Community Farmer Forests
Key details
Cost per tonne of CO2: | £17.20 |
Trees planted: | 20 million |
Project established: | 1999 |
Project location: | Kenya, Uganda, India |
Planting partner: | TIST |
Selva Power Up
Super Certified: For those who need even more accuracy and third-party verification about the quantity of CO2 offset by their contribution, this is the project for you.
Project location
Why we love this project
Over 100,000 local subsistence farmers across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and India are part of this amazing movement to improve the environment and their livelihoods by planting and preserving trees on degraded and/or unused land.
Supported and trained by our partner, TIST, the local farmers work together in small community groups to grow and maintain their trees. As the trees grow and absorb carbon, the farmers receive income from TIST which sells the carbon offsets on behalf of the farmers. This ensures the community is fully incentivised to protect their trees for the long term and plant even more!
Where each $ goes
For every £, $ or € you channel to this project, 46% goes towards income for the farmers who plant and protect the trees and the cost of training farmers in sustainable forestry. 14% goes towards certification and validation of the carbon offsets, 14% to TISTs overheads (offices and administrative staff), and 10% is allocated as TIST profits (money that they reinvest to grow, bring on more farmers and ultimately plant more trees). The rest enables Selva to do its thing!
Transparency
TISTs forests are verified and validated by Verra, the highest international standard for certifying carbon emissions reductions. Verra uses a bunch of super smart techniques and processes to confirm that the trees are absorbing as much CO2 as expected, and that the trees stick around for the long-term. This adds to costs, which explains why offsetting with TIST is more expensive than our other projects, but provides the recognised third-party validation that we understand is important for some of our community members.
In case that wasn’t enough, TIST also carries out its own rigorous monitoring and evaluation process of all the trees it plants. This involves regularly counting and measuring individual trees, then publishing all the results online for all to see.
There’s no organisation more thorough than these guys when it comes to tracking trees.
A brief note on the project location: TIST has tens of thousands of small groups of farmers planting across East Africa and India so it would be hard to mark them all on our map, but you can get all the details about precise planting locations here
About our partner
TIST was founded 20 years ago with a desire to combine climate change mitigation with improving the lives of the poorest people in the world. Since then, TIST has supported local farmers in planting 20 million trees and has won multiple awards for its monitoring system and local community model.
