Join IP Children & Elders Replant 1000 Trees

Looking at a balding mountain range could be a worrisome reality.  Putting back its lush green forest cover would seem to be a daunting task.   But the indigenous women, children and young adults in Bargy Pacqued in Bayabas have just  two options.  Either they start outplanting trees or leave the mountains barren and their next generation suffer. 

In the past three months, the community slowly outplanted close to a hundred locally growing tree species and shrubs to jumpstart their reforestation efforts.  Adopting a sectoral approach  to replanting trees, women, children and young adults defined the first areas to be planted.  They arranged themselves to groups and followed a simple community plan to do the work.

At the onset, the elderly men seek out from shrubby  outskirsts naturally growing seedlings, and nurtured these in a makeshift nursery ready for planting. They avoided non-forest tree specieis  as they want to restore the naturally growing species of trees particular in the area which they  lost to  wildfires that happen almost yearly.  They tackle the first sanctuary usually a hectare of land area before moving to the next number of hectares

The women are planting also  agro-forest crops for livestock feeds and supplemental food sources at the periphery of the target  forest areas.  The forest is home to wild animals and species that's reliable for food herbal crops and raw materials for weaving, furniture works.  Hence restoring diverse forest crops is of paramount importance to the community.

Aside from planting the community also monitors the success rate of surviving outplanted trees and replace those that wither to keep pace with the target areas to be covered. Here young adults checks seedling survivors and others replant. 

It's still a long way, but thanks for the support you have given, the community was able to start planting the first tree seedlings that will grow into big forest trees someday.  Their only option actually is to start planting now.  We hope in the next report we can share the progress of the work and we hope you  will  still be with us in this endeavor.