 Welcome to the finals of the Uplink Trillion Trees Challenge. In this session, we will hear from six finalists about their solutions to how we can scale and accelerate the conservation and restoration of our forests. This session is a collaboration between Uplink, the World Economic Forum's digital platform to crowdsource innovative solutions to the sustainable development goals, and 1T.org, the Trillion Trees platform, which was set up to connect, empower and serve a global community to conserve, restore and grow a trillion trees over the next decade. Uplink, since its founding, since its launch with founding partners Salesforce and Deloitte, has received more than 500 submissions across a series of challenges on oceans, on COVID and of course trillion trees, which is what we will be focusing on today. And there are already 4,000 active entrepreneurs, change makers, experts and investors on the platform, looking on how to connect and scale some of these solutions to our most intractable challenges and roadblocks. So I am delighted to present this session to you today where we will hear from some of these amazing entrepreneurs. We have received over 250 submissions to the Trillion Trees Challenge. We have narrowed it down to a cohort of 20 and 12 semifinalists and the six finalists that you will hear from today are the ones that will pitch their solutions. And today we will ask our panel to come down to narrow to the three winners. So I am delighted to introduce our speakers. First of all, Inger Anderson, Director General of the United Nations Environment Program, Hindu Ibrahim, President of the Association for Indigenous Women and Peoples of Chad, Susan Di Bianca, Chief Impact Officer and Executive Vice President of Corporate Relations for Salesforce, Rod Taylor, the Global Director of Forests at the World Resources Institute, Chinayenwa Okoro Onu, Founder and Managing Director of Waste or Create Hub and one of our global shapers, Bruno Sanchez Andrade Nuno, Principal Scientist, AI for the Earth at Microsoft, and Michael Renner, Managing Partner at Deloitte. Our panel of judges will be hearing from the finalists and the way this session will run is that we will first hear some introductory remarks from Inger Anderson and Hindu Ibrahim and afterwards each of the finalists whom I will present in a moment will have five minutes to present their solution followed by five minutes question and answers from the judging panel which will really be those 10 minutes that they have to pitch their solution and to give an insight into the amazing work that they have been doing across the different aspects of the Trillion Trees Challenge. We have a very broad variety of solutions because we wanted to bring in the diversity as the challenge asked for submissions across the different areas of scaling solutions to accelerate forest restoration and conservation, mass mobilization, technology for trees, greening our cities and establishing the forest economy. So a very wide variety of submissions, each of them amazing in their own right. Throughout this session we welcome your participation and the way we will do that is that we will welcome your questions through Slido. So as you can see on your screen you can go to Slido.com or scan the QR code that is on the right of your screen at the moment which will take you to the website and by entering the event code as the IS and selecting the room uplink Trillion Trees Challenge you will be able to ask your questions and more importantly you will also be able to vote for our People's Choice Award once you have heard from each of the five, six finalists and the three winners along with the People's Choice Award will be announced at the closing session of the Sustainable Development Impact Summit on Thursday 24th September at 2pm European time. So I am now delighted to turn to our first speaker, Inger Anderson. Thank you for joining us. 1T.org was set up to support the UN Decade for Ecosystems restoration and I would like to welcome you and ask you to tell us a little bit more about the UN Decade and the central role of eco-preneurship innovation and what is often called the restoration generation and helping us to achieve the goals of the decade. Inger. Thank you so much and a great huge thanks to both the web to uplink to 1T.org for really pushing this idea and this imperative and huge congratulations to all the entries. There's so much innovation in there and we are so impressed by I think the judges will have an impossible task ahead of them but that will be for others to worry about. Now first of all just to say look we are in a crisis globally speaking we are losing our nature, we are losing our ecosystems, we are losing and in so doing we are losing species but we are also losing the very regulation that nature provides whether or rainfall of fertility etc. So all of this really matters and the twin sister to the IPCC the IPBES which deals with the science of ecosystems and species and biodiversity has come out with some very important data data that tells us that we are really eroding the nature upon which all life is based we've interfered with or impacted about 77% of the total land surface of the earth it bears thinking about so 77% of the land surface we've sort of done something to it now that has been good it has gotten us food it has gotten us cities it has gotten us infrastructure all good but we can't continue to do this and assume that all these other things will continue happening. So and of course we know very well that nature is critical when it comes to and ecosystems are critical when it comes to carbon storage to weather patterns to pollinators to overall soil fertility and obviously to species as we know it. So as we are seeing this loss of fertility as we are seeing the creation of degraded lands the UN has decided thanks to our member states that this next decade shall be the decade for restoration and so having a total amount of of these submissions really showing that young people that eco I have a hard time getting that word but entrepreneurs in the eco sphere are willing and ready to roll this out and to show initiative this is massive. Just last week we issued the global biodiversity outlook and that is the outlook where we said so how's nature doing and unfortunately the report card that we are getting as a humanity is a fail. We set in 2010 some targets that were set in Japanese city called Aichi prefecture so therefore they're referred to as the Aichi targets and we're failing across all 20 of these targets that's not good enough. And as we're heading into COP 15 of biodiversity at which point we will set new targets for the next decade and into 2050 it becomes critical and here restoration can become key. We fragmented, exhausted, extracted, cut down so much of nature. So let's think about that. Let's see how we can stretch. Now there is some good news. 91 countries have signed up for integrating nature into how they look upon their national wealth if you like how they account for how wealthy they are and that's critical because as professor Parthadas Gupta says nature is an asset. It's an asset class that we need to consider as part of our wealth. Not that we're going around putting dollar signs on trees but that we have an understanding that without nature frankly the rest is sort of immaterial because it only produces the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the houses we live in, the clothes we wear. It's kind of basic stuff. And so this ecosystem a restoration decade it calls specifically that we should prevent halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystem prevent, halt and reverse. So that's what we are about. We have had an extensive consultation on how to roll out the decade. There's been massive amount of young people who are really engaged and we're very, very grateful for that with our partners in food and agriculture, organization FAO and UNEP we were asked by the United Nations to be the sort of custodians or the primary movers for this decade but we are wanting everyone to crowd in. That is what really matters here. And so this decade will