Why reforestation

Approximately 100,000 acres of forest is cut down every single day around the world. This has devastating effects on global warming and local wildlife.

Environmental Partnerships plant trees that bring important economic and social benefits. Through our program, whole communities are working together to save the world's most degraded lands. The many benefits these fast-growing trees bring allow the participating families to save their homes and way of life.

The benefits from these trees spread far beyond these remote villages, to our own homes, schools and communities as well. That's because these trees also remove from the global atmosphere great quantities of carbon dioxide, the major "greenhouse gas" (GHG) responsible for global climate change. This program takes this carbon and turns it into things people need such as food, clothing, shelter, medicines and organic fertilizer - in doing so returning the carbon to the soil.

Reforestation is also the most cost-effective means of offsetting carbon emissions. Each of the fast-growing trees takes about 25kg of CO2 from the atmosphere each year for at least 40 years – that equates to the absorption of 1 ton of CO2 over its lifetime!

How it works

Through photosynthesis, trees take CO2 out of the air by incorporating it into biomass and release oxygen into the atmosphere. This concept of CO2 sequestation has become more widely known because the Kyoto Protocol allows the use of carbon dioxide sinks (reforestation) as a form of Carbon Offseting .
Trees play a unique role in the global carbon cycle. They are the largest land-based natural mechanism for removing CO2 from the air. (CO2 is also removed by the oceans and ocean organisms.)
Trees are able to store a large amount of CO2 in their structures. An acre of forest will absorb about 10 times the CO2 amount absorbed by an acre of crop land or grassland

Projects