In line with our commitment, we commissioned the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche en Ethique (CIRE) at the University of Lausanne to take a critical look at our actions and identify areas for attention. We were impressed by CIRE’s interdisciplinary approach, which brings together expertise in environmental ethics, health, education and care. With its contextualised approach, CIRE seemed to us to be the institution most likely to help us make progress. We certainly think we’re doing the right things and doing them well, but there’s always room for improvement.
The CIRE report meets our expectations exactly. We are reassured that no new issues have been raised. And we are committed to finding solutions to the issues raised:
We will be addressing the points of attention relating to carbon credits and the selection of investors to whom we sell them in subsequent news items.
As far as the promotion of women is concerned, we are aware that there is still a lot to be done. From strengthening existing women’s groups to training young girls, not forgetting safeguarding the forestry knowledge held by the elders, the themes are many and varied. We also want to make better use of the skills of our partner GUIDRE, which has a perfect command of training courses for women (literacy, maternity care, prevention of female circumcision, etc.). During our last visit to Damaro, we met another NGO, a partner of GUIDRE, which supports the development of women’s market gardening, and with which we are looking forward to working. In short, the field of possibilities is almost infinite. It’s up to us to exploit it, within the framework of our statutes.
The issue of remuneration for our seed-families will be addressed in June, when the first ‘carbon income’ is distributed in the Linko sub-prefecture. We will ensure that a proportion of this income is devoted to the seed-families and village communities. And this will be the subject of deliberations within the Cooperative Committee (made up, as you will recall, mostly of women). For the supervisors, our ambition is to secure their jobs as much as possible, at least for the three years of the plantation phase. After starting with 6-month contracts, then 10-month contracts, they now have 12-month contracts. We are now looking at ways of guaranteeing them real social benefits as well. From the outset, we have been paying amounts to deal with sickness and to finance their pension provision, but we would like to see accident/sickness insurance and pension funds managed by specialist bodies.
The tension between free and informed consent and the social pressure linked to the constitution of the Cooperative is complex. The aim of all institutions for the governance of the commons, as suggested by Elinor Ostrom, is precisely to introduce rules, and therefore constraints, to better manage the commons. And it is true that this exerts social pressure. Where is the line between group pressure (and the benefits of joining forces) and coercion? How can we ensure that this social pressure is not exerted to the detriment of the weakest? On this question, deliberation, as recommended by the CIRE, is certainly the best way to highlight any grievances linked to ‘too much group pressure’.
Many thanks to Nicola Banwell for all the inspiring exchanges and for this very useful report, reflecting the Western ethical perspective. The next ethical supervision will certainly be Guinean!
In Linko, seed families become ‘measurers’. The three-year planting cycle came to an end in 2024 and it is no longer necessary to collect seeds to sow new plots at Linko. In order to maintain the link with the 370 seed families (mainly women), we have suggested that they take on a new and equally essential role, that of “measurers”.
Every year, it is vital to know the state of each of the 840 plots reforested since 2021. So it will be the scorers who will visit the plots to assess the growth of the trees and check that they are being properly cared for by the land families.
In each village, we have set up pairs of women measurers, who will be responsible for visiting 5 to 7 plots in a nearby village (to avoid any form of social pressure). In all, 187 pairs for the 840 plots in the project. Since 99% of the women (there are also men among the seed-families – and we have, of course, ensured that the pairs are not mixed) are illiterate, each pair will be accompanied by a local ‘guide’, from the Community Management Committees in each village, who knows how to use a smartphone.
In each of our 26 villages, our supervisors have identified a person who knows how to use a smartphone. These people were to be trained to use the QField geolocation application and to enter data in an online questionnaire. But when the training took place with the 26 people, we realised that not all of them had a smartphone… We had to buy 19 smartphones. Then we noticed that their use of smartphones was limited to making phone calls and watching videos… That’s just the way things are! In the end, only 5 out of the 26 could really act as guides for the measuring machines. So we had to find other guides (otherwise the 5 local guides would have had 75 days each). We recruited them from among the ISAV students who had come to do an internship on our project in 2023. Then we had to adapt the schedule to take account of the students’ obligations (graduation) and Ramadan (some husbands might have been reluctant to have their wives act as measurers during Lent).
The measurers started their visits at the beginning of April and finished at the beginning of May, just in time to prepare for the meeting of the cooperative committee before the General Meeting of the land families.
