Trees and Life's BLOG

Yesterday in Brussels, more than 15 000 persons were mobilized to promote a "ambitious" agreement in Copenhagen. Many people came in family, what was the case of our Belgian Trees Ambassadors.They carried the colors of Trees and Life, what contributed to enrich the long green wave in the district of the European institutions.

After consulting with the villagers, 300,000 trees have been planted since August: mainly jatropha trees in order to meet the population needs to delimit their fields, and a little more than 100,000 mango trees. Senegal Trees & Life rests on the participation of the villagers: the villagers – mainly women – join the project on a voluntary basis, maintain the seedlings in nursery from February and are project managers of the collective planting days. In order that they can maintain the trees once planted, Senegal Trees & Life provides access to millet mills, community granaries, motor-pumps and medicines for the health centres, via micro-credit cooperative societies. While this system was being set up, 2 tons of millet and 100 kg of sugar have been distributed to the communities who had planted during this first campaign. The team on the field of Senegal Trees & Life is now working for setting up a monitoring methodology: the inventories of the planted trees should be done by the Villagers Committees of Development under the supervision of the Intervillagers Committees of Development who will run the cooperative societies and the community-based forests. For this purpose, GPS and training are planned. The challenge now is to identify the surface of the zone where Senegal Trees & Life will act in order to plant 20 million trees and to have an optimized impact on the local, regional and global climate (zone with a side of at least 50 km). The team on the field of Senegal Trees & Life has already started to make the development plans (monographs of the related soils, investigation on the field in new villages) and to prepare the second planting campaign with the villagers.