 is about improving the landscapes throughout the world that are deforested, degraded, or underutilized. And just as restoration is more than just tree planting, its benefits extend beyond trees. Successful restoration generates a wide range of benefits, including forest quantity and quality, enhanced food security, improved air and water quality, climate change resilience, job creation, and many more. So we are now going to begin with a 45-minute panel session and we are going to listen to the restoration implementers and experts talk about their experience implementing land restoration activities. Throughout the conversation, we will hear what is working and what needs to be improved. Then we will close our discussions with what should be done moving forward, particularly now at the launch of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, so that we can all work towards a successful ecosystem restoration. So during this panel session, please type your questions in the chat box in the YouTube channel. We will spend the second part of the webinar tackling and brainstorming on the questions you will have asked. Now, before we begin our panel discussion, let us first hear from two institutions that have co-organized this event. Allow me to welcome Misha Tisdell, co-founder and director of GreenPOP and Peter van der Haaf, director at Ecosystem Restoration, comes to introduce their organizations and tell us about why they felt the need to organize this event. Misha, the floor is yours. Hi, I'm Misha, co-founder and director of the GreenPOP Foundation. We're based in Cape Town, South Africa and work to restore degraded landscapes across Sub-Saharan Africa. Our workforce within four themes. We spread environmental awareness through education, communication and art campaigns. We help people grow their own food by empowering and educating community and home food gardeners. We green urban areas by planting indigenous gardens and trees at schools and community spaces in low-income neighborhoods. And lastly, we restore forests across the continent by supporting local grass-roots organizations to plant trees and assist in natural regeneration and revive forest landscapes. A decade ago, we started with the goal to plant a thousand trees. A decade from now, we plan to have planted over a million trees. But success in the landscape restoration is not about counting trees. It's about increasing ecological function. It's about expanding habitats, about combating climate change and improving resilience for human, animal and plant communities. We're excited to be part of this global movement, a decade on restoration. Never before have we had such a great amount of energy and urgency for something that is so profoundly important to our very existence. Thank you to all of you for being here at the beginning. Let's go restore the planet together. And now over to you, Peter. Thank you so much, Bernadette. And let me start by saying that Misha really framed this session very well in this introductory video. And I'm really pleased that we're partnering with GreenPOP for this particular session. The subject is important to us, camps, ecosystem restoration camps, which I'll introduce also with the video, approach restoration from the perspective of soils, biodiversity, water flows, people, livelihoods and communities. Restoring humanity's relationship with earth. And that's not easy to find funding for that, which is why we're talking about this beyond trees. Because for trees, we can get funding. For the whole work, it's very difficult. Now, all I have to do is introduce ecosystem restoration camps. So I'll share the screen again and show you that short video. People from around the world are gathering in ecosystem restoration camps to restore degraded ecosystems and introduce new ways to produce our food and materials. These camps are initiated by the people who are losing their livelihoods due to degradation, or by the people that are inspired by new and promising regenerative agricultural techniques. The fast growing global ecosystem restoration camps movement works together to equip anyone who wants to start with understandable expert knowledge and accessible advice to restore degraded ecosystems and start new regenerative livelihoods. And to realize our vision with the lowest costs possible, we invite ordinary people from around the world to physically join in and support at the camps. We can change the future of humanity to one of abundance and well-being by reconnecting to our planet's great natural systems. So join us and help us create the world you want to live in. Thank you, Pita. And thank you both to you and Misha for telling us about the great organizations that you are working with and the great work you are implementing. And also for introducing some of the challenges you are facing as you implement restoration on the ground. So now let's move to our invited panelists. Allow me to welcome Vais Coro, Zo Gold Angelucci, Felix Finkbiner and John Mu. Each panelist will provide a self-introduction before answering the questions. So esteemed panelists and dear followers, trees have become a conversation starter for ecosystem restoration. But ecosystem restoration is much more complex as we just heard. I would like us to explore what it really takes to have a successful environmentally and socially just restoration project. And I want to begin with your first Thais and then Zoe. Please tell us what has been your experience with tree planting and community activities? What is motivating you to build your project mission and really what roles do trees play in your restoration projects? Over to you, Thais. Get us started. Thais, please unmute. Yes. Good afternoon, everybody. It's for some places it's morning, for some places it's evening, but it's almost the end of the environmental day. I am Thais Corral. I live in Brazil. I live in actually in a place that is in Matatlantica, the Atlantic forest, which is considered one of the hot spots of biodiversity in the planet, even though only 12% is left. And I think that the trees, like because it's, I think the focus on the trees that has been becoming very popular kind of replicates a little bit this idea that we just solve a problem, just focus in one solution. And I think that the perspective is much more to looking to the ecosystem, no, and looking to the tree as the outcome of a whole system that is regenerated. No, and at Sinaldo Vale, the place that I founded 10 years ago and which we live with a lot of people, this is what we have been exercising, like opening our perception to what it takes from us in terms of our dedication, in terms of our knowledge, in terms of our work, to really aligned with the process of ecosystem restoration. And it's much more than trees. It's like looking into the trees that have like resisted over centuries to being that kind of soil, because soils have been degraded, but some trees have been resisting there. So instead of cutting them down and starting calling them exotic, just embrace them and see which are the service and what that these trees can, how these trees can be aligned with the whole process of regeneration and restoration. So my learning with communities as well is to activate that perception instead of just repeating what they see in the news or what is fashionable in terms of saying that everything in Mart Atlantic is exotic. You have to kind of cut down Jake trees and other trees that have been brought from other parts that really could grow, could stay in the place, could be resilient and resist. And now they can be like allies in terms of these restoration. Also, what draw me into this project was really to learn in practice and to really open the