kick off in the beginning of next year and we're really looking to every single person, every single company, every single community taking and of course every single country and government taking a proactive role here. And youth organizations have been critical and will continue to be critical. The UN's major group on children and youth have been really instrumental for us but we look at everyone to come in. And private sector and this is my final point, Nicole private sector is critical and this is where the WEF has such a beautiful bridge because you're combining it all in this particular initiative. We know that the private sector right now has a significant part of the solution. After all, private sector manages agriculture, private sector manages forestry, private sector manages fishery, private sector manages infrastructure. So be part of the solution and obviously try to find ways that the financial sector will begin to not invest in gray and dirty futures but invest in green and lush futures. And that also means ensuring that the kind of subsidies that are going into gray and dirty may be shifted out. Today we're talking about millions and trillions of dollars that are going into unsustainable subsidies, whether it be on the energy side or whether it be on the agriculture side. Look at that and right now we're 15 billion dollars going into from our public monies into stimulus. This will not happen again in the post pandemic setting. We're trying to get the economies back. This stimulus package across the world has to have that green reset and that green reset needs to be part, restoration needs to be part of that green reset. So that's what it's all about. These fantastic young people who have put in these many, many proposals, you will have a headache finding out who's going to be the very best. But I think each and every person who has put in for some of these ideas actually is part of the solution. And from our side at Junib, we wish you all the very best of luck and we look forward to working with you, both with uplink as well as obviously with the trillion tree challenge as well as with the weft in the months and years ahead. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Inger. And as you very rightly say, all of us need to participate in this UN decade and in the process of restoration. And let me turn to you, Hindu, with your experience of working with Indigenous peoples and local communities, how can we make sure that the Indigenous people local communities perspective is included and is, you know, goes hand in hand with the types of innovations that we are going to hear about today. Hindu, over to you. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's really a great pleasure to be with all of you and it's hard to talk after Inga. Inga, so nice to see you and thanks for the leadership. So I'm firstly really honoured to be in this panel of juggies for this final round of the trillion tree competitions and we all believe that you are already a winner because your time dedicated to collaborate and achieve all the solutions to this global goal. So congratulations to all of you. Winning one, maybe it's something, but all of you are doing an incredible work that's helping all of us. The world estimate more than 37% of the cost-effect of emission reduction that come from the nature-based solutions and us coming from indigenous communities, for me in nature-based solutions, it is our way of life and we know already the most vulnerable communities know how to protect this nature in the natural way for a long time and as I am representing indigenous peoples and one of the sustainable development gold advocate and also the web champion for nature my message for all of you is we must rebuild our relationship with nature for the survival of the peoples and our planet and that is all about it and that is also all about the competition that we are having it is about peoples it is about the indigenous peoples in the local communities indigenous peoples that save more than 80% of the world by diversity but who found themselves in front line also of the climate change and biodiversity laws so all the solutions coming from the technology innovations need to respond to the needs of those communities it's need also to serve those communities and they cannot be only beneficiaries there must be a partners on those innovations, they must build it together because we are talking about sustainability and this is the lack who took us in this pathway of climate change and loss of biodiversity but if there are a partners I think they will take it for long and Inga said also because of the COVID we are in this pathway maybe we are lucky to meet virtually but imagine for the community who do not have access to the electricity and we can't talk about the internet so they can't meet but they are experts in the field where we talk about the land restoration, ecosystem restoration when we talk about tree planting when we talk about saving the remaining tropical forest that we have they are more expert than all of us that meeting virtually even they do not have access to this technology so why not we can have a proper technology that can help those people who putting the food in our tables to help us restore the ecosystem that we do have so this is all about what we are doing so the most vulnerable and poor people in this rural areas they deserve this rebuilding better and rebuilding green to respond to them to give them all what they need and to replant these trillions trees because we cannot get one trees overnight we can get it with our relationship over years and that's what indigenous peoples and local communities know so we need everyone in each from governments private sector of course indigenous peoples local communities civil society to come together there is no vaccine for climate change we cannot wear a mask we cannot build a war but we can fight it together if we all engage and I'm so excited to hear from each of you experience and presentations and as I said you are already a winner and you are giving us a tough job if we need to choose one among you but I believe that you are all a winner and I will be very happy to follow up with all of you you are changing the life of my peoples and of many other indigenous communities that you do not know thank you very much thank you very much Hindu and as we will hear very soon I think uplink is doing a great job in precisely bringing together some of these perspectives from across the country and how we can bridge the technology and AI with traditional knowledge and local communities on the ground so without further ado I would like to turn to the pitching part of this session and I would like to introduce our finalists we will start with Simon Husson from the Borneo Nature Foundation second will be Adam Philby Drendra Systems and then Mike Hans from Inga Foundation fourth we have Diego Sanz and Lisa Walker from Reforestem and EcoSphere Plus then John Leary Trees for the Future and David Ezra J from GreenStand so we will start now with our first finalist Simon Husson from the Borneo Nature Foundation Simon over to you thank you Nicole and good afternoon everyone my name is Simon Husson I'm the founder and director of the Borneo Nature Foundation and it's a great honour to be here and it's my pleasure to present our project to you today let me start by introducing BNFTU we are an Indonesian NGO with our headquarters in Kalimantan on the island of Borneo where we work with government, communities and other stakeholders to promote sustainable development and to protect some of the last great rainforest in the world we started life 21 years ago as a small research project with data and providing recommendations that helped lead to the designation of the Sabangau National Park and this is still the location of our main programme Sabangau is the largest lowland forest remaining in Borneo it's a dense flooded swamp forest with an amazing array of biodiversity and the forest stands on top of a bed of peat up to 15 metres thick over 90% of the carbon in the ecosystem is locked into this peat where it's been