Climate Action El Salvador Project #51571

This machete grows trees!

by Paso Pacifico

Jan 4, 2022

Farmer-led forest restoration

By Sarah Otterstrom - Executive Director

Maintaining reforestation areas

We are so grateful for your support for this project that aims to catalyze farmer-led forest restoration and slow climate change. We have used your support to bolster our restoration efforts on the ground and to gather resources for a training manual. Here are some updates:

Your gift made it possible for us to hire a part-time intern to support our exeuctive director with project research and to gather training materials for our restoration platform. Training materials are for youth and farmers to develop skills in farmer-mediated natural regeneration, restoration mapping, and digital media and story-telling, Materials gathered thus far include scientific literature, restoration training manuals from around the world, and a compilation of existing apps and software for restoration purposes.

We mapped Paso Pacifico's current restoration areas in RESTOR and Explorer.Land mapping platforms. Each of these formats gives us the ability to add data layers like carbon, biodiversity, and farmer profiles. Our project profiles are not yet public on these platforms due to privacy concerns for landowners in Nicaragua.

In addition to these platforms, we mapped individual trees at the Mono Bayo Reserve using GreenStand. The next steps for this work will be to digitally tag each mapped tree with its species names. Now that we have made it through the rainy season, our ranger team on the ground is clearing weeds and vines around these trees to make sure they grow strong and healthy while they remove carbon from the atmosphere. Thank you for helping us to make it possible.

Finally, I would like to mention that your support has enabled us to pinpoint opportunities to link forest products with potential markets. This is important to our long-term restoration goals because farmers need to make a living from the trees that they grow. Balsum oil and native-bee honey are two such products. Balsum oil is extracted from native balsum trees using an artesanal approach. We have shared a sample of Central American balsum oil with a beauty company in France in hopes up opening up that market connection.

The digital platform to facilitate the interactions between youth and farmers grow in 2022. We are pleased to share that we have received a generous grant from the Bruce and Marilyn Wallace family foundation that will enable us to contract a Chief Product Officer to help lead the digital build-out of the product.

We hope you have a wonderful new year!

With gratitude,

Sarah and the Team

Sketch of digital forestry platform relationships

Balsum tree in El Salvador

Links:

Zoom in on map to see the trees planted in Southwest Nicaragua

Permalink Comments (0)

Jul 14, 2021

Empowering local farmers

By Sarah Otterstrom - Executive Director

Farmers are proud to put their machete to good use

Dear Friend,

Thank you so much for supporting our campaign to develop a learning curriculum that will support farmers in planting trees. Here are some updates on our progress over the past few months:

We completed our ethnographic study of farmers across three regions in El Salvador and Nicaragua. There, we learned that farmers are proud of their ability to utilize their machetes, and have deep knowledge about how to use their machetes to prune trees, stimulate new growth and replant trees. As a result of this study, we are now putting together an illustrated training manual to help reach 1 million farmers in the area. Our manual will empower farmers and their communities, while also ensuring that our fight against climate change is stronger than ever.

Our reforestation project has also led us to become finalists in a global innovation competition! Thanks to you and your support, our project has led us to gain more exposure which, in turn, will lead to more trees being planted to save our planet.

We have begun reviewing illustrations and searching for Latinx artists who could help us to draw culturally relevant images of farmers using machetes to stimulate different types of tree sprouting.

Rainy season is underway in Central America and we are working with landowners in eastern El Salvador to identify new sites to plant trees.

This project is a key element of a platform being under design by Paso Pacifico, with support from the Ashoka ASPIRe program and Societal Platform of the Ekstep Foundation. The platform will connect youth with farmers to promote tree-growing using traditional tools like machetes, and by mapping them for climate change. We are grateful for your contributions to this program and look forward to sharing more in the coming months.

With gratitude,

Sarah

The machete represents an important life skill

Local farmer in Nicaragua

Permalink Comments (0)

About Project Reports

Project Reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.

If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you will get an e-mail when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports via e-mail without donating.