Why plant trees?

The climate is changing, which, for example, means that the atmosphere is getting hotter and more turbulent and unpredictable weather like hurricanes, floods, and droughts will become a normality. Fortunately, trees remove CO2 from the atmosphere as they grow, which makes them the most cost-efficient carbon capture mechanism in the climate change tool box.

Carbon capture is not the only benefit though! Besides cleaning our air, preventing erosion, and providing habitats for animals, planting trees creates jobs and the growing trees provide a steady source of income. The local communities working with us have total ownership of the trees. This ensures that they receive the benefits of the tree planting, which in turn makes them heavily invested in protecting and caring for their trees.

Benefits of tree planting

Community benefits
As the trees will be taken care of by members of the community, it is crucial that the communities have use of the trees and value them. This is done firstly by letting the communities choose where to plant – as long as it’s not on land that could be used for farming. Additionally, the communities choose which species to plant – as long as they’re not invasive species such as eucalyptus. Due to these two simple principles, the communities will have a valuable resource on land they couldn’t previously use and the trees will cater to their specific needs and provide for example fruit or herbal medicine. Finally, a third of all revenue from projects goes directly to the participating communities, providing a nice contribution towards school books, public renovation and so on.

Ecological benefits
The ecological benefits are quite simple. Trees will help soil retain water, provide shade, and prevent erosion, and are thereby in and of themselves beneficial to the local ecology. To prevent any damage to the ecosystem, we only plant trees native to the area, which keeps invasive species from doing any harm. Additionally, we try to plant as many different species as possible, with an emphasis on rare or endangered ones, in order to promote biodiversity. 

Climate benefits
The climate benefits are at the heart of our work, and also one of the main reasons we primarily plant trees in the tropics. Due to the lack of any real winter hindering the growth of our trees, they become much larger, much faster than anywhere else in the world. Larger trees means more carbon captured. Therefore, to ensure climate benefits, we plant as many trees as we can, with as high a survival rate as possible. To ensure the highest survival rate, we have made a tree-planting guide for participating communities to follow.