accumulating for 20,000 years unfortunately much of this peatland has been drained and degraded by human activity which causes the peat to dry out and to become highly flammable climate change causes frequent droughts and in 2015 fires erupted in the forest near to our long-term research camp and these quickly spread and burned along a 2km front and although we sent 100 people out to fight the fires day and night including our entire research team it only took the arrival of the rains to finally put it out and close to losing everything that we'd been working for for two decades so it was a disaster from our perspective but of course the overall impact was much greater huge areas of forest and their biodiversity were lost and the health impacts for local people were incredibly serious in 2015 children in Kalimantan were wearing master school long before we'd ever heard of Covid-19 and the amount of carbon released was massive with a daily emissions rate greater than the EU's burning of forest fuels which led to one of the highest recorded annual increases in atmospheric CO2 now for us in BNF this was a huge wake-up call this was a realisation that if we were to achieve lasting impact we had to diversify and scale up everything we were doing we worked at the grass roots level developing community-led solutions to tackle both the fires and the causes of fire so we established trains and equipped three new community firefighting teams and when the fires returned in 2019 these guys were right on the front line succeeding and stopping all of them entering the forest we encouraged changes in behaviour from working with farmers to develop peat-friendly agriculture to teaching young generations and we worked to restore the peatland to block and drain its channels to rewret the peat and by reforesting burnt areas now reforestation which is our main topic today of course is critical in burnt peatlands one characteristic of burnt peatland is that it burns over and over and over again it spreads out and burns even more forest so reforesting the burnt area doesn't only help rebuild that forest but it protects the surrounding forest as well but of course reforestation burnt peatland is hard if you were to log a piece on forest it would generally grow back naturally but once the top layer of peat has burnt away the nutrient layer and seedbank are lost and the conditions are so harsh that a climax vegetation of grasses and ferns grows instead so we have undertaken research on how to restore burnt peatlands discovering which native species will grow here and learning from other organisations attempting the same in Calimanta so in 2018 we started our community nursery project in order to provide the seedlings to enable us to plant at scale it's a simple concept we give young seedlings to community groups which they grow on their land we train them to be expert nursery managers give them resources when they're ready to plant and then we protect and we monitor them for the long term in this way the community gain additional income and they're involved in all stages of the process the communities themselves helped to develop the strategy with us and their ownership of the project and the crossover with the firefighting teams motivates them to protect their trees we're working with women's groups to make organic bags that improve planting success and as the project grows we're working on a cultural project so they can use the nurseries for their own long term benefit and of course there are numerous benefits for conservation so today we've got seven nurseries up and running with 40 people working in them and we planted the first 50,000 seedlings earlier this year it's a simple project, it's not expensive on a per tree basis and has clear upscaling and potential and co-benefits now we're still near the start of our journey so we set ourselves an initial target which is planted by 2025 and we want to partner with other local organisations to develop and spread this initiative across Kalimantan now to achieve this we need to complement our existing funding base by accessing new sources of funding from partnerships with the private sector to exploring the potential of carbon based financing and making that work for all tropical peatlands now funding was to become unlimited beyond that our challenge is to develop our own institutional capacity we've grown substantially since 2015 and we have a fantastic team of 70 people working on our projects in Kalimantan but we will need to increase the size of our teams add experience and provide training opportunities and hands in hand with this is increasing our expertise to address the most difficult challenges such as reforesting the most remote and hard to reach areas and making sure that this project is integrated as part of a regional effort to identify a crisis in Kalimantan and to make sure that our projects are having a real long lasting impact on the ground thank you very much I just wanted to finish with two images there the orangutan was the reason that I went to Borneo in the first place but it's the people of Kalimantan that are the reason that I've stayed and want to help future generations thank you very much thank you very much Simon so who from our judges would like to ask Simon the first question yes, Rod Taylor thanks Simon great presentation I'm interested to know what other threats there are of Sabanga what other forms of encroachment of their mining is a illegal logging and how your project can address those threats yes thank you Rod the area before it became a national park in 2004 was a log forest and it suffered heavily from illegal logging at the turn of the century and one of the first conservation efforts we put in place was dealing with illegal logging helping support community patrol teams to stop it and managed to successfully stop that and soon after the start of the national park yes, there are encroachment issues on the edge the drainage of the peat is important not only because it helps promote the fires but also it does cause peat subsidence and so all of these issues are being addressed we're addressing this sort of integrated fashion to rewret the peat and to work with farmers and stuff and ultimately to support the national park management in helping them protect the entire area thanks yes Michael hi, what is the I think you mentioned is the total addressable area to be restored in Borneo I think you said 2 million hectares now there's 2 million hectares of peatland burned yes now it's a huge area of peat and obviously that requires interventions at every level from the government down and from grass roots up much of this area is under small holder management and then we need to work with the farmers to promote peat friendly management and to actually find ways that we can actually grow some of the peat is forest and protected some of the peat is in agriculture areas and the most important thing with the peat is to be growing on it is to continue having biomass growing on top and maintaining the peat because so much of it is wasteland, it's degrading, it's burning of course and so yes and then within the national park obviously the area to reforest is smaller but the total challenge is of course huge and what you've learned about restoring preserving peat, how generalizable do you see that being other areas in the world, I mean I don't know enough to say this to any confidence but I imagine there must be something similar elsewhere even up to and including boreal peat for example, do you think you've learned anything that would be helpful in very different ecologies? Of course and I mean so peatlands are a particularly difficult ecosystem to restore because you have this interface between the vegetation on top and the peat underneath and you get rid of one and it impacts the other we're learning a lot from peatland scientists that work in arboreal peatlands and through international peat society and other organizations like that there's a lot of discussion on them how to restore, how to rewet these in peatlands these tropical peatlands is probably the largest scale that you can look at for