Forests4Water Brazil: Community Climate Action

Dear donors and friends across the world,

Greetings from Iracambi! We hope you are taking care of yourselves, doing well, and having as much fun as we are in making plans for 2021?

In our last letter we talked about the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration and we gave you a sneak peek at Iracambi’s contribution towards it: we’re going to plant more trees. A lot more trees!

So here’s the deal. Right now we’re finishing up this season’s planting. We’re lucky enough to have some volunteers onsite who have come from different parts of Brazil to help, so our planting team is out there in the field planting the last 1000 seedlings of the season.  

And, thanks to your magnificent support, we’re also deep into planning for the 2021-22 season.

A quick recap. We’re locating land to reforest, seedlings to plant, and manpower.

First things first. We have more than enough land to plant. Hooray, hooray! We’ve also located subsidiary sources of seedlings, but we really want to increase the capacity in our own nursery. That will involve hiring more staff, enlarging the nursery area (happily we have lots of space) and completing our detailed budgeting and planning.

So that’s where we are right now. And here’s where we need to give a big shoutout to two very special people. The first is our forestry mentor who inspired us to take a great step forward by committing to an ambitious, achievable goal that excites us! Like all good mentors, he’s helping us think though exactly how to get from where we are to where we want to be in the simplest way possible.

The second very special person is a long-time friend and colleague with considerable experience in large scale reforestry. He walked us through every part of the process, soup to nuts, and generously shared innumerable practical tips on the best ways of getting those trees into the ground and maintaining them until they are thoroughly well established.

One of the exciting things that we’ve learned is the truth of the old African saying “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” And our community is expanding exponentially! It seems that once you take the decision to scale up, the resources you need show up. So we're welcoming, celebrating and collaborating with our partners everywhere: team members, mentors, practitioners, volunteers, students, schoolkids, community members, and, of course, YOU, dear donors!

Thanks to your very generous support, together we’re going faster and farther towards our exciting goal of restoring the beautiful Atlantic Forest. Stay tuned for further developments!

with much rainforest love, 

The Iracambi Tree Planters 

Links:

• Planting sites: click on the icon for info about each site!

Dear donors,

Did you know that we are just entering the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration?!

So what could be better than to wish that 2021 brings us all new hope, health and happiness? And, before we go any further, we want to send you all a great big thank you for your amazing support over this past year. 

Next, we want to share a message received today from a new donor. "Climate change is the existential threat of our times and the rainforests of Brazil are the lungs of the world; (we) wanted to support a great and effective local cause with a huge global impact. Thank you so much for all your hard work, Iracambi!" 

All we can say is that without all of you, dear donors, we'd never have made it this far! 

And now for some exciting news. We’re unrolling some ambitious plans for 2021 and, as our friends, allies and supporters, we want you to be the first to know!

First of all, we’re committing to the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration and planning to plant a lot more trees this year, (ten thousand at the very least and hopefully a lot more.) If we are to keep within the limits of 1.5-2C temperature rise and avoid climate catastrophe, there is no time to waste.

We've set ourselves an ambitious goal and we’re going to need your help!

And, in order to up our game considerably, there are four things we need to put in place. We need to find land suitable for reforestation, seedlings, manpower and equipment.

Let’s start with the land. As you may remember, we live in the buffer zone of the Serra do Brigadeiro State Park which is one of the most important biodiversity conservation areas in the state. We’ve located a series of priority reforestation areas on contiguous properties bordering the Park, whose owners are keen to reforest. Reforesting these properties will enable us to restore and extend an important ecological corridor: good for the farmers, good for wildlife, and great for protecting and recuperating water resources.

Next, we’ll increase production in our forest nursery, as well as locating other sources of healthy young saplings for planting. We’re already working with local farmers on setting up small tree nurseries on their properties, and there are also several commercial nurseries in the area that can provide high quality seedlings.

Since we live in an area of family farms where the main crop is coffee, and since the cycle of coffee and the cycle of tree planting happen at different times of the year, it’s not difficult for us to find seasonal manpower during the planting season.

Next, we need to acquire a reliable form of transport to move tree seedlings and tree planting teams onto tree planting sites. (Smaller items of equipment such as strimmers and hole diggers are also on our wishlist of equipment.)

And lastly, we need to include education into every part of our program: informal education with farm families and visitors, and a continuation of our education programs with local schools and online. In addition, we need to redouble our efforts at raising awareness both at local and municipal levels where we participate in community groups and councils. Finally, we look forward to reopening our doors to students and researchers as soon as it is safe to do so!

With that in mind, we’d like to consolidate our forestry programs on GlobalGiving: folding them into one, whose mission, as part of the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, is to restore a healthy forest ecosystem that includes all human and non-human inhabitants of this section of Atlantic Rainforest! We'll let you know when we're ready to consolidate the programs, we just wanted to give you a headsup.

Will you join us in this exciting program? Our team can't wait to see what we can achieve with your support. 

Thank you so much, please stay safe, and here’s to restoring the beautiful Atlantic Forest together, so that people everywhere can breathe a little more easily!

With rainforest love from Alfredo and the entire Iracambi team

PS We’re also planning to extend our program of forest monitoring, setting up a monitoring protocol that can be used in ecosystem restoration efforts anywhere in the world. More on that later!

Links:

• UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration