freetown City Council — Freetown The Treetown (authority)
- Stable source ID
src-a3c7e68853a06093- Publisher
- Name not classified · fcc.gov.sl
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- Not recorded
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-02
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-27
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
The council page renders as a navigation shell to automated retrieval and carries no publication date. The page states no publication date.
- Claims linked
C40 Knowledge Hub (research)
- Stable source ID
src-571426dfcf6c7810- Publisher
- Name not classified · c40knowledgehub.org
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- Not recorded
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-02
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-27
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
The C40 knowledge-hub article did not return a readable body to automated retrieval; it is the source of the "highly replicable" framing discussed in the lesson. No publication date is recorded: the page did not answer when this entry was checked.
- Claims linked
Earthshot Prize (recognition)
- Stable source ID
src-c4e7e22317f94c3b- Publisher
- Name not classified · earthshotprize.org
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2023-09-08
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-02
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-27
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Further information on the project.
The Conversation — why Freetown's celebrated tree planting scheme won't work for other African cities, or the planet
- Stable source ID
src-0bd7a85bf1b2e1da- Publisher
- Name not classified · theconversation.com
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2025-02-27
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-02
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-27
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- No locator recordedDescriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
United Nations Climate Action — Freetown: planting five million trees by 2030
- Stable source ID
src-7f1f0be719ffef09- Publisher
- Name not classified · un.org
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- Not recorded
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-02
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-27
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
An interview page with the mayor that carries no publication date. No publication date is recorded for this page.
- Claims linked
Known limits of this passport
- Publisher names and source languages have not yet been classified; domains are recorded without guessing.
- Existing source notes are descriptive locators, not page- or paragraph-exact citations.
- A missing archive, publication date or content hash is shown as null rather than inferred.
- The project-level evidence grade ranks the strongest source in the entry; it is not a truth score for every claim.
Continue exploring
Compare this project
A tree with an ID number: four registers, four things the number is for
Giving every tree a record is the same technical act everywhere. What differs is what the record is then used for — and in one case the register turned out to audit the campaign that created it.
| Project | Since | Status | Outcome | Evidence | Run by | Cost | What the record is for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Urban Forest Visual & Email-a-TreeMelbourne, 🇦🇺 | 2013 | Live | Succeeded | Independent | City government | not public | An arborists' inventory that accidentally became a public relationship: every street tree carries an ID, a species and an estimate of its remaining useful life — and residents started writing to them. |
| Bangkok's Million-Tree RegisterBangkok, 🇹🇭 | 2022 | Live | Ongoing | Official | City government | not public | An audit of the city's own headline. When the first million was declared, the register showed only about a third of the records were trees; the rest were shrubs and climbers. |
| CityLAB Berlin & Gieß den KiezBerlin, 🇩🇪 | 2019 | Live | Ongoing | Official | Civil society | not public | A task list. The open tree cadastre plus weather data tells residents which tree needs water, and logs who watered it through the drought summers. |
| Freetown the Treetown Mobile Token SystemFreetown, 🇸🇱 | 2020 | Live | Ongoing | Official | City government | not public | A payment record. Community growers are paid by mobile money against geotagged photos of the tree they planted, and survival is what the money is measured on. |
Explore the wider context
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Freetown the Treetown Mobile Token System” — Freetown, Sierra Leone. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/freetown-tree-tracker/ (last verified 2026-08-02). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.