Our Practices

The Green World Campaign works within a holistic model of regeneration of agricultural soil and woodland landscapes, held to the highest standards of accountability and transparency.

Regenerative practices go “beyond sustainability” to restore land and communities to health: improving rural income and nutrition, restoring living soil, incubating village businesses, creating local resiliency, and even reversing climate change.

Our price of 1 dollar per tree is leveraged by generous volunteer work, in-kind contributions, and matching funds from our grassroots partner organizations. These local groups are not recipients of charity: they are stakeholders in our common future.

Our integral approach is based not on planting the greatest number of trees as cheaply as possible, but on long-term sustainability. We take careful account of the needs of both people and planet, learning from our partners "on the ground," helping communities and the environment they depend on to thrive.

Criteria

Some organizations send seeds to distant locales and count each one as a "tree" (in fact, 20 to 50 percent of seeds never germinate). We insist on measurable outcomes and strict standards of accountability.

Our partner funding criteria include:

• Organizational proof of non-profit/charity status

• Proven record of success planting sustainable trees

• Effective program design, monitoring and evaluations

• Accounting that is up-to-date, transparent and based on

• Generally accepted principles

• Third-party authentication of trees planted and accounting records

• Sharing of best practice

Value Added

As we work toward expanding our scope and scale, our operations and procedures will require more direct expense and indirect staff time. Thus, our "cost per tree" will also come to include:

• Effective central office in Kenya that initiates, manages, and coordinates diverse projects.

• Community sustainability education

• Micro-finance capital

• Social enterprise development

• Credit card processing

• Volunteer / Intern recruitment / coord

• AgroForestry Research

• Media Documentation

• Cultural preservation

• Tree "geo-tagging" and monitoring

• Independent program evaluations

• Independent auditing

Carbon Sequestering to Reverse Climate Change

Based on the Kyoto Protocol and NASA 1 tree absorbs on average 1 ton of C02 over its lifetime of 40 years. These calculations are based on a tree planted in the tropics absorbing on average 50 pounds (22 kg) of carbon dioxide annually over 40 years. But as we know, trees don't all survive for 40 years. Hence we prepare to plant on average 5 trees to account for 1 ton of C02 sequestration. Beyond that, a central focus is on “biodiverse agriculture,” aka agroforestry, ecoagriculture, permaculture, which along with living nutrient-rich soil, increased crop production, and improved human health can “draw-down” carbon from the atmosphere into the ground. Many scientists now believe that scaling up reforestation and eco-agriculture to billions of acres of degraded land could actually reverse climate change. Green World Campaign is one of the first organizations to focus on these innovative practices.