Plant 10,000 trees to grow resilience in Amhara

Let me share with you WeForest's New Year resolution for the reforestation project in Amhara: to plant at least 600,000 new trees on communal land and on the farmland of participating families. We are confident to achieve this goal, because of the solid foundations we have laid for the project in 2016. We established tree nurseries, held awareness raising and training sessions with local farmers, and formed good cooperation relations with local government.

Two abandoned tree nurseries were upgraded in the last six months and another tree nursery was established. Once these nurseries are up to speed they can produce up to 1 million seedlings per year. Together with the local people we selected five planting sites where soil erosion was very bad and intervention highly necessary. In the coming months we will focus on selecting more planting locations.

As part of the project we conducted 300 interviews and focus group discussions to understand the reasons of the high deforestation rates and the needs of the local community. Cooking turned out to be the most important reason for cutting trees, and we will certainly address this issue in the project. You can read more about the outcomes of the research in the attached planting report, for example about the education level of the local people: only 19% of the people have been to school past 5^th grade.

Don't forget to have a look at the photos of the gullies in the area. These are the direct result of deforestation, they form a major contributor to soil erosion and loss of agricultural land and are an important reason of our reforestation project in the area.

Enjoy reading the report and please contact us if you want any information. Thank you for supporting WeForest and for Making Earth Cooler!

• Amhara planting report (PDF)