perception, the perspective to what really takes to activate the restoration. And we only know that in my view, when you inhabit the place, because the place itself, the trees, the species that are there, they tell you, they reveal it to you. So it has been what I feel that this decade should help us to think in another way. And I think that listening to the people that have been on the land for a long time, even if they can't talk the expert language is very important. No, otherwise we are going just to replicate the same mistakes that led us into the degradation of land for centuries, not just with a new label. So this is kind of what we have been doing at Sinaldo Vale. Just today we kind of, it was part of an event or so in which we are going to be part of a restoration of a big part of the area in which we are. No, it's like 5,000 actors around the Guanabara Bay, which is built around Rio de Janeiro. And I think that the participation of communities and this open perspective, this more like integrated perspective that ecosystem regeneration camps bring are very important at this point in time, because a lot of initiatives will be happening. And it's important that they take that perspective, know in places like ours, which is a camp, which is a campus, is a regenerative campus for the future. And working also with young people, I think it's, and people from all different disciplines and communities, I think it's like a critical ingredients to make this a successful endeavor. I think I used my five minutes. Yes, yes, you did great. Yeah, and you made great points that we should look at the tree as an outcome of the process and the process is the restoration process and the approach will be integrated and participative and considering all the communities in the area. So now I turn to you, Zoe. Yeah, what has been your experience and any reflections you would like to make on the question? Thank you so much, Bernadette, and thanks to you. So that's a really inspiring example of place-based restoration. Thank you for sharing that. My name is Zoe Goldinger-Lucci, and I'm the head of programs at the Green Pop Foundation based in Cape Town, South Africa. My background is in sustainable development, environmental justice, urban greening, and forest restoration. And for me, restoration of places and spaces has always been about people. Over the course of the last few hundred years, people have been migrating towards urban areas, they've been finding new digital homes, they've been going into space, but that's actually just taken us away from nature. It's made us very disconnected, but ultimately humans in nature are inseparable. And the demise of our ecosystems will ultimately lead to the demise of ourselves, as we've seen over the last year and a half in particular. So if we want to build the world that's envisioned in the SDGs, we rarely have to focus on building healthy landscapes as a foundation. So Green Pop, as Misha mentioned, started in 2010 with the goal of planting 1,000 trees in one month in under-greened areas in Cape Town. And that reason was actually because South Africa, even decades after the end of apartheid, is still suffering from unenforced spatial segregation in urban areas. If you take an aerial view of the landscape, you can actually see the different communities based on tree cover. And we have beautiful, wealthy, mostly white neighborhoods with lots of public green space and tree-lined streets. And then you have poorer communities of color relegated to generally barren areas. So that's an issue of environmental justice. And I think that's something that actually underpins a lot of what Green Pop does. And what we're trying to address within the restoration movement is making a more just society in which everyone has access to these benefits from healthy ecosystems. So Green Pop started trying to address this issue in a very small way in Cape Town. And then over the next decade, we expanded organically and we were invited by individuals and organizations in South Africa and around Sub-Saharan Africa to collaborate and plant trees and start working on small-scale forest restoration. In 2018, we consolidated all of this work into our Forest for Life program. So this program actually takes a forest landscape management approach and we try to protect existing forests through sustainable development activities and assist in restoring forest ecosystem function and biodiversity through active and passive restoration. So based on our experience, we are very aware of the complex challenges that are associated with Indigenous forest management in Sub-Saharan Africa. And in order to be successful, restoration has to be context-driven, just as Thais mentioned. We have to take into account the unique characteristics of forest landscapes and the barriers which prevent forests from being protected or restored without our intervention. We need to see why it can't just solve itself, why this problem is persisting. And we need to look at current best practices and stakeholders in the area, as well as local experts. So that's what this project does. We take a pro-community stance, we try to identify the threats to reforestation success and local community needs and incorporate solutions that benefit both people and the planet. So I mean, I think that description probably covered a lot of buzzwords within the ecosystem restoration space, but what does that look like in reality? So I'm going to talk just a little bit about one of our projects that we work with. So in Southern Malawi, we work with a hospital, actually, which runs one of the largest sustainable development projects in the region. And they have this amazing approach where they see development work in environmental restoration as primary care. And they think that it's not possible to have healthy communities without a healthy environment. So in partnership with them, we've developed a project which takes the multi-pronged approach to forest restoration in rural villages. In addition to planting trees in community forest managed forest areas and along river banks, we're also doing farmer managed natural regeneration training and training in sustainable natural resource management agroforestry. We're also addressing the threats to forest by providing improved cooked stoves which require less wood to operate and training in alternative livelihoods for those who rely on charcoal burning to earn an income. So that's kind of a Malawian situation in a very rural context. In South Africa, we have projects as well that address very different threats. Here we have a very big alien invasive vegetation problem. So what we focus on is actually alien invasive management and clearing fire breaks and trying to prevent wildfires. And those activities take a very different shape and form. So without all of the holistic support activities in our projects, which are very different from project to project, our forest restoration projects would ultimately be unsuccessful. So really trees are a common thread. We went from focusing on schoolyards in Cape Town to forest patches in the western Cape to forest landscapes in sub-Saharan Africa. And through this journey, trees have been in common, but they've always been rooted in a broader community and landscape context. So for me, tree planting is actually one of our most common activities, but it's not the ultimate goal. The goals are much broader. As you mentioned in the beginning, Bernadette, they're about expanding ecosystem services and connecting habitats and capturing carbon and supporting sustainable livelihoods. And while tree planting can help to achieve some of these goals in some contexts, it's not the only relevant intervention. And in some cases, it's