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Leah Russell3 min

Grow Your Own Forest: A Cooling, Feminine Response to Global Warming

With many leading scientists worldwide asserting that forest restoration is the number-one strategy for slowing climate change, global reforestation charity TreeSisters is calling on women everywhere to restore our planet’s tropical forests.

On a mission to make giving back to Nature as normal as it currently is to take, TreeSisters have just launched their digital Grow Your Own Forest campaign, inviting everyone to grow their own forest as a simple way we can all help create a healthy planetary future for our children and grandchildren. “We are all warming our world and watching climate chaos unfold as if we are helpless, and we’re not,” says Clare Dubois, Founding CEO of TreeSisters. “If we stop waiting for governments to act appropriately and take matters into our own hands, we can collectively reforest our planet fast enough to make a significant difference.” When you Grow Your Own Forest with TreeSisters, you’re making a powerful choice to restore groundwater, protect endangered species, reduce poverty, and sequester carbon. You are literally cooling our world. You’ll be restoring forests in Kenya, Cameroon, Brazil, Mozambique, Madagascar, India and Nepal. Making this choice values the children of every species and the climate they will inherit. It says ‘I care’. When you donate to TreeSisters, their system converts your donations into numbers of trees planted, so that you can track the scale of your impact whilst discovering fascinating facts about the projects you’re supporting. When you share your forest on social media, your friends can donate too and help grow your forest, extending your impact. Just set up your account and watch your forest grow. In response to devastating fires and forest destruction, TreeSisters is funding a new food forest project in the Brazilian Amazon to protect the rainforest and the livelihood of the Ashaninka tribe. New data from Brazil’s space research agency has revealed deforestation of the rainforest has increased nearly 30% in 12 months (August 2018 - July 2019), the highest level in a decade in the Brazilian Amazon. This is partly due to the prioritisation of profit over preservation by President Bolsonaro, who has also come out strongly against lands reserved for indigenous tribes. One of the Ashaninka’s spiritual leaders, Shaman Benki Piyako, has designed an agroforestry project which aims to create a forest garden of 10 million native fruit trees over 10 years. Investing in the tribe’s economic and sustainable empowerment through reforestation will ensure they stay a robust community with sustainable sources of revenue, whilst continuing to enjoy nutritious food, high quality drinking water and traditional medicine from the forest. Another new project in Mozambique, funding the restoration of decimated mangrove forests will also sustain indigenous fishing communities and protect threatened ecosystems. The objective is to plant 750,000 mangrove trees in the first year, employing at least 60% women. This will improve the women’s position in their community and increase women's leadership. Savings can be made that will allow families to send their children to school, and to start microenterprises. TreeSisters is a feminine response to climate change. Instead of looking to technology to sequester excess atmospheric carbon, it restores and regenerates the mechanisms Nature herself created to do the job perfectly: forests. Empowering a global network of women, the UK-based charity has to date funded over 6.5 million trees through its projects. TreeSisters is aiming for a million trees a month by the end of 2020 as the next step on their path to fund the planting of 1 billion trees annually through monthly, one-time and partnership donations.  

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Join TreeSisters’ ‘Grow Your Own Forest’ campaign and you can fund tree planting across the tropics in diverse forest environments (including mangroves, rainforests, dry deciduous forest, agroforestry and more) in Madagascar, Cameroon, Nepal, India, Kenya, Brazil (in the Amazon and Atlantic rainforests) and Mozambique. To find out how you can contribute to restoring and protecting the global tropical forests, visit: www.treesisters.org