this but obviously the reforestation the rewetting and preventing future fires will go hand in hand. Thank you Simon, I think we may have time for a very brief last question, 30 seconds Hindu I think you had one more question for Simon Thank you very much just to quickly Simon, I know that there are indigenous communities and also a local displaced people that resettle in Kalimanta so are you working with both of them or just one and if both of them may you name the organization please thank you so much. Okay thank you very much, there's organizations like Care and Wetlands International and others that work with these communities and we also work obviously with these communities in our area as well there's indigenous communities that are predominantly fishing based communities and they rely on the peatstone forest for a huge number of natural resource of natural resources and natural benefits for example fish in the young stage of their life have their very life stages within the peatstone itself there's also many of these communities that have moved to Kalimantan were actually moved to these peatland areas with the idea to farm it in the late 90s there was a disastrous agricultural project that cleared huge areas of peat to give to communities to farm and of course that farm intended to fail it's very difficult to do agriculture there so these are communities that we're helping to work with for peat-friendly agriculture and helping to promote different ways of growing crops, different forms of permaculture and fisheries to help them there. Thank you Simon we have more questions from the audience but we unfortunately have to move on to our next finalist who will be presenting for Dendra Systems Adam over to you Good afternoon everybody and thank you for the opportunity to present to you When we founded Dendra Systems over six years ago carbon was just below 400 parts per million as of July this year it was at 414 and despite all the efforts to curtail it's still climbing with a net loss of over 6 billion trees a year it's not just carbon though we are facing an unprecedented loss of biodiversity when we look at the challenge there are many ways to attack it the list of solutions is long we can restore, we can sequester we can reduce and replace at Dendra we've chosen to focus on restoration and sequestration our mission to tackle this challenge is to enable scalable restoration for our complex and very importantly our biodiverse natural world the market drivers for ecosystem restoration are primarily biodiversity and carbon Biodiversity restoration is already well established and regulated within the resources market and it's starting to drive activities globally we've completed over 38 projects to date across 11 countries in the last few years working some of the world's largest resource companies the carbon market is growing but to reach its full potential as a vehicle for restoration investment requires trust, scale and optimization Dendra have developed and deployed an end to end system design to help biodiverse ecosystems survive and thrive using our own area-based imaging platform we collect, process and manage enormous datasets representing intimate ecosystem detail these datasets offer significant improvements over traditional survey methods such as those that use ground-based transects and reliant instruments we're not only we're also not only constrained by the limitations of satellite-based datasets which sacrifice the detail needed to manage biodiverse environments especially in years 0-10 when early intervention to improving outcomes the complexity of modeling these environments relies on significant but yet scalable compute resource developed over the last six years our AI-driven engine can now provide insight into ecosystem condition to help for flora and fauna species and the risk posed by invasive species and landform instability these detailed insights will facilitate targeted action improved outcomes and increased accountability Dendra's platform enables end-to-end transparency and stakeholder engagement from landholders to investors via a single scalable platform at Dendra we've taken biodiversity analytics to a whole new level we're able to analyze every inch of soil and every plant down to a blade of grass we can achieve this at scale whilst maintaining accuracy the insights produced can be used to efficiently mobilize landowners portfolio managers and communities to both influence and enter also audit the outcomes we're able to see and share data on land in a way that has never been possible before whether you're monitoring tree species tracking growth or viewing accurate carbon sequestration data both at the per plant or ecosystem level data is easily accessed it's possible to monitor the health of ecosystems by tracking the presence of animals that have made it their home or to identify invasive species that need to be removed these insights and subsequent action they enable lead to improved outcomes and through transparency and accountability facilitate the trust needed by the large scale investment in restoration projects we're ecology driven in everything we do we don't engage in single species planting projects that would be building back a fragile environment our aerial seeding platform that we developed has the ability to live over 50 different species at one time to meet the trillion trees challenge we need to deliver scale drone and AI based solutions are a way to achieve this but are often seen as replacements for people and community engagement when looking at restorations can be further from the truth when we look at the size of the problem dendro solution both complements and scales community driven restoration projects better survey methods mean that we're no longer relying on estimates better data means better analytics which in turn leads to improved decision making and ultimately better outcomes with investment de-risk larger projects can be undertaken which increases the requirement for jobs in long-term land stewardship for our platform we want to empower and enable landowners and communities to make best decisions to their land to direct resources to where they're most needed and to increase the scale of what's achievable with what are in some cases very limited resources planting trees requires more than dropping seeds 30% of land restoration is appropriate for direct seeding and our aerial seeding platform is used where appropriate we can analyze restoration from direct seeding hand planting and manage natural regeneration and are able to provide insights to improve outcomes no matter what method is used aerial seeding can be used to de-risk to improve safety and facilitate larger projects which again internally is the need for increased community engagement and jobs we're a global team of ecologists engineers data scientists and drone operators who come together to address this challenge like the ecosystems we support we're growing so please join our team or the journey by investing in restoration sequestration reducing and replacing thank you very much thank you who would like to ask the first question to Simon maybe one of the judges we haven't heard from yet yes Suzanne hi thank you a question for you around cost can you talk a little bit about the average cost what you've seen over the last number of years that you've been running and how you kind of anticipating bringing costs down over time yeah so I'll see the the cost of carbon varies on a project by project basis but typically what we've seen because of the operational intelligence that we can drive we bring around including our cost we bring the overall cost of carbon down by about 10% on a per project basis is what we've seen consistently thank you Simon another question anyone else from the panel who has another question Bruno do you have a question for Simon yeah I'd love to know more about the relations with the communities like it's great that you you can do a lot of remote sensing and even with aerial drones to seed the plants but then for example to remove the invasive species and to to get to see what you cannot see from above