not the most appropriate intervention. So I see campaigns aiming to plant literally billions and trillions of trees. And I can't help but think that we as humanity are now so focused on counting trees that we may be losing sight of the bigger picture. We literally can't see the forest for the trees. So that brings us to the conversation that we're having today. So thank you for including me. Amazing. And I believe we are beginning to have a common theme. Recession should be place-based, context-based. It should be about healthy landscapes that then leads to a healthy communities. So thank you for telling us about the work you are doing and how you are contextualizing it to the different parts of the world. And now I would like to turn to you, Felix. You also have an intensive and really rich experience implementing restoration projects on the ground and around the world. And the question I have for you are, what have been the benefits and limitations of using the plant at tree during fundraising or raising awareness on restoration? And how is planned for the planet supporting the holistic considerations of projects to go beyond tree? Thank you very much, Bernadette. So I'm Felix, the founder of Plants of the Planet. We are a children youth organization started 14 years ago with just a school competition among local schools of who planted the most trees in southern Germany. And today, 14 years later, there are three main areas to our work. The first one is actually quite close to the ecosystem restoration camps and its general approach. It's about teaching young kids about the dangers of the climate crisis and the importance of restoring ecosystems to help fight it. So we've organized about 1,600 academies. These are one-day workshops in 75 countries so far had just over 90,000 kids participate in the plant trees as part of them. And we gave them certificates at the end that made them climate justice ambassadors so they can spread the message and help us fight the climate crisis. The one part, the second big part of what we do is our on-the-ground restoration work here on the Yucatan Peninsula in southern Mexico. We have a team of just over 100 people contributing to restoring a degraded forest around the Calakmul biodiversity reserve here in southern Mexico. And a big part of what we do there, or the biggest part of what we do there in practice, is planting trees. In fact, we've planted just over 6 million trees here as part of this project in the last few years and aim to plant about two and a half million trees this year alone. And the biggest part of how we fund this work is through collecting donations one euro per tree. And I think as everyone else in this group has experienced, we find it relatively easy to fund that part of the work and all the auxiliary work around it is much, much more difficult. Yeah, experiencing the same challenges as everyone else. But I think that the part of our work that's most relevant to this conversation here is our work around our plan for the Planet web platform. We've developed a series of digital tools with the aim of making it easier for restoration works around the world to get attention, to fundraise for their work, and to showcase their work and make their work as transparent as possible. And to start off with a plan for the Planet platform where projects can register and showcase their work. And we've now just yesterday launched the TreeMapper app, which is essentially a tool that makes it as easy as possible for people on the ground to actually monitor the impact and long term development of their tree planting and other restoration strategies. And all of that data is immediately made public through our platform so that donors can see where this work actually happens on the ground that they're supporting. And academics can also use this data to better understand the impact of restoration work. We began with this work several years ago and launched this platform in 2019 in its original version. And we now have about 160 restoration projects participating in a total of about 32 million trees have been funded through this platform. And this brings me to my main point here that in designing such a platform, many of the smaller decisions we make can obviously create sort of incentives that become incredibly important for these projects and that participate in how they shape their work. And one of the original tools we had in our platform was actually the ability to sort projects by price. So each project could define their own price per tree planted. And it obviously seemed natural that there would be one button where you could sort these projects that way. And that obviously encouraged people to then support those cheapest projects. And that creates a sort of perverse incentive, not for highest quality restoration, but for to out-compete in terms of that one simple metric. So in the newer versions of our platform, this kind of sorting no longer exists. And the only way you possibly find out the cheapest project is you can literally scroll through each one of those 160 projects and look at those prices individually. And we've had similar experiences with other metrics, right? The natural incentive you have when you build a platform like that is to pick out a few simple metrics to make it possible for people to compare these projects, like survival rate, of course. But with survival rate, we have a very similar issue that we have with counting trees in the first place, right? That a survival rate of 20% in one project may be way, way more impressive than a survival rate of 80% in another project. So a metric like that is not really much more valuable in that sense. So we've really moved to a platform design where projects can showcase so many different aspects of their work to show what makes them unique and what makes them an excellent project. But of course, we keep working on that. But one feature that still persists in the way we've designed our platform so far is that projects give the price of our fund raise on a per tree basis. But we've thought long and hard about how we can move forward here. And we've now decided to build a system or in the final stages of finishing this update where projects can now define their own metrics in terms of how they collect data. So some projects will continue to collect data, collect money on a per tree level. But other projects might say we're going to collect money for x euros per hectare or x euro per hectare per year or an entirely different metric. So projects can pick how they want to have their work measured and how they want to have supporters support them. So this is something we're rolling out in the next few weeks and we're really excited to see how projects take this up and what feedback we get from our donors in that process. But to conclude, I do want to say that I think this problem we're facing here is really a problem grown out of a success. We are incredibly lucky to have this metric, the tree that captures so many people's imagination, makes so many people passionate about supporting our work. We're incredibly lucky compared to NGOs and other spaces to try to get people's attention, trying to get people's support. And whenever you try and simplify an incredibly complicated process to one metric, you're going to have perverse and inappropriate incentives. But compared to other people facing the similar project, I think the per tree is actually a lot less perverse than what some other people are facing in other spaces. So it is a challenge and we need to think long and hard about it. But I still think that communicating about trees continues to be an incredibly valuable way to get people's attention and get people's passion to support the