The 187 teams of measurers:
Visited 703 plots of land
Walked more than 650 kilometres in the plots of land
Measured 13,278 project trees (under 5m) and 5,174 trees that already existed before the project (> 5m)
Assessed each time: the impact of fires, the quality of land maintenance and the risks due to livestock.
It’s a high-quality piece of work for a first attempt. Congratulations, ladies and gentlemen! And thank you, because it allows the project and the family plots to know exactly which plots are well (or not so well) maintained and where the trees are growing well (or not so well). This makes it easy to provide targeted recommendations to each field-family to make the necessary corrections. And what’s more, this data corresponds to the satellite images!
“On International Women’s Rights Day, let’s celebrate the strength, resilience and beauty of all women! Happy Birthday to all the women of arboRise-Guidre! #8March”
Seny Balamou, silviculturist on the Linko-Damaro team
Our project would be nothing without all the women involved.
…as seed harvesters,
…as members of the Community Management Committees,
…as village delegates on the Cooperative Committee,
…as scorers,
…as supervisors,
…as foresters:
… multiple roles for multiple talents. THANK YOU ladies for your decisive actions!
The 2025 reforestation campaign has just begun, with three teams of five people in the field!
Remember that arboRise is currently active in two regions:
In Linko – Damaro – Konsankoro (zone 1, marked in green below).
In Samana – Diassodou&Karala – Sokourala – Koumandou (Zone 2, marked in blue below)
The plan for Zone 1 forsees the reforestation of 500 hectares per year. Spreading the efforts over several years made it possible to keep the required resources within reasonable limits. The disadvantage is that CO2 sequestration and thus carbon revenues are very low over many years.
As before the opening of each sub-prefecture, we also carried out a detailed analysis of the context in Diassodou: Human geography, protected areas, forest cover and eligibility, etc. This analysis allowed us to spread the effort of presenting the project over several groups of villages. The aim of our local partner GUIDRE’s team on the ground is to present the project to all villages in the region in order to convince 25 villages to participate in the project.
Here you can see the ‘family photo’ after the presentation of the project to the authorities of the Diassodou sub-prefecture:
The team then presents the project to all the village communities in the sub-prefecture, as here :
In the villages that quickly decide to join the project, the team finalises the agreements with the interested seed and land families. And the delimitation of the plots of land can take place.
We’ve been able to carry out the validation audit of our project 😊 For the South Pole technical team, Nicolò, Tosca and Nele, this is the culmination of a lot of hard work and effort. They are the ones who drew up the Project Description Document submitted to Gold Standard and audited in the field over the last few days. This document describes how our project meets all the requirements of the certification standard.
Before starting the audit, we spent a few days preparing with our partners from South Pole and GUIDRE. Our aim was to make the auditors’ work as easy as possible by planning activities with the villages and preparing the necessary documents. Of course, as before an exam, it was an opportunity to rehearse together the strong points of our project and to anticipate any ‘trick’ questions. But as we all know, it’s not just before an exam that you have to learn: you have to plan well in advance, as we have been doing, conscientiously, for the last three years.
The plots were randomly selected and not very accessible, so the approach was by motorbike and on foot.
The goal was always the measurement plot, at the centre of a radius of 14.11 m (625 m2) [40 plots for 500 ha].
The two auditors, Kuldeep and Manish, from Earthood, accompanied by their interpreter, arrived in Linko on the evening of Tuesday 10 December and the audit itself took place from the 11th to the 16th. They had previously asked to check 48 project documents, such as lists of training participants, minutes of the stakeholder consultation, etc. On site, Kuldeep, the auditor responsible for forestry aspects, visited 15 randomly selected plots to check the baseline measurements.
On site, Kuldeep, the auditor responsible for forestry aspects, visited 15 randomly selected sites to check the baseline measurements. Manish, responsible for social aspects, interviewed over 50 people (seed families, field families, GSCs, authorities, etc.) in eight villages. Of course, coming from India, he had to translate and answer their countless questions.
Ama Diallo measures the circumference at chest height and Benoît Lelano measures the height with the clinometer.
Both GUIDRE and South Pole have acrobats to measure height with the graduated pole 🙂
All interviews with beneficiaries follow a rigorous protocol and are documented.