I'd love to know how you engage with the local communities not only as part of the of the sensors or in a way to measure things but also to act and the benefits for them for example economically yeah so great question thanks Simon so the community the land-owned engagement is absolutely key and to first of all because we can we can survey the land using drones there has to be trust in our organization to do that but once you've actually completed the seeding activities it's where the hard work really starts we can provide obviously a huge amount of data insights and analytics that can be used on the ground to make better decisions but it's really that local community to be empowered with that data to make decisions around the best use of that land and to also preserve the planting there's probably many people aware the early years in restoration activities are key in terms of ensuring long-term success to prevent that weed mitigation to prevent cattle and other grazing animals from destroying the seeds or the seeding there so we typically if we're not working on a commercial restoration project we'd be working very close of NGOs who understand the local community the local environment and all of that and be able to bring the local stakeholders together and one of the key benefits or one of the values of our solution is to provide a common platform with that information transparently available for all of those different stakeholders to see view and monitor and track the project over time so it's not we turn up in year one and we do our work is a tenure engagement with the great transparency that enables for stakeholders thank you Simon and one last question from the audience which is about applicability across different types of landscapes so how well does Dendra work in high tree and cloud cover tropical landscapes yeah so there's there's certain use cases where we would perform seeding and typically that would not necessarily be in those environments where we would conduct more monitoring based activities for established forest areas we've worked across dry lands we believe that there are around 30% of the degraded land is suitable for direct seeding by drone but we believe that we can monitor and have across a number of different environments the different ecosystems in there so there is a it's not applicable in terms of the drone operations for every single environment but we view it as a complement activity to support on the ground for the restoration work great thank you very much Adam sorry for calling you Simon and so we are now going to move to our third finalist Mike Hans from Inga Foundation Mike over to you hello I'm Mike Hans I'm a tropical forest ecologist and I for many years worked for the University of Cambridge as a researcher based in Central America researching the ecology of slash and burn agriculture and of course the ecology of any possible alternative here you see the problem it's estimated that there are some 250 to 300 million families around the tropics as a whole not just rainforest who are burning vegetation in order to subsist it's completely unsustainable and as far as we can calculate it's firing about 2 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere annually we have a solution it is using nitrogen fixing trees supplemented by minerals in the worst of soils we can restore the soil to fertility we can restore food security and then because we take the pressure of the land of further slash and burn the remaining land of this in this case a theoretical 8 hectare family holding can be reforested with various other forms of agroforestry we've got four techniques there are many more and they are not just restoring the family holding but we've got 300 people concentrated in two areas they are restoring the landscape we start with nitrogen fixing trees they are growing into these very degraded sites being slashed and burnt for over 100 years and they are planting them in hedgerows with four metres between the hedgerows this is a way of stabilising the slope as well they will grow quickly this is a sister organisation in Mexico we train them to do it the Inga have begun to recapture the site from the invasive grasses and after about two years the Inga will have completely eliminated the grass by shading and the soil beneath the canopy next please the soil will be ready for planting that's natural little fall you can see there we use no herbicides that's wiped out two species of invasive grass next one please this is the key to why Inga alley cropping works is a complete innovation to the original concept of alley cropping which is developed in Africa and is widely regarded to its pale the trees Inga are pruned at roughly five feet in height the branches and stems are removed as one of the favourite domestic firewoods and very valuable indeed but the main feature is that the foliage has been stripped and has now mulched onto the soil surface now it will decompose slowly and that's a deliberate choice of Inga in order to protect the soil from torrential rain and from insulation baking in intense sunshine the nutrients will become available for the next crop but the key to this one is that physical protection allows the fine roots of the cropping system to penetrate the very surface soils the nutrients are created you can see on the right here that's our demonstration farm we've trained many people it's being replicated in 15 other countries now this is what they see when they come the maize will be taken off the trees will recover and the following year will the whole process can be repeated the second component of the four component model is cash cropping in this case pepper botanically unrelated and that's a very very productive, profitable scheme for the family can transform the family income the third component is very different arrangement these are fruit trees associated with Inga as their only source of nitrogen in this case it's cacao developing beneath the shade which is what cacao likes the fourth component of the model is reforestation you can see on the right this is actually some land that we bought next to the demonstration farm it's now our arboretum for rare and threatened species it's been planted here this is three years ago with Inga about six meters apart and they will be interplanted with some valuable or endangered tropical tree species for the future and under planted with cacao this is the same plot, same slope three years later taken earlier this year it looks like a forest it's actually an agro forest the timbers species will start to push through the cacao will develop will control the shade by lopping branches occasionally from the cacao at landscape scale this is what the system looks like our strategy has been to concentrate fairly small resources in two areas so that we can convince big decision makers that where you restore a family holding and there are 300 of them you've begun to restore the entire landscape here's a summary of what has been achieved since 2012 hundreds of families and hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2 sequestered and we've achieved it whilst positively addressing 11 of the 17 United Nations SDGs and the result is we are now inundated with hundreds of families who've seen their neighbors production systems survive the worst El Nino effects of the past four or five years it's the worst ever recorded and they now see they're completely convinced that the tree system the ingus system will work for them thank you very much for listening to me thank you very much Mike who would like to ask the first question to Mike from our panel any questions yes Bruno thank you for the presentation fantastic work it sounds great what is your biggest barrier for growth core funding for In The Foundation of course at present I mean the team is working in the field in Honduras but the lockdown there is very severe is one of the worst I know of and that's a short term but for us core funding we've already been selected by four government ministries as an NGO of great interest and they're talking about our training their technicians we've trained already a couple of