restoration work we all want to do around the world. Interesting, quite interesting. So I saw you shaking your head as Felix was talking. I mean everyone was just shaking their head. But I want to come back to you because he mentioned something quite interesting. It is easy to fund the euro per tree, you know, the model, that model works, but it's not necessarily for the other components involved in restoration. Do you resonate with this? Do you have similar experiences and do you, could you say why this is the case? Maybe in a minute or so. Absolutely. GreenPOP, we also fundraise on a per tree model for some of our fundraisings. So it's 120 Rand for one of our trees. They're a bit more expensive and we try and wrap some of those additional services into that cost. But I really resonate with what Felix said about it being a good problem to have. Because I think, I mean, GreenPOP started with the goal to make greening popular. That's where our name comes from. And I feel like not just thanks to us, but thanks to everyone working in the restoration space. That goal has kind of been achieved over the last 10 years. Now green is very popular. And everyone really does want to be involved. And I think having the tree as a unit, people can picture it. They know what a tree being planted looks like. It's harder to picture a restored ecosystem for most people. So it's worked to build the environmental movement. And now we just need to dig deeper. And we need to broaden the discourse around ecosystem restorations that trees don't continue to be the primary focus. There are a lot of challenges that we're facing around fundraising and communications. We get a lot of companies coming to us often wanting to plant very large number of trees for a very small cost. And we're just not able to do that in the type of project that we're working in that are community based and context driven and are looking at these other threats. So it's a tricky thing, but I do think it's a good problem. And I think we can be happy about the place that we've gotten to and also be ambitious about the place we're going to next. Agreed. Agreed. I would like to remind again our viewers that please keep your questions coming into the YouTube channel. We will have the time to brainstorm on them and try to answer them in the second part of this seminar. And last, but really not least, we also have John with us on our panel. And the question I have for you, John, is what would you like the general public and founders to know about what is needed to successfully restore ecosystems? Thank you, Bernadette. And thank you to everybody. It's lovely to see Felix. I remember when he put his hand over my mouth years ago in Sweden in the Talberg Forum. And also lovely to see Misha here. We've been knowing each other for about a decade. So that's a great thing. And I think we've all seen that restoration is moving forward, that we have a unique opportunity with the launch of the UN decade of ecosystem restoration. And it's rather critical to consider what we know and what we want to see going forward. So the thing that I've noticed in studying ecology is that nothing is extraneous and everything is interrelated. And so this concept of symbiosis is also in permaculture. It's discussing stacking functions, that all of these things are interrelated. So it's true that trees are part of a functional ecosystem. And I think that the funders, the people around the world who are interested need to understand that there's massive complexity in ecosystems. And that it's the reason that, I mean trees are aesthetically beautiful, but they're really functional. The height of the canopy is the place where solar radiation is interrupted. And below the height of the canopy, there is a microclimate where the temperatures, the diffusion of the radiation, and the cycling of moisture through respiration moderates and regulates the surface temperatures and the evaporation rates. And of course, respiration. So when you take away the vegetation, take away the trees, then you really don't have evapotranspiration, you just have evaporation. And this is what's happening in very large areas of the planet. So just talking about trees, talking about price of trees, is not really what we need to consider. We need to consider the value of trees. And the value of trees is far beyond what is being discussed. So it's not the cost of planting. It's not even the cost of tending. It's the value of the microclimate, the natural regulation of the temperature, the weather, and the climate. It's also the creation of soil fertility. And the habitat for microbial and fungal communities. And for wildlife. So when you realize that everything is interrelated and nothing is extraneous, then you kind of feel that the heartbreak of understanding how much has been lost through ignorance and through selfishness to imagine that just taking whatever human beings want to build things which are ultimately ephemeral. So what I noticed in my studies over the last few decades is whenever I'm looking at the cradles of civilization and these places, the sand is blowing over the ruins of once great civilizations. And then I look at the things that we have in our societies now. And if I look at them and look through time, I realize that they are the ruins of the future. And that what we're seeing when we look at forests and functional ecosystems is the eternal systems that live and die because death is part of life. And so I think that when we understand these kinds of things, we're also looking at things. I was just on the refugee discussions earlier today. And so many people have lost their human rights. How did this happen? And so it is really, as Zoe was talking about, it's a justice issue too. The all living things have rights. Everything that's alive today is a representation of all life since the beginning of time. It can't be any other way. And so if we lose our short term feelings and start understanding that we're just passing through, we're one generation of many, many generations that have come before us. And there should be many, many generations after us. And it's our duty to understand who we are and where we are and what our responsibility is. And I think we have a great opportunity now to make a new shift, a change. This is a paradigm shift because when we understand the value of ecosystem function, then we recognize that it's vastly more than the value of anything that human beings have ever made and everything that human beings will ever make. And that brings into clarity the difference between the value and the price. And it even brings into question our economic thinking to this point. So we've created economic systems, which ultimately, when you analyze them, were created through genocide or through slavery or through domination and of other cultures. And that's the basis of our current dominant political and economic systems. And so just as we look at degraded landscapes and we say we have to restore them, I think we have to look at the fairness in our societies and say, well, we have to restore that too. So when you look at this concept of stacking functions, you realize, actually, we won't solve our problems if we try to separate them. And we say, okay, the degradation is over here, but it's okay. The sort of immoral or unethical and cruel situations which have created our societies, well, that's okay. That happened before. We'll excuse it. It's okay. No, it's not okay. And it's not about blame or retribution. It's about truth and reconciliation. So if we can tell the truth and give everyone equal rights in the world and not only people will all living things, then something else happens. We're in a new era. We can have a new central