Not one nursery

This record holds 61 published bodies working on trees in Pakistan: forestry departments, wildlife departments, NGOs, universities and programmes. The number of nurseries among them is 0.

That is not because nobody looked. Nurseries were the first thing the discovery worker searched for, and the enrichment worker was pointed at candidate lists of them. The searches came back with directories that do not cover Pakistan, aggregator pages with no nursery on them, and a great many results for nurseries in other countries.

The finding is not that Pakistan has no nurseries. It has thousands, and anyone who has driven out of a Pakistani city has passed them. The finding is that they have no usable web presence — no site, no listing, nothing a machine can read and cite. They are invisible to precisely the method every restoration registry in the world uses to find people.

This matters beyond us. A global registry assembled from what is findable online will contain the organisations that already have communications budgets, and will omit the people actually growing the trees. Every such registry is measuring web presence and calling it restoration capacity.

The only way past it is the telephone, and someone willing to make the calls.