Sustainable Agriculture Morocco Project #1563

Plant Trees to Empower Farming Families in Morocco

by High Atlas Foundation

Project Report | Jan 21, 2022
Benefits of Community Tree Planting and WorldTree

By Abigail Hall | HAF-UVA Intern

There are three categories of benefits that come from tree planting in communities: social, environmental, and economic. Socially, trees improve the aesthetic and environment in which we live— they reduce stress, help children retain more information if they are able to spend time in green spaces, and serve as a memorial for important cultural events or values.

Environmentally, trees reduce urban heat through evaporative cooling; they improve air quality by giving off oxygen and filtering dust and pollutants such as ozone, carbon monoxide, and sulfur dioxide; they reduce the amount of stormwater runoff and they provide protection for certain species of wildlife. Lastly, tree planting can have economic benefits, reducing cooling costs in the summer by providing shade and acting as food sources for food-insecure communities.

Now that we have examined some direct and tangible benefits of community tree planting, this article is going to examine an organization called “WorldTree.” WorldTree is a group of investors, farmers, scientists, and activists who have come together and committed to building a new kind of forestry based on one of the fastest-growing trees in the world: The Empress Splendor. This tree grows to its full maturity in ten years. One initiative that WorldTree has started is using this wood to create musical instruments.

So how might community tree planting and musical instruments be related? Well, there is currently a new search for guitar wood because the current gold standard for instrumental wood is Swabash, which is now becoming limited due to climate change. Investing in planting The Empress Splendor is the solution.

There are many incredible properties of the Empress wood. First, it is incredibly light—a quality that many musicians prioritize when purchasing an instrument. Empress wood is also hydrophobic, meaning that once it is dried out it will resist getting wet again. Some logistical benefits of Empress wood include its easy ability to take and hold stains and finishes well in addition to the ease with which this wood can be worked on and molded. Once the Empress wood is harvested, the Empress trees can regrow. Additionally, upon harvest, the carbon is sequestered, absorbing thirty tons of carbon per acre per year.

WorldTree has partnered with the Sustainable Furnishings Council, which has over 400 members, to look at ways to advance and move towards sustainable, plantation-grown wood. With the Empress Splendor, they can do that. Today, the world still gets over fifty percent of its wood from native forests. One of the easiest steps to improve climate change is to protect native forests. With the Empress tree plantations allowing for over 5,000 acres of planted area, WorldTree can positively impact seven of the Sustainable Development Goals, which makes WorldTree the largest grower of Empress trees in North and Latin America.

In addition to using Empress wood to create musical instruments, WorldTree has partnered with Katrien Van Der Schueren, an artist, designer, and interior designer in Los Angeles. Wood is a big proponent of interior design production and this partnership between WorldTree and Katrien’s company, Voila Studies, will allow space and resources for more design and home products to be made out of the sustainable Empress wood.

WorldTree brings together three critical aspects of impactful climate change efforts: innovation, expertise, and tree science. Their innovation includes the use of leading-edge forest inventory management. Their team includes forestry experts who have over seven million acres of timber investment experience. Lastly, WorldTree utilizes eighteen exclusive Empress genotypes that have been selected for lumber and carbon maximization.

This organization should serve as an example of the vast number of benefits that result from community tree planting. Not only does this work provide jobs, but it also improves quality of life, amount of resources, and environmental health, and it serves as a space for experts in investing, farming, and science to work alongside passionate activists to create a better planet.

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Jan 10, 2022
Report about monitoring trees in 2021

By Mohamed El Kadiri | YCC - USFS member

This report summarises six months of field-work regarding monitoring trees in the Draa Tafilalte region, Azilal and Tata provinces. The process of monitoring fruit trees at the High Atlas Foundation ran from the beginning of April to the end of December 2021, a suitable time for the new season of tree distribution to farmers for 2022.

I. Planting sites/regions and provinces

1)-The map shows the area where I work

- Total number of trees monitored: 200,000

- Old contract: 65

- Total number of points recorded: 617

Positive points

The trees are growing in good condition in the majority of provinces.
Trees have a higher success rate in 2021 compared to last year.
Farmers were very interested in planting more trees and working with us as a monitoring team, especially after they expressed their satisfaction with the quality of the trees they received from HAF this year, for example, in Errachidia province, where 90% of the trees are growing well.

Some obstacles

Traveling to far planting sites takes a significant amount of time.
High temperatures affect our work, especially during the summer period.
The rugged terrain and sometimes-missing roads as well as distance between farms force us to walk long distances to access planting sites, which extends the time expended for monitoring trees.
Some trees were exposed to diseases that made them not grow in good conditions, especially pesero disease that affected the almond trees in Ait Attab in the Azilal province.
The lack of water and the absence of wells forced farmers to travel distances in order to bring water to irrigate the trees (Zagora, Azilal…)
Farmers who buy small quantities of trees raise monitoring costs considerably (effort, time, expense)

II. Monitoring / provinces and percentage of monitoring

1)-The map shows the provinces where I work and the percentage of monitoring in each province

2)- The graphic below shows the percentage of living trees in each province for 2021

The monitoring of trees this year was accomplished under difficult conditions that required a lot of effort, but despite all the obstacles we faced, we managed to overcome them and monitor many trees in a short time.

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Dec 7, 2021
Monitoring Trees in Guercif

By Lahcen Ben Moula | Tree Monitoring Officer

The visit to the province of Guercif is among the distinguished trips to monitor the trees that were distributed to farmers by the High Atlas Foundation in coordination with local cooperatives in order to inspect the condition of the trees and communicate with farmers while providing them with information that helps them in their agricultural field as well as listening to their problems and challenges facing us in the field of agriculture in the region.

There is no doubt that the province of Guercif is characterized by a very large area, and it is among the cities of Morocco that have vast lands suitable for agriculture, mainly the cultivation of fruit trees, especially olive trees, so that the title of the city of olives is called for the province of Guercif, and this is mainly due to the availability of the area on large farms of olive trees, which made it occupy high ranks. Advanced in the production of olives and their derivatives.

Through the monitoring process, many areas in the plains and high in the mountains were visited, and they communicated with more than 100 farmers in the area, and 27,430 trees were planted in the area at the beginning of 2021 to add to the number of trees that are planted annually in the area.

As for the condition of the trees, most of them are in good condition, although there are some areas that suffer from drought and farmers are doing a great job to preserve them, as there are areas for the first time that know the process of cultivation and do not have sources of water for irrigation, and this is one of the challenges that farmers in those areas talk about.

On the other hand, there are very good areas and are considered very successful models, as the valleys in the area played an important role in supplying the area with water despite the costs required by agricultural equipment such as solar energy and drip irrigation, and the impediment of the weak economic level that most farmers suffer from.

A summary of the monitoring process in the region, but that 80% of the goals that were set were achieved, and the evidence for this is the positive effects that farmers tell about in the initiative carried out by the High Atlas Foundation in order to from trees support farmers and enable them to benefit at a symbolic price commensurate with their purchasing power.

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