dozen from the Ministry of Environment and what we see is that the demonstration farm it's now 12 hectares is probably going to become a training centre more than anything and we may possibly ease off the extension work that's occupied for the next eight years thank you we had one more question from Suzanne first I think yes the judges always take the same question I'm going to ask right before I ask it but I'll just add one more in which is around you know what have you found in terms of maintenance is sort of over time and anything that learn that you didn't know about the ecosystems that sort of come in afterwards okay that's a fabulous pair of questions I'm going to start with the last bit what I was not able to say is after the Cambridge projects in Costa Rica what emerged from seven years of trials of subsistence cropping systems was the only system that was sustainable was alicropping with Inga species but supplemented by rock phosphate there have been so much confusion in the literature about do forests need rock phosphate or not and everybody been experimenting with these soluble fertiliser forms which fail because they leech in those soils we used rock phosphate and we got an immediate response it was still there seven years later that's part of the question about maintenance so you have to supplement any sustainable system including this one with rock phosphate nothing else rock phosphate what we then discovered in Honduras that some of the soils are so degraded over such a long period of time the farmers call them esteril they say they won't grow anything except invasive grass we discovered that the Inga and phosphate combination alone isn't enough but we did apply something I tried in the Cambridge project which is dolomite and camea sulfates and magnesium potassium and that mixture had an absolutely miraculous effect on the growth of the trees little shrinking trees that were suffering lept up from a meter and a quarter up to four meters in two and a half months it was astonishing and it restored the fertility of that plot we then learned from the farmers that they it was a hundred years ago that they were first slashed and burnt Mike thank you very much I'm sorry that we can't hear more about it because it's absolutely fascinating but in the interest of time we will have to move to our next finalists which are Diego Sanz and Lisa Walker from Reef Restem and EcoSphere I think Lisa you will be starting so over to you Lisa thanks Nicole yes hello everyone I'm Lisa Walker CEO of EcoSphere Plus and I'm very happy to be presenting jointly today with Diego Sanz CEO of Reef Forestem thank you very much to the forum uplink and trillion trees for hosting us the carbon market should be the biggest market in the world there's a carbon consequence to every decision we make every day whether that's buying a product getting on a plane sending an email etc. EcoSphere Plus and Reef Forestem launched a partnership earlier this year bringing together our complementary skills as we have a shared vision that we can harness the potential of the carbon market to accelerate action for nature at EcoSphere Plus we are part of an impact investment platform financing large-scale natural climate solutions or NCS projects and Reef Forestem brings leading digital technology and local reforestation capabilities together we can provide an end-to-end solution for corporates and their customers addressing the barriers to scaling climate finance for nature and we're on a mission to mobilize widespread action by embedding NCS in transactions across the value chain and across sectors we've already achieved a lot 2 billion trees and over 2 million hectares protected globally much of that in high conservation value habitat 30 million tons of carbon emissions reductions and we've provided solutions to more than 40 corporate clients and the bit we're really excited about through our corporate clients tens of millions of customers have already been offered carbon pricing for nature at the point of sale in the next five years together we can really scale we're targeting 5 billion trees and 10 million hectares globally and that includes thousands of hectares of reforestation projects in Europe 70 million tons of carbon reductions and we believe we can reach over a billion consumers through corporate partnerships and millions of individuals so now over to Diego who will tell you how thank you Lisa and good afternoon everyone my name is Diego Sanz I'm the CEO and founder here at the Reforestation our partnership with ecosphere plus brings to life an end-to-end solution starting with the corporates under net zero targets as well as the individual consumers pushing them to action we engage those through our B2B2C model and the first way in which we engage our customers of different kinds is by user interfaces going all the way from enterprise solutions to our easy to integrate APIs, point of sale plugins both for e-commerce and retail as well as individual profiles we also add a layer of trust and transparency powered by AI and remote sensing which results in an integrated monitoring reporting and verification solution our MRV that enables users to bring to life the carbon credits and forest source that they are purchasing and it helps to build the community around the projects last but not least these projects are really what our partnership brings to life in the best way not just around trees but around forests their communities and the jobs that they support both at a very large scale through ecosphere living portfolio worldwide as well as a more local scale throughout the forestation capabilities in Spain and soon on other European countries now I would like to show you how the platform works behind the scenes the project is financed by one of our clients or funds we divide the area for the source that contains certified carbon credits this system enables greater traceability and it is designed to build trust and transparency in a way that the general public should clearly understand how remote monitoring and carbon certifications work rather than reinventing a new certification mechanism first our core engine keeps track of its transaction such as for the source its sources or utilities retirement through a public registry that serves as the foundation of a digital community and that helps to showcase to the world the efforts of corporates and citizens in a way that is more transparent highlights the project environmental value and connects every stakeholder with the forest and communities behind them in regards to our forest this year we saw Adidas our first major corporate partner integrating our API and a corporate forest in the coming months joined Microsoft on two of their programs released our first e-commerce plugin very recently and finally we are going to launch a prototype of the MRV by the end of the year now over to you Lisa Thanks Yeah, L'Oreal is a great example of how things can scale and how we can find solutions right across the value chain so Ecosphere Plus has been partnering with them on insetting since 2019 on peatland restoration in Sumatra to balance their own carbon impact this year L'Oreal launched a 50 million Euro fund to regenerate nature which will be managed by Morova which are the investors behind Ecosphere Plus and now Reforestin will be part of L'Oreal's start-up program as winner of the tech for good competition with the potential to bring solutions to consumers so we'll end by saying achieving the goal of one trillion trees requires a systemic reset and a reset of our relationship with nature we believe we can enable this through our end-to-end solution to deliver a system-wide shift in behaviour and unlock the positive potential of climate finance just imagine one cent added to every financial car transaction in a year could keep 370 billion trees standing or a third of our goal Thank you very much Thank you I'd like to turn now to the judges for their question Yes, Chinayanoa I think you have to unmute yourself Kemi? Yes, we can hear you Awesome Great presentation Lisa, I just have a question how do you find the companies that you connect