Pond Foundation wants to highlight and nurture the spiritual connection between humans and forests and the word ‘love’ captures how we feel about forests and how we want to inspire others to feel about them. We could have called it the Forest Protection Initiative, or something similarly bland and boring, but there’s nothing bland or boring about forests.
Forests teem with vibrant, magical life; they’re great for the planet, for so many species and for humans too. We see people as being integral to forest ecosystems, not separate from them and not a part that should ever be separated by political or forest management decisions. We acknowledge, deeply respect, and love the role that indigenous and local communities play in protecting forests the world over. A central part of Forest Love’s work will be to help communities secure the resources they need to continue their work to both protect their forests and grow their communities. Another part is to help people who have become disconnected from forests to find reconnection to that most ancient current.
How it works?
It’s not universally the case that communities need money to protect their forests. Indeed, sometimes money gets in the way, fracturing communities in the process. Yet, money generated with a community’s consent and engagement, can support forest protection and community livelihood development.
Healthy, growing forests remove carbon from the atmosphere, storing it in biomass and soils. There is a growing market for credible carbon removal projects as people concerned about climate change report that just reducing emissions isn’t enough. There are questions over the credibility of forest carbon projects because past practices have misrepresented forest carbon claims. New approaches to biomass and carbon calculation offer scope to change that by providing strong, credible data to support carbon removal claims.
Pond Foundation is partnering with Chloris Geospatial, a US technology company. Chloris has built a platform that uses cutting-edge remote sensing, machine learning and ecological science to measure natural capital. Chloris can directly measure forest carbon stock, gains, and losses with quantified uncertainty at the pixel level, for any landscape, anywhere in the world. For the lay person, that means that Chloris can reliably measure how many tons of carbon a forest sequesters or adds to the atmosphere over a given time horizon, all the way back to the year 2000.
This is a huge breakthrough for forest protection.
For communities managing forests, this means they can get accurate data on whether their forest is a carbon sink, or a carbon source. If it’s a sink, Chloris’ analysis can reveal how many tCO2 have been sequestered by virtue of the community’s protection actions. It’s then possible to sell that carbon to organizations, like Pond Foundation My Carbon Zero members, who are driven to remove their annual or lifetime carbon balance from the atmosphere. The funds raised go to support ongoing forest protection actions and community livelihood development programs.