intention. So if the central intention of human civilization is to gather material things, then it's not to restore ecological function. If the central intention is to restore ecological function on a planetary scale, we can take care of everyone. We can live in abundance and in peace. So my work has been in communications. And I think this is what we need to do, in part, is to communicate with one another and make sure that all the voices in the world can participate in this conversation. So that's sort of why I'm Los Angeles now to create a new series of programs. We're calling the flourishing path. And we hope that all of you will join us in communicating about what you're working on and many, many, many others. So thank you so much. I think we can get to questions. I hope that's helpful. No, thank you. You put it very well. And you highlighted the issue of communication. You highlighted that people are discussing the price and not the value, but also you linked it to what we were discussing earlier, that trees, it's not about putting trees on the ground. It's also about the process, but also the function of the trees, so that we need to consider that complexity involved during the process of land restoration. And with that, looking at the time, we have about two more minutes in this section. We have also a few questions that came through the YouTube channel. How can we bring funders attention into the other aspects of restoration? It seems to be a common issue for different organizations. Still seems like planting trees get the whole attention for dollars. So how do we bring funders attention? Thais, do you have some reflections on this question? How do we bring funders attention into other aspects of restoration? Well, I think we have done, since for the last 30 years, we have been trying several mechanisms and frameworks to bring more integration to our thinking and our action. I think that Rio Summit 30 years ago when I met John Liu and so many very powerful, so many pioneers of this perspective of integration, like Hazel Henderson and Vangari Mathai that already connected the trees and Vangari to poverty, to citizenship. I remember her saying that she started to build a political movement and she felt that the only way that people could build a political movement was to connect into their roots and their roots were like their places and the trees that they love, the environment in which the nature in which they were born. So I think and then we create many others. Now we have the SDGs and but the question is that how do you help or think about shifting this perception? Because as John said, ecosystems are something that we never created, with the technology, with our thinking. It's so rich, it's so sacred. I think for me it's how we can realign all this knowledge we have, no financial, scientific, in this big, I would say in the realm of sacredness, because when you really let nature penetrate you and you connect to nature, you feel so humble and what I see all the time with all most of these solutions is that they are very arrogant. It's built by people that are willing to show up, how their way of doing it is best and the solution here and here. I feel that even when I see very genuine people that sometimes are not educated, they don't take it. They know that this is not relevant. The relevance comes from also what you can do also informed by the ecosystems. We kind of have a view, a dominant view over the ecosystems. What the ecosystems also can tell us and how this can inform the whole mechanisms of funding, of articulating plans and that I still don't think, I don't see happening. I don't know what it will take us. Now maybe with COVID and the pandemic that we all were afraid that everything was going to kind of collapse, maybe we can be more sensible to these voices, the voices of the planet. I agree. We all need to connect with the nature and maybe also inspire the founders. I would like to invite those to continue to send us your questions through the YouTube channel because we have more time to discuss them and have continued this conversation. There's one other question that we received about how to measure growth performance. Felix, would you like to say a few words on this? I remember you mentioned a few metrics as you were presenting to us and what we are doing. Please go ahead. Not quite sure. I fully understand the context of the question, but I'm just making an assumption that it is how we do it within our platform. That is really what the TreeMapper app is for that we launched yesterday, which essentially allows for a range of different restoration strategies. For instance, if you go plant trees, you create these polygons on the ground simply with the app in a step-by-step process, and then you register sample trees within these areas where you planted and put tree tags on it. Then the app reminds you after one year, please go back to these specific sample trees. This is where they are and re-measure them. Based on the data we collect on certain sample trees, representative of the species planted, we then make projections for growth and survival and ecosystem recovery for the rest of the sites. If you want to understand this a little better, you can go to treemapper.app, so treemapper.attp, and you'll see a quick summary video, or you can already download the TreeMapper app in the App Store, in the Play Store. Obviously, it's free for everyone to use. Great. Thank you for that information, and maybe we'll find a way to share the link with our followers. We also have a question on mangroves. Which parameters can I use to determine restoration potentials or suitable land for mangrove regeneration? John, do you have some reflections on this? Well, I've documented mangroves in several continents around the world, and I've seen many good programs. I'm not really an expert personally, but the fact is it's rather easy to grow mangroves. You just have to know where they live. You can stick them into the ground and they grow, so you can easily create nurseries for mangroves. You can easily you can easily plant them, and they thrive, generally speaking. It's when they're destroyed because of trying to drain areas to have more land, or they're cut down, that's where the real problem is. So protecting the existing mangroves and restoring mangroves where they've been destroyed. That's a huge thing, and of course the real thing about mangroves is that they protect your coastal systems and they even grow soils. So if you start to see how the mangroves raise the level at the coastal regions, then theoretically you could see the relationship between sea level rise and, oh dear, sorry, sorry, that was from Egypt. We're working in Egypt. So, you know, I think there are many, I would recommend, I know that initiatives of change is working on this. I'll put something into the chat. Thank you, John, and we're looking forward to reading what you share with us. We have one more question in the chat that I would probably, I would like to ask it to our panelists before we close this session. How can we be pragmatic keeping our broad perspective at the center? Great question from Thais. Maybe you also have some reflections on this, but I would like to start with Zoe, what do you think? How can we be pragmatic keeping broad perspective at the center? Sure, I'm not sure. I think it's important to try and recognize that just as all of our ecosystems are different and all of our perspectives will be different on how to deal with these issues as well. And, I mean, we only have so much time and capacity, so I think it is important to just try and stay focused on individual contexts and look at the problems on the ground in each particular context, speak