Together we also presented the project to the authorities of the Damaro sub-prefecture, where we will be expanding our activities from 2025:
At the beginning our relationships were relatively formal, but as the stay progressed we were able to create more personal links. It has to be said that we were all living with each other 24 hours a day in a small space, with few moments alone. There was never any tension despite our different origins, languages, religions and genders 😊
On the left, our living environment for 5 days. Right: Nicolò and Edouard scale the fish.
So what? Did we pass the exam? Our impression of this validation audit is good. Manish and Kuldeep have reported only minor improvements. We’ll know the result in the next few months. The auditors and Gold Standard have the opportunity to conduct three ‘rounds’ of questions and answers, each lasting around 2 months. The final verdict will therefore come in June at the latest, with very likely requests for improvements to be made to the project between now and the next audits. The purpose of these audits will be to check that the project continues to comply with the rules of the standard and that the dendrometric measurements are carried out in accordance with the state of the art.
But for now, the whole project team deserves a big thank you and a welcome rest.
As in Linko in spring 2024, we are also distributing individual and collective equipment in the sub-prefecture of Samana.
The mayor and sub-prefect of the rural district of Samana are of course involved in this event. The picture shows a harrow for the plough and, above all, a metal fence to protect the women’s market gardening areas from stray cattle.
The second half of the year is mainly devoted to establishing monitoring plots on a representative sample of land. These plots will be used to measure tree growth over a 20-year period. Each plot is a circle 14.11 metres in diameter, the center of which must be fixed and the circumference marked out.
To guarantee representativeness, we estimate that 40 monitoring plots per 500 ha stratum will be sufficient to reduce the uncertainty interval below the target values defined by the standard. The final sample size will be determined according to the heterogeneity of the vegetation in the field. Our partner South Pole randomly determines the location of the plots (on which plots and where in the field). South Pole has also created a digital form that allows the GUIDRE team to send measurement results directly to South Pole.
…because it’s not just a question of establishing the plot, but also of carrying out a precise survey (species, circumference, height) of all the existing trees on the plot before we start our activities in 2021.
One of the aims of the Cooperative, and the main role of the Cooperative Committee, is to draw up a key for distributing the carbon revenues. It is certainly not up to arboRise to define how this income will be shared among the cooperative members. This choice must be made by those primarily concerned, in accordance with local traditions and customs.
But what will these criteria be? And how will they be weighted? Should effort and merit be taken into account, or should income be distributed uniformly? Can fate be invoked to justify certain disappointing results? etc.
Rather than discuss these criteria in the abstract, we opted for serious games, which are more effective. In practical terms, we used pre-printed tarpaulins with a number of scenarios on them, as in this case, where the aim was to distribute income according to the hazards suffered by the landowners:
Each member of the cooperative committee was given 20 (symbolic) coins representing the project’s carbon revenues and was tasked with dividing them between the 10 situations presented on the tarpaulin, then commenting on his or her choice in front of his or her peers.
As the day progressed, a consensus quickly emerged on the principles for distributing carbon income, for example:
Compliance with the cooperative’s rules by each member should be rewarded in proportion to the effort required to comply with each rule. For example, certain ‘costly’ rules (such as the installation of firewalls around the pitches) should be better rewarded than simple rules (such as the installation of tape to mark the pitches).
Of course, those who do a great deal to encourage the growth of trees on their plots should be rewarded, but the ‘undeserving’ should also be given a little, otherwise they risk leaving the project.
The reward should (very clearly) be for the result (the density and height of the trees on the land) and not for the effort required to achieve this result.
External factors (infertility of the land, fires, etc.) should not be regarded as inevitable: it is the responsibility of the landowning family if it has chosen an unfavourable plot of land or if its land has been affected by fires.
Over the following days, we repeated the same exercise in the 26 villages, 2 villages a day, with all the land families in the village and in the presence of the 2 members of the village cooperative committee. The idea was to show the farmer-families the complexity of the Cooperative Committee’s task, and it also made it possible to express out loud what everyone else is thinking: in the end, it will be those who achieve results who receive the most carbon income. Another reassuring lesson is that there are no real differences between the villages: the distribution choices are fairly homogenous.
At the very end of the tarpaulin exercise, we asked each village ‘how much of your carbon revenue would you be prepared to share freely with your village? Most of the participants said they would be willing to share around 10% of their carbon revenue with their community. This would enable the villages to develop their infrastructure (wells, market gardening, health post, school, etc.).