and also what criteria do you use to identify what unique projects to associate them with? Yeah, thanks I mean as Diego said we find that a lot of our clients as corporates that are I think leaders in their field they're wanting to commit to or they've already committed to a net-zero transition pathway and they see this as a way to really obviously deliver emissions reductions whilst they are on that transition so they very much sort of go hand-in-hand across that pathway and secondly as a we have a really sort of strict environmental, social governance set of principles that apply to all the projects that we invest in and we also set key performance indicators across a whole range of different areas which means we can really target high-performing projects and make sure that we're improving the governance and managing the well and that includes the IFC performance standards, FPEC and lots of other best practice standards Thank you Lisa Do you have a question from the panel? Yes, Michael Hi, how do you use the monitoring capability to close the loop so if someone's involved in a specific project obviously you want to monitor it in order to determine if it's delivering as as promised and if it turns out that for whatever reason it's not delivering what was expected, what kind of remediation are you in a position to pursue? So right now we're using the first prototype basically we're building on top of BIRRA certifications we're actually feeding the algorithm from BIRRA's data, basically what we do is we extrapolate from that and we kind of correlate the data that we are calculating in your real time so that we can kind of like, maybe the auditors went to the project two years ago we can know where it's going now depending on the last images and also we can kind of double check if our data matches with what is in the certification in all the documents from BIRRA we are still learning a lot from it far from having a perfect model at the moment Thank you very much Lisa and Diego, I think we will need to move to the next solution as time is running out so I would like to now turn to Trees for the future and John Leary John, over to you Thank you so much We at Trees for the future are absolutely humbled to be in the finals of such a prestigious competition What we have learned in planting nearly 200 million trees over the last 30 years directly speaks to the goals of the trillion trees challenge it is clear to us that if we plant a trillion trees without fixing the destructive nature of our food and farming systems and the impacts they are having on our ecosystems then the planet will still be in peril It is my honor to present today what we see as humanity's best strategy for feeding the future achieving our sustainable development goals and then the climate change Six years ago as we planted our 100 millionth tree we gathered the best ideas from the previous 25 years in tree planting and gathered all the best ideas in centuries old indigenous practices regenerative agroforestry and new permagardening techniques and we created a four year training program called the forest garden approach and it was designed to be a pathway out of poverty and extreme hunger for millions of people around the world struggling and today it is helping 19,000 families over 143,000 people In the program in the forest garden program we provide the training, seeds and essential materials and the farmers like Moore Loom here provide the land, the labor, the water and an entrepreneurial spirit In our training workshops they learn to plant and grow about 4,000 seedlings dozens of vegetables, perennials fruit trees like the one right here, this cashew tree many of the first year trees are planted in the living fence which is a thorny protective barrier that shields the families investments from risks it's often times multi-road Moore Looms was clean and nice and straight and within the protection of these living fences families are able to grow the new paradigm in agriculture, forest gardens here two years later next to the same cashew seedling you see is with his wife and his child the family has something to eat seller trade every single month of the year they have diverse portfolios of different types of fruit trees and nut bearing trees there's perma gardens of vegetables, bushes timber trees growing together all working with nature not against it producing more product with less effort each year in the layers there's habitat for birds, bats, bees you can imagine what it meant for the loom families food security during this COVID crisis having 180 different types of fruit trees to depend upon over nine million data points in our sales force database have proven a powerful triple bottom line of impacts and most importantly that the forest garden approach ends hunger for communities within two years by taking people from low dietary diversity to high dietary diversity and from being severely food insecure to reaching food security the forest garden approach also increases the number of marketable crops that each family is growing it increases the number of pay days and it can increase families income from 400 percent and as high as a thousand percent if families have access to running water imagine going from a dollar 25 a day to four or five dollars a day and you can go to all the way to ten dollars a day if you have access to water if you look at the next slide you'll see that we've done focus groups with youth and we've learned that at about $75 a month a young African 22 year old would prefer to stay in the community earning $75 or $100 a month we can double or even quadruple those expectations with forest gardens and so you can see what a better investment this is than paying the cost is $75,000 a year to host youth in migrant camps in Europe and then if you look at food aid costs as well the drones show the incredible environmental impacts forest gardens, sequesters 60 to 90 tons of carbon per hectare and they truly regenerate the degraded land this is just one year year to year and piece by piece we believe that we can contribute to the mosaic that will be the great green wall across Africa by working with farmers to plant forest gardens I'm going to end by saying that everything grows better in a forest garden the same agroforestry techniques that are improving roses life are also the secret for agribusinesses and the private sector to be regenerative and how they produce all of the commodities and foods that feed the world horticulture, oil crops, coffee, cocoa everything that's causing deforestation now can be grown in ways that are regenerative and we can show you how we hope to lift a million people out of hunger and poverty by planting 125,000 forest gardens by 2025 we have attracted a wonderful team we have a wonderful enthusiastic donors, public sector private sector, social sector partners we need large farmer networks that the world economic forum actors may be sourcing from we have the solution, we can start tomorrow and we're all together and we can do this, thank you thank you John questions from the panel Hindu, yes please, over to you thank you very much for the presentation, I see that you are working basically in African countries and I also saw that from, I mean I'm not lying to all of you, I went through all your websites and then I saw what you did so not only him, so I saw that all your leadership are not coming from the Africa, you have tried some of the stuff that only from Africa and then I really believe that people cannot be only beneficiaries, they can be partners so how would you do in this project that people should be partners in this project in them lands not just beneficiaries getting lessons from the SPA we have about 200 employees across Africa and all of them are African our American and international staff based out of Washington DC here is happy to help in various ways we're partnering directly with farmer groups and through farmer groups through cooperatives and associations that's how we can scale we're looking for more introductions to those types of groups and we're permanent partners with them helping all of their members