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ZeroCarb is the carbon coach for 120,000 SMEs in French-speaking Switzerland active in the service sector. The intelligent carbon footprint calculator. It is a tutorial that highlights the environmental actions that the SME has already implemented and suggests new measures to progressively reduce CO2 emissions to zero.

Why does arboRise support a carbon calculator for microenterprises? Many of our members and donors are climate conscious SME owners. In talking to these entrepreneurs we realised that they lack a tool to help them make the transition to a greener future. And it has to be affordable, because a small SME often does not have the resources to hire external consultants!

ZeroCarb provides a simple, fast and cheap solution to suggest relevant carbon footprint reduction measures to SME owners, and offers them an obvious solution to offset the remaining emissions: planting trees with arboRise!

Do you run a service sector company with less than 10 employees? ZeroCarb is for you! In less than 10 minutes you know the carbon footprint of your SME and get ideas on how to reduce it. Take advantage, the ZeroCarb carbon footprint calculator is still free!

An ecological fable before its time, Jean Giono’s The Man Who Planted Trees is a short story written in 1953 to “make people like planting trees”, in his words. In this short story, the narrator recalls his encounter in Haute-Provence with an extraordinary character: a solitary and peaceful shepherd who plants trees, thousands of them. Elzéard Bouffier, the silent, stubborn one, reconciles man and nature. A fiction that activates reality, a bearer of hope; this forest has social and economic consequences, allowing the surrounding villages to welcome new families when they were threatened by desertification.

Seit 2014, dem Jahr der Uraufführung des Stücks, führen   diesen Text bei jeder Gelegenheit vor, die Musikerin lässt die Worte von Jean Giono erklingen, Olivier Havran verkörpert den Erzähler mit Sanftheit und Aufrichtigkeit. Ein inspirierender Atemzug.

Since 2014, the year of the show’s creation, Sara Oswald and Olivier Havran have been walking this text whenever they can, the musician making Jean Giono’s words resonate, Olivier Havran embodying the narrator with gentleness and sincerity. Inspiring breathing.

The arboRise association, inspired by Jean Giono, offered this ode to the foliage to forest lovers on 16 January 2022 at 5pm at the St-François church in Lausanne, as part of the festivities for its 750th anniversary.

Two patron saints are sponsoring the show: Saint Francis of Assisi, who was the first to celebrate Creation, Nature and what we call “the Environment” nowadays, which is why he can be considered the patron saint of ecology. And then Saint Marcel, celebrated on January 16, the patron saint of seed growers!

Our team is touring the 12 new villages included in our 2021-2022 reforestation campaign to explain our approach to the communities.

In each village, the council of elders and the village chief sign the “village convention” and commit to welcoming the project and protecting the future forests. Then our team explains the tasks of the “seed families” and the “field families”: learning to reforest is not improvised!

Interested families introduce themselves and sometimes have to be chosen by an innocent hand:

Then we go to the field to check the health of the seed trees and that the land is well cleared:

In perfect sync with the launch of the campaign in Guinea, the RTS operation “Tout est possible” has enabled us to launch reforestation activities in Switzerland too!

Thanks to “Tout est possible”, 16 families in French-speaking Switzerland are committed to collecting seeds and 6 landowners are making land available. After a very positive first contact by Zoom, we will start the preparations in the first quarter of 2022. Here too we will apply the arboRise method: learning together and solving one by one all the obstacles that will inevitably stand in our way. The project is still open to new energies: just announce yourself at info@arborise.org. Are you a forestry expert or a forestry whiz? We are looking forward to your advice!

Our 2021-2022 reforestation campaign is launched! Both the national (“this is your home, welcome to your house” according to the new deputy director of Water and Forests) and the local authorities (“you are going to plant 400 hectares this year, and why not 500 in subsequent years?” according to the sub-prefect of Linko) strongly support our action.

   

As for the population directly concerned, they gave us an enthusiastic welcome in the village of Forono. They all thank our association, its members and our donors for contributing to the recovery of the forest cover with our participatory approach.

As the first field mission in the framework of our partnership with the Research Group for Forestry Development of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich has shown, there will be no shortage of difficulties, as planting trees is by far not the only concern of the population and we will also have to cope with the surprises of Mother Nature. During this reforestation campaign we will have to continually adapt our approach to local conditions.

Experimenting and finding practical solutions to obstacles that arise is our method, which has been successful so far. Also thanks to our local partner Guidre, who once again demonstrated their professionalism and multiple skills during this stay in Guinea. An example? The families who implement our action are cruelly lacking in equipment. We are therefore going to provide them with tarpaulins, which will make it easier to harvest seeds and will also be useful for the women to dry their fonio and cassava crops, and with boots, which are very useful in the rainy season for the families who provide land. We will also create forest management committees in each village, which will support the families on a day-to-day basis, for example in the establishment of hedgerows around the reforested land. We have also strengthened our forestry skills with the involvement of Mr. Kpogomou, an environmental specialist from this region.

The Indosuez Foundation (Switzerland) – patron of numerous institutions in French-speaking Switzerland – is making it possible to implement our 2021-2022 reforestation campaign through a significant donation. The action of arboRise is fully in line with the commitment of the Indosuez Foundation (Switzerland) « …in projects with a sustainable and concrete environmental impact. In this way, we work towards the conservation and preservation of the environment, particularly forests, economic development and the empowerment of local communities ». The amount allocated by the Foundation will finance all the contributions made to the 200 seed families and 200 land families during the 2021-2022 reforestation campaign !

The arboRise committee expresses its deep gratitude for the recognition shown by this donation. A huge THANK YOU!

The young shoots from our spring reforestation campaign are already looking good ! It only took the six months of the rainy season for them to take firm root in the soil. Unlike nursery-raised plants, they do not suffer from the shock of transplanting and their root system is stronger. Fortunately, their survival in the dry season depends on the depth of their roots.

It is also interesting to note that these young shoots have germinated despite strong competition from weeds. So the clearing that we are asking the families who own the land may not be necessary…

These young shoots must now escape from the goats who like woody plants (cattle prefer herbaceous plants). The second threat to the saplings is bushfire. This is why we encourage landowning families to plant hedgerows (barriers against cattle) and build firebreaks around the land.

The low-tech approach of arboRise is based on Mother Nature. It is slow and full of uncertainties but it is sustainable.

Die Volkart Stiftung unterstützt die Aktivitäten von arboRise in den nächsten drei Jahren nachhaltig mit einer jährlichen Großspende. Dieser Beitrag und die Arbeit von arboRise stehen ganz im Zeichen der Vision der Volkart Stiftung: “Die Vision eine Gesellschaft, in der die Menschen respektvoll zusammenleben, ihre Meinung informiert bilden und der Umwelt Sorge tragen. Dafür unterstützt die Volkart Stiftung seit Generationen Projekte und Institutionen, welche den Gemeinsinn innerhalb der Gesellschaft unterstützen, unkonventionelle Ansätze fördern und öffentliche Reflexionsräume schaffen.” Der Ausschuss von arboRise ist sehr dankbar für die Anerkennung, die diese Spende und die damit einhergehende Beratung und Vernetzung mit sich bringt: ein großes DANKESCHÖN!

 

The first field research mission starts this Sunday 24 October!

Why? Remember, with the help of the Development Research Fund of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, we want to understand the indirect effects of our project on village communities. Because, although our project is full of good intentions and was enthusiastically received last spring, it is possible that our action has consequences that are not always desirable, and perhaps also unsuspected positive effects. We want to understand this so that we can act even more effectively and sustainably.

ForDev, the ETH institute for sustainable tropical forest management