Trees for Global Benefit - Uganda

Trees for Global Benefit is a cooperative community carbon offset scheme linking small scale landholder farmers to the voluntary carbon market. This activity is designed as a market solution that seeks to reduce unsustainable exploitation of forest resources and the decline of ecosystem quality, while diversifying and increasing incomes for rural farm families.

Fast facts:

Trees for Global Benefit has mobilized over 5,000 smallholders to work together;
Smallholder work together to protect the productive and natural landscapes on which they depend for their basic needs of water, food, energy, building materials and harvest of forestry products.

The problem

This project targets rural poor smallholder farming communities who have been marginalized from most of the mainstream socio-economic related services like access to financing.

The solution

The Trees for Global Benefit project enables rural poor small holder farmers access to financing and capacity by linking them to the voluntary carbon market through aggregation and mediation. The program uses carbon finance to build the adaptive capacity of smallholders through improved land management and diversification of incomes. The income from the sale of certificates enables the farmers to invest in forestry activities.

This activity provides technical expertise required for the farmers and operates as a revolving fund that continually purchases credits from thousands of smallholders, which are aggregated to achieve marketable scale. This activity buys carbon emission reduction units upfront from across multiple small scale landholdings and sells them on the voluntary market. The project then engages with multiple buyers either directly or through brokers that buy the credits, enabling the project to recoup investments, recapitalize itself while at the same time diversifying and expanding farmer participation.

Helping the planet

The aim of the project is to produce long-term, verifiable voluntary emission reductions by combining carbon sequestration with rural livelihood improvements through small-scale, farmer led, forestry/agroforestry projects while reducing pressure on natural resources in national parks and forest reserves.

Helping people

The project supports farmers in having a form of security of tenure and developing improved land use plans, which doubles as business plans. The project links farmers with Village Savings and Loans Associations through which they not only receive their payments but also are introduced to the culture of saving. Trees for Global Benefit promotes gender equality based on the understanding of the division of labour, land tenure and land use and design mechanisms to ensure that all parties involved in the ownership, use and access of land are involved in decision making. Special effort is made to hold meetings closer to the community to allow women who are usually not able to move far from their households participate

Scaling Up

This project started with 33 farmers in one district (Mitooma) has now been expanded to ten other districts in Western (Rubirizi, Mitooma, Hoima, Masindi, Kasese) and Eastern (Mbale, Manafwa, Bududa, Bulambuli, Sironko) Uganda. Preparations are also in advanced stages to scale out to other parts of the country. All these regions of Uganda are comprised of communities with different ethnicities, landholdings, agro-ecological zones and farming systems. Each community’s preference is captured within the technical specifications. To achieve marketable scale, the project aggregates credits from across multiple land holdings and bundles them together. The aggregation helps in building economies of scale for the project to recover costs but also to generate sufficient certificates representing emission reduction units to satisfy demand.