not just plant forest gardens but we've also been working with them on savings clubs and accessing markets for all the horticultural crops and others so our farmer groups, I speak Wolof, I speak other languages and we work directly with our farmer groups to help them kind of access new markets and really try to be a grassroots partner in that way Thank you John Rod, I saw you had a question Yes, thank you you mentioned right at the start that one of the inputs from farmers is water could you clarify the kind of rain fed or other water sources that are necessary for the model? Sure, yeah, the model is flexible so that if everything's rain fed then you pick species that do not need constant irrigation throughout the year the cashew tree was a great example it's very hardy it produces a very lush juicy fruit in the dry season vegetables are the same way some of the higher value horticulture requires a bit of water if you want to do tomatoes and other things but if the family is limited we can find squash and watermelon and other things that are more water friendly and air friendly models when you do get access to water and we see a lot of our farmers doing it we've had investors who put money into the water it's a key leverage point $5 a day is a huge win but we can take people to $10 a day we situate our programs around where other organizations have established water infrastructure and we're helping to make that sustainable in many ways Thank you John we are now going to turn to our last finalist David Ezra Jay from GreenStand David over to you Hello, on behalf of the GreenStand community and technology and a data driven model that is growing across continents this model can pay a billion people to grow diverse forests GreenStand is about the people growing trees the large number of professionals who have been shaping this project are here for environmental and social reasons I'm here because of the people I've met and earlier this year I met this woman Lucy she's the leader of an indigenous women's group in East Africa and one of the few people with a smartphone in that village and with Lucy's phone the women in her group are doubling and tripling their income by growing and monitoring their trees and these aren't just any trees this is an African teak tree and it's one of a lot of trees that they have there these women are growing they're growing a diverse forest here and this forest is on the edge of a biodiversity hotspot it's a really amazing story and what's most amazing is that they're doing it in a way that scales naturally and can scale massively so here's how it works users are responsible for creating the impact on the ground and sending a digital proof of that impact we have an open source technology stack that verifies what that impact actually is and who is responsible for it this data package is then minted into a wallet on a central ledger allowing users and third party entities to own and trade it on an open marketplace for carbon it can be traded for biodiversity or other ecosystem services it's really a data package or it's a forest product that turns the act of restoring our planet into profit and the challenge that we have it's not one that you can solve from outer space or with drones it's answering impact ownership we're mapping an actual interaction between humans and the environment so for data analysts this is a complex problem for our users it's simple growers click a photo that's it we've made it so simple to track trees that people don't have a reason not to that the hard part is actually growing the trees and and verifying that it's actually alive that's the easy part if you have trees or your organization is planting trees spend an extra three seconds to click a digital verification of your impact and when you do you're going to end up your trees end up here where we verify them and we can crowdsource or outsource the tagging of any anything you can see in here and that really builds this this data package and we can do that for as many trees as you can ever find and these numbers are scaling we are setting up to collect and process a massive amount of data surrounding the incremental growth of individual trees at a global scale so to do that we need machine learning automation image recognition we can't really do it without it and here you can see we've got one of our awesome contributors is analyzing the structure of a proton tree with image recognition and these are processes that we're building we have an open source community that is is figuring out these problems and we're doing in a way that is is open and that can be replicated and and anyone can use so so how much does it cost well what our users have found is that they can make money with this platform this technology finances forest it uses real data to make growing trees profitable for everyone so in this model the last mile is the marketplace it starts with a farmer growing the tree it ends with you being able to own trade and take credit for an unquestionable verified impact that teak tree in Africa that Lucy help track was funded by the sale of a cup of coffee in a restaurant in Singapore this is a model that can pay a billion people to grow a trillion trees if we adopt a standard a green standard is simple green stand answers who owns what impact thank you thank you David I would like now to turn to our judges and maybe Bruno would you like to ask the first question giving your given your expertise in the area I was thinking of why this blockchain technology as I understand you are using and then the steps where you have to cluster together a lot of trees to create or the harvest to make the beans and then connect that to the coffee how do you how do you ensure the trust in the community translates to trust in the system and at the same time what are the steps where there is this clustering and then this aggregation of the products as it moves to the production line basically what we do is we capture a tree and that is a data package and so we can put that in a central ledger where you can transfer to move it so it's very hard to falsify the system or to it's hard to put something there that is a very tangible product does that answer your question yeah okay that's good and how big is the operation now how much have you grown how many trees and how much value have you transacted through the system so it's starting to scale quite a lot we've got just I think in the way that we have started using us and are adopting it so it's starting to scale and there's kind of two different models behind it one is that organizations are using the platform to verify what they're doing and they can show their trees and be like oh yeah we're taking the money here are your trees and the other is this model that is really paying people to grow forest which is the real way that we can start paying people to actually grow forest thank you very much David and we have come to the end of our session so we'll have to close the judging panel here even though there's lots more to discuss as you've seen we've had solutions some of which are very much at a start up scale others that are already scaling others that have years of experience in terms of prototyping a certain model and intentionally the intention of the challenge is to identify and source a whole variety of different solutions that are at different stages I would like to thank all of the finalists but most importantly all of the people who have submitted their solutions and who are working tirelessly to restore our balance with the natural world and to bring back our forests and protect the forests that we still have a warm thanks to you because your work is so important thank you also to our judges who will now go on and deliberate and select the three winners who will be announced on September 24th at 2pm CET at the closing session of the Sustainable Development Impact Summit and we encourage all of you to vote for the People's Choice Award via Slido share the link so other people can watch the live stream and also vote for their choice who will be announced at the same time on the 24th thank you very much, goodbye