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!