We also spoke to the land families about their opportunity costs. Indeed, if these farmers lend land to be reforested, they are potentially giving up income from their crops. We therefore immersed ourselves with them in the details of hillside rice cultivation to understand every aspect (yields, expenditure, length of crops, fallow periods, etc.).
In all, 255 people in the 26 villages, or 88% of all the family plots, took part in this deliberative process. For arboRise, participatory reforestation is not an empty word. It’s essential that everyone has their say so that everyone takes ownership of the project.
Thank you to the Somaha Foundation for helping to make this consultation possible.
In our experience, leaders are one of the levers of change in any organisation or social group. And our process also aims to facilitate the emergence of new leaders, legitimised by transparent elections in their village, then at sub-prefectoral level, within the Cooperative. Of course, the current political leaders (sub-prefect, mayor of Linko, village chiefs) are involved in the process. They are delighted with the momentum generated by the project in the region. Indeed, we are convinced that it is the networking of leaders (old and new!) that will be decisive.
In October last year we founded the Cooperative of the field-families in Linko to manage the new arboRise forests as a common asset (see our report here), and on 9 July 2024 the Cooperative’s General Meeting was held. This year it was a question of electing the organs of the cooperative:
In preparation for the election of the 26 members of the Comité Coopératif, each village had previously elected two representatives, one man and one woman. At the General Assembly, we simply used a hat in which 14 women’s tickets and 12 men’s tickets were placed. Each village drew a ticket at random and that’s how we ended up with a Cooperative Committee made up of a majority of women, all recognised in their village, and therefore visible at sub-prefecture level.
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In some circles, there is a great deal of self-pity about the condition of African women. For our part, we have observed tangible signs of their influence, which contradict this image of weakness. In one village in the sub-prefecture, for example, the women deposed the village chief, who was reluctant for the village to join the project! Another example: it’s a woman from the village of Booko who heads the brotherhood of hunters for the whole sub-prefecture, an extremely powerful position that implies significant customary powers. Third clue: the fact that a majority of women were required to sit on the cooperative committee was never contested or even debated. To close this parenthesis, here’s some inspiring reading on the subject: L’autre langue des femmes von Léonora Miano.
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…Then we moved on to the election of the 5 members of the Administration. The cooperators from each village first chose the candidate from their village, then the whole room voted by a show of hands for each candidate, and the 5 with the most votes were elected. We are very pleased that Imam Bangaly Condé has been elected Director of Administration. He is well educated, has lived in Côte d’Ivoire for a long time and has been involved in the project in an exemplary way right from the start.
The day after the General Meeting, we organised a training session for the 5 members of the administration and the 26 members of the Co-operative Committee and their substitutes to prepare them for their role and responsibilities.
For the Administration, it’s simple: they have to manage the budget and organise the next General Meeting (and thus relieve our partner GUIDRE, who has been doing this until now).
For the Cooperative Committee, it’s more difficult: they have to mandate the measuring machines to visit and evaluate each plot of land, and then, on the basis of their report, work out a key for distributing the carbon income. It is certainly not up to arboRise to define the criteria for distributing this income. This choice must be made by the people concerned, based on local traditions and customs.
But what criteria should be used to distribute carbon revenues? Find out here.
How much CO2 does a forest absorb per year in the project area? This is the key question that all reforestation projects must answer in order to obtain certification and attract donors.
The simplest solution is to rely on scientific studies that have measured biomass growth in similar forests. The problem: very few articles on African forests have been published on this subject. Fortunately, the Hérault et al. research team has quantified the growth of several of our project’s tree species in the Korhogo region of Côte d’Ivoire, 400km from our project, over 30 years (The long-term performance of 35 tree species of sudanian West Africa in pure and mixed plantings).
Another, more precise approach is to measure the biomass of mature forests in the project area, and then deduce annual growth. This is what we have done with our partner EcoAct.
Before we can begin, we need to accurately identify the age of the forests to be measured. The objective is to know the average biomass growth per year and per hectare. To do this, EcoAct identified all the 20-year-old forests and all the 10-year-old forests in the Samana sub-prefecture. We then applied a number of additional selection criteria to obtain forests with little degradation and easy access.
Thanks to this pre-selection, we were able to identify the GPS points of 5 forests of 10 years and 5 forests of 20 years (knowing that we would only have time to measure four of each category).