to the people who are from there, and then try and communicate that in the most effective way possible. I think going back to one of your earlier questions, one of the biggest challenges, the reason why we keep focusing on trees, it's because it's a communications issue. I mean, our organizations are trying to simplify things and be pragmatic in the way that we communicate, but it is a challenge. So I think as small organizations, we need to kind of just do our best on the ground where we are, and then we need to look to the larger organizations in the world that are setting these bigger goals and challenges to the various countries and hopefully they will also take a course that is conducive to all of us having a more holistic approach and being able to speak about it in a more holistic way. Can I say something? Yes, please go ahead. I think what I've been observing, that there are many different entry points that can help us with that, like hook people in another way because at the end, it will be holistic if people start to see it holistically, like even communities. And I've seen a big contribution of nurseries, when you do the whole steps of nursing, from collecting, from identifying the species, from collecting the seeds, from seeing them, watching them growing, and kind of doing in different places, seeing the species that have thrived there, have stayed there, and how to support their replication, their growth. And so I think that many, we have incredible experience in communities around the globe, and I think that putting them together and seeing what, how they connected to people, I think it's critical because at the end, we, this holistic perspective, will only be prevalent if people believe in it, and if they will only believe in it, if they are connected to it. So in which ways can you be reconnected to nature in a practical way, not just like looking for the beauty of nature, but really aligning, restoring it and regenerating it. So I think that nurseries are a very important point, and they build communities, people from all ages, you have like a network of nurseries in Brazil that are all made by retired people, people that go to these places and like they stay there and support the collected seeds and then like take care of these nurseries. Quite interesting. Felix, you have a few reflections on that. How can we be pragmatic, keeping our broad perspective in a minute or so? Please go ahead. I think being pragmatic in this context just means using this massive opportunity that this excitement around trees gives us and running with it, and obviously then using that excitement to use that funding to support a broader range of services. I loved what you said, Zoe, that obviously we do use this tree pricing model, but we make it a little more expensive so that we do plant that tree, but we also use that funding for all the auxiliary work around it. And I think that's exactly what we should do. We should use that momentum, not fight this excitement, not have endless debates about how this is how this is imperfect and people are not smart enough to understand the full complexity of our work. This is a natural process and it's a great opportunity and we should use it. Interesting. Let's not fight it, let's work with what we have and find a way to also make it work with all those other approaches that are not currently funded or considered in the restoration project. There's one more question from the tree on tree initiative. Have we given any thought to creating an alternative coin that can be representative of the increased value in restored land? You could buy tokens as a way of donating. John, what do you think about this? Yes, I've been thinking about that for quite a long time. I think it's very important that we have a very careful development of that. It's not about an individual or one organization, it's about creating a currency that can be used around the world. It's a trust mechanism. It's also a means of exchange and it's a storehouse of value. When we have this conversation and one of the things I wanted to mention and I mentioned earlier is the flourishing path concept for the television program is to have this conversation in public. So instead of going in a back room and making decisions for everyone, I think the best way is we do this in public and discuss exactly what's possible and what we could do and then how everyone can discuss it together and we come up with a collective intelligence. I've been calling that collaborative inquiry for collective intelligence and I think that's what we should be doing rather than trying to make this and impose it or some. So that then of course changes the situation because theoretically we could use that type of a mechanism to finance the restoration. So I'm very hopeful for that. Thank you very much. And thank you for that. Dear viewers, please keep your questions coming. We appreciate all your interaction that you are also following us at this particular time of the day. So thank you everyone. Right now, I would actually like to bring in Peter and Misha since you are also following us and part of this conversation. Any other reflections you would like to make? Any additions? The floor is yours. Thank you so much. Thank you to all the speakers in Bernadette. I found that incredibly inspiring and I think for me the last little roundup really hits home. It's like looking at the context, use the momentum we have. Don't get blinded by the fact that we could focus too much on the trees and not see the entire forest for it. There's so much work to be done and the last thing that we need to do is focus on the cynicism which can be brought about by whittling down to something which could be as critical as all the other ecosystems that need to be functioned in on. So I'm feeling really inspired by this. I think it was a really fantastic conversation. Yeah, I'm eager to see where this goes and one of the things that we've consistently been coming around to is also how does carbon relate to the bigger conversation around this as well. Because if we're focusing in on carbon as a means to bringing in funds for restoration and there's obviously a lot of projects out there that are based on grasslands or based on drylands and they just don't have the same capacity to bring in carbon as a means for bringing income. And so hopefully this is the beginning of a longer conversation which allows for us to stack those ecosystem functions and to realise the value that they bring to all communities, plant communities, animal communities and human communities. Yeah, so thank you. Peter, over to you. I also see questions coming in that are really interesting and it's shocking how aligned Misha and I are so often now. We hardly know each other but there's so much alignment. Maybe go back to why we've organised this session and that's because we are still in between the world where value is truly accorded to functioning ecosystems and where we're struggling to get funding in to restore them. And that's my job with the ecosystem administration camps is to help camps find those routes. People are willing to join, which has made that difficult. People are willing to join. That adds so much. But when we're talking to potential funders and so often these are tree funding organisations, we find it difficult to have that whole conversation where the tree is part of an entire project. An example where John is now, the Hollywood sign, it's going to be restored, that area around it. It's an arid region. It doesn't need many trees, a few thousands. But the entire project will encompass so much more in other plans in water storage and permeability that we couldn't get it funded through tree campaigns but also