Greenpop's Forests For Life Program

Forests For Life is a collaborative reforestation and land stewardship project run by Greenpop. It focuses on enabling land restoration and alternative livelihood development across sub-saharan Africa

Greenpop’s Forests For Life program aims to capacitate land owners and NGOS in designing and implementing tree planting and restoration projects that restore ecological function, manage invasive vegetation and improve livelihoods.

Six Kingdoms is a managing partner within the program, supporting project development and implementation as well as monitoring and evaluation protocols.

Forests For Life connects land stewards and implementing agents with the knowledge support, processes and structures and funding required to kickstart and maintain a diversity of projects related to tree planting, invasive plant clearing and landscape management.

By designing and implementing a collaborative approach to landscape management that brings together local knowledge and needs with funding opportunities and knowledge support, the Forest For Life Program aims to plant 500 000 trees across sub-saharan Africa by 2025.

However, the project is more than just a tree planting drive, as a large portion of project funding goes to ancillary operations like invasive plant clearing, training and education, enterprise development and capacity building. We believe that the people who are best qualified to run restoration projects are those that live in the landscape permanently, and the intention behind the program is to enable them to do their best work with funding, project guidance and management support.

Every context and every landscape is different. The Forests for Life program aims to leverage international funding for local environmental that is locally relevant and responsive.

The trees planted make real impact, but can also be seen as a metaphor of collaboration, investment in the future and of hope. Just as a tree is more than the sum of it’s leaves, roots and trunk, the program aims to be more than just the sum of the trees planted.

For more on Greenpop, see here

A Forest For Life planting site in the Garden Route, South Africa, just after planting. This area was covered in invasive vegetation that was burned in wildfires before joining the program

 

Ruan Siebert monitoring a Keurboom 6 months after planting and 1 year after the fire.

 

The same site 3 years after planting. The pioneering Keurboom have created an ideal microclimate for secondary species to establish as well as reducing the likelikhood of invasive plant recurrence.