On site, it’s not advisable to go into a forest alone, especially if you’re a foreigner. It is more respectful and prudent to make yourself known to the authorities in the nearest village, to explain your intention, receive advice and be accompanied. These discussions can be time-consuming, as there are also many questions about the project, but it’s well worth the effort. The support of the village is crucial.
Then it’s off to the forest. This often requires long approach walks, either in the bush or in the forest. The machete is essential for progress, and it’s best not to have forgotten anything in the vehicle (measuring equipment, raincoat, boots, water, etc.).
Once the GPS point had been reached, we marked out a 30m x 30m perimeter in each forest with tape, so that we knew exactly which trees to include in the measurements and which to exclude because they were outside the 900 m2 perimeter.
We then proceed methodically to make sure we don’t miss any trees. Specifically, one person measures the diameter at breast height, one person measures the height, one person indicates the species and marks the tree, to avoid re-measuring it a second time, and one person records this information. To recognize species, we need to rely on local expertise.
In the end, we measured over 1,500 trees in six days on 13 plots of land (in addition to the 4 10- and 20-year-old forests, we also measured trees on land to be reforested by arboRise in 2021 and 2022). It’s tedious work and not without risks, sometimes in the rain and in overgrown vegetation, but it’s essential work that will enable us to accurately calculate the biomass, and therefore the carbon, and therefore the potential income from the project, and therefore the possible expenditure.
Thank you Stéphane, thank you Julia for your strong engagement in the field under difficult conditions ♥
This initial overview of the forests has given us some tentative indications:
Species diversity depends on the soil: some 20-year-old forests were almost monospecific, with Uapaca Somon dominating, like beech in temperate forests, at the expense of all other species. This should encourage us to carry out targeted thinning to maintain biodiversity.
On the sites reforested in 2021 and 2022, there is great variability in terms of density: it can reach more than 4,500 stems per hectare, but some parts of the plots are still bare 2 years after seeding. This is due to the soil.
The same 10-15 pioneer species are almost always found, and we can assume that natural regeneration is effective. This should encourage us to focus seed collection on the rare species on our list of 40 species.
Once the data has been collected, the analysis work can begin. Silviculturists and forestry specialists long ago learned how to estimate the volume of a log (a delimbed trunk) when Europe was being deforested to build ships. Basically, it’s a matter of calculating the volume of a cylinder: Pi x radius2 x height. In reality, a trunk is not really cylindrical, but rather conical. And the proportions between diameter and height vary depending on the type of forest (temperate, tropical, boreal, dry, humid, rainforest, etc.). This is why numerous studies have attempted to find the allometric equation that most closely approximates a given forest type. Some even try to include branch volume in the equation. It should be remembered that these equations are fairly reliable for monospecific cash tree plantations, but in natural forests made up of several species this quickly becomes approximate and generally underestimates the forest’s biomass volume.
With our partner EcoAct (thanks Margarita! ♥ ), we tested seven allometric equations, specific to tropical forests, and selected the equation whose correlation with the NDVI value of the GPS point was maximum: the equation of Djomo et al. (2010)* which considers diameter and wood density (as we couldn’t measure the height of all trees): B = exp(-1,8623 + 2,4023 ln(D) – 0,3414 ln(p))
These values indicate the weight of dry biomass. Then remove the weight of all non-carbon atoms (x 0.47), and add the weight of the two oxygen atoms (x 3.67) to obtain the weight of CO2 in the trunks of each hectare. To this, by convention, we add 20% to account for subterranean CO2, present in the roots.
We can thus say that, in the project area, the trees of a forest have absorbed 325 tonnes of CO2 per hectare after 20 years, i.e. 16 tonnes per year.
Since we have values for forests of 2, 3, 10 and 20 years, we can even estimate the growth curve:
It should be remembered that we’re dealing here with naturally regenerating forests, some of which have probably been degraded (for example, the biomass of one of the 10-year-old forests is significantly lower than that of the others). However, our garden forest approach should generate more diversified, denser and less degraded stands, with a greater quantity of biomass as a result.
We’ll talk more about this in a few years’ time, when we take the first dendrometric measurements of our forests. And in this regard, perhaps some of you can help us find Terrestrial Laser Scanning equipment, which will enable us to measure exactly the whole of a tree (not just the diameter at chest height and the height), so that we can include the CO2 absorbed by the branches, without going through an allometric equation. Thanks for your help !