find it very difficult to get funded in another way. So for me that was a very practical question. Can we find something else that gets people excited? And I got excited about Felix's comment about maybe hectares or square metres. That's a unit or we can find something else. And that's the question that we're trying to pose. Can we find something else so that people start to understand the whole value, so to speak, of an ecosystem? And my background is in marketing. So I fully understand that it needs to be easy to communicate. It's to reach a lot of people. It needs to be an immediate click and the tree is perfect. But isn't it also our task to get people to understand there is more than the tree in an ecosystem? And can we find something as easy to communicate? And I don't have the answer, a square metre. But what does that tell us about all the stackings of functions and all the depths? This is a real big challenge, I think. So we'll keep searching. But I'm very glad with this discussion too. I find it very meaningful. Thank you for that input. I see John's hand up. And as we run up, I'm also going to suggest each of you reflect on this question or suggestion also from Felix. Do we have any ideas for powerful metrics that could allow us to measure our work? So yeah, let's, all of you panellists, provide a quick roundup closing remarks, but also reflecting on this question. Do we have good metrics that can allow us to measure our work? Over to John. Okay. Well, I think that what I've noticed is that surface temperatures can change dramatically with vegetation. So when you have exposed soils, the temperatures are increased by really 10 to 15 degrees centigrade easily. And when we look at the intergovernmental panel on climate changes discussions about the two to four degree centigrade global temperature averages increases. And then we think that in small areas we can change the temperature on the surface by 10 to 15 degrees. We start to understand what everybody could do. And I think that's a very, very good metric. And I would say that this concept about, you know, we really need to think not only about how do we make a new currency, we have to think about where did the currencies that exist come from? And sadly, when we look back in history, we can see genocide and slavery and mercantilism and the loss of human rights. So in order to have this conversation, we're going to have to have a very, very long conversation and that it really should take place in public. And that's what I feel at this point. I'm now beginning to consider when I turn 70. And this is something that I'm preparing myself for because I don't want it to sneak up on me. And I've been thinking, well, what do I want to do in the rest of my life? So I think we're, so Felix, you have to take over. It's all up to you soon. But I think that what I see is that we are at a crossroads and that human civilization has the information necessary to choose a different direction. And we certainly have a need because the direction we're on has predictable catastrophic outcomes. So anybody who's thinking about this, they have to realize that the situation is pretty grim. Certainly in California, when you start to have millions of acres burning every year, it's terrifying. So now is the time to change. We have the information that we need. I think we're reaching critical mass in thinking. I noticed I was in Zurich. I was speaking to Credit Suisse. And I told them about what I felt about the currency situations. And I said, please come and tell me why the existing fiat currencies are okay. And none of their executives could come and defend the status quo. So this is this has also happened in the Davos where they've said, they've said, you know, well, we need to change. So when everybody knows that we need to change, I think the time has come to change. So we'd better have this profound conversation so we can really have a collective feeling about what the change should become. And I think those change the metric too. Yeah, I took notes on the surface temperature as a great metric, alternative metric. Now I'm coming to you, Felix. Do you also have some recommendations on the powerful metric? I think there are so many things we need to be tracking to look at our impact. Someone in the chat just mentioned pollinators, you know, and all a range of biodiversity recovery metrics we need to be looking at. Carbon is incredibly important as a motivator for a lot of what we do. Obviously, not the only motivator. You know, John mentions temperature. I don't think there's ever going to be the one other metric that is going to replace trees as basically the single defining metric because this is just too complex that there would be one thing that would supplant it as the one metric that can capture it at all. I think the land unit, the square meter restored, would probably be the best candidate or the hectare restored. But that's not new information, right? All along, if you'd asked anyone 10 years ago, is a hectare or the individual tree a better metric for restoration? Obviously, the hectare land unit is, but it just doesn't carry that emotional weight. That's the entire reason we're using trees in the first place. It'll never work in our communications the way that the individual trees work. Obviously, we need to, I think we, or I expect that we will be continuing our work by valuing those trees, communicating in terms of trees while at the same time professionally tracking the impact of our work with a much wider set of indicators that we're all tracking at the same time. But I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with also measuring and then communicating the work in terms of trees. I will have to apologize for Bernardette. She has left this meeting because there's a child waiting for attention. Maybe that actually made me think humans make up words for everything. And we have something called love, which has so many layers and is really complex, but we have one word. And maybe we can think of something that's one word that does prevent complexity that people intuitively feel. I don't know how to quantify love. I feel lots of love for my children, but maybe we can start thinking about it because I agree with you, Felix. It's a great communicator, the tree, and there is a connection. If you're sitting next to a tree, you feel it. But the reality is that the metric of the tree where all the funding goes to is not sufficient for all of the ecosystem restoration, which is what the two practice underground people here told us. So we do need to either then turn it around, how can we make that fundable tree part of a holistic ecosystem project so that funds are more aligned or we find another route. I've promised Bernardette I would facilitate and I just took the floor. So Zoe maybe or Thais reaction on that. So I like the hectare unit or the square meter unit. I agree with Felix. It's probably not as exciting as a tree. Something I've been thinking about recently is that if we're talking about ecosystem restoration work, it's people doing the work, right? It's not magically happening by itself or in a vacuum. So one of the things I was thinking about is actually funding the people who are doing the work, funding work restoration days or something like that. And then it does become an emotional thing because you can connect to these individuals in the places that they're working and their passions and what they're doing. So that's one idea. I also have been thinking a lot about an index that we're using within our work, which is actually developed by the World Resources Institute. They have an amazing restoration indicator wheel. It puts all of the the different indicators, some of which Felix listed, which we've all been speaking about. It puts them into eight different categories. And then there are 24 sub themes. And it covers every kind of impact that restoration could have. And then from that, they actually have a way of developing an index, which is a number that you can then track your progress over time. So depending on which of the indicators you pick, then you can put them into the index and say, okay, it started out as a seven and now the 7.5 based on all of these indicators. So I think that's something that's quite interesting. Thinking about one index that we could use, perhaps a number that can change over time, depending on on our indicators that we pick. Also not super exciting for the general public, but I think in terms of tracking many different things, as Felix was saying internally on the ground when we're doing this work, I think it is important to keep track of all of this, so that we can start to be more holistic in our communications. And I'll hand over to Tais, because I think I took the floor. Yeah, it's fine. What I feel is that this whole business, because it's our business of planting trees and doing like impact, millions of actors and millions of trees replicates a lot of the mindset, the current mindset of the state of school. But when you go, I mean, in a place like Brazil, it's so incredible, you know, that still we have, of course it's important to plant trees, but what about the trees that we already have and we are destroying every day, you know, just because of that mentality that that your land and your tree and the trees you have, the only value they have is if they can be used it, you know, for cattle or for logging, for wood, for this kind of things. And I haven't seen it yet, you know, in spite of all these conservation institutions, anything really practical, practically feasible in terms of supporting people to maintain the trees that they already have in their land, you know, it's incredible. Even the other day, it was so, I couldn't, I was in a parking lot and they saw my car and they said, ah, you have like a ranch, I said, I do, I said, what do you do, do you raise cattle or you do, or you log trees, because in the mindset of people, you know, that's the only thing a ranch is for. These we are signing 2021 and Rio and in Brazil, which is a country so known, I mean, for the environment. So I think for me, a way of measuring it is how many trees can we maintain standing and how can we connect it to income generation for people, you know, for them to maintain them in their land, to maintain their love for their land. And these I don't see anywhere, you know, because even the mechanism like the pain for ecosystem service is ridiculous, is ridiculous what they pay. It's like $20 for one actor, what is $20 for an actor a year, you know, so unless we change that mindset, you know, and funders, really people that have money, because when you go to people that have money, there is all the things they want to do parks and they want to do this and that with governments and all that. But how about the small landowners, you know, which are millions and would need, would connect it to the thing of justice, you know, because they are the real caretakers of what we have. And for me, this would be a big change, you know, in terms of indicators, not only the trees that we plant, but the trees that we conserve standing, you know, and, but you know, this is still, you know, we say about the certification of biodiversity and carbon sequestration, but still, all this is so expensive to do. And then you have to look for funders, how a small farmer would have access to that, you know, so I believe that these conversations have to happen. But at a higher level, I don't know, I mean, how we can make these minds more sensitive, you know, I really don't know, but I see it so clearly, you know, that this could could make a big shift, you know, if we founded these mechanisms. Yes. And that's the challenge. Maybe we can do it after 10 years. Let's draw this to a close. I see that in the YouTube chat, someone raised the soil health index. It's another important one. And maybe that's quantifiable. But, John, just in your mind, having thought about it so long, maybe you can wrap us up and say, you know, what would you suggest to help this particular debate forward on ecosystem restoration and trees? Well, I would say that we have to give voice to the people who are voiceless in many ways, because they will have a different perspective. And the perspective of those in power has been expressed for a very long time. And it hasn't been able to deal with the complexity with the basic human rights of all of the people. So, that means that we should enlarge, I think it was Einstein who said, like, if you have a problem and it's, you can't solve it, make it bigger, you know. And I think this is not a bad idea, you know. When you make it bigger, then you go out to the larger scale and you look at it and you go, oh, now I see that it's connected to this other thing and I was looking at it too narrowly and I didn't realize that it was connected to all these other things. So, you know, this is certainly true here in Los Angeles if you go look at the LA River and you see that it's basically a concrete channel down the middle of the city and you think, what in the world? Who was thinking of that? You know, like, this is ridiculous. This place was a great wetland. And now it's just dried out husk, you know, with wildfires burning every year. So, when you zoom out and you look at that, you can see it this way. And I think that's what we need to do with this question about value. The value is different than the price. And the value is not a single factor. It's a massive collection of all the things that you're happening that include not only trees, but human beings and not only human beings, but all other life forms. I mean, when we start to realize how many fungi are connected to the trees and how the microbes and the fungi are actually symbiotically related to the trees and so they don't exist. The trees don't exist without them and they don't exist without the trees. And that's the basis of evolutionary succession. And then how could we imagine that we could be here if we destroy the habitat for the basic building blocks of life? So, this kind of understanding is going to require a very interesting shift in human civilization. And I must say, although I can see very many downsides to global pandemic, one thing that happened was a lot of time to contemplate quite complex thought. And maybe we're, now maybe this is an ability to jump forward into a new understanding and a new paradigm for human civilization. Okay, thanks. I think we're going to wrap this up. Thank you to our moderator, Bernadette from Rwanda. Misha and Zoe from GreenPop in South Africa, Felix, Germany, but now in Mexico. Thais from Brazil, John, you're in the US, in California. I'm here in the Netherlands. This is a little bit of a global community working on resolving a problem together, which is what John is suggesting we should all do. We've never intended to resolve the issue we raised in this meeting. That's not possible. We've learned also that it's really difficult. We'll take the advice from John, zoom out, try to think about complexity and see if we can introduce that in what we're trying to do in this decade. Thank you, Misha, GreenPop for partnering with us on this. Thank you all for participating. Thank you all in the YouTube channel for watching. Once we stop, the recording will be saved on YouTube. Tell your friends to go look at this and tell them to come up with great ideas in the comment section. Thanks, everyone. Thank you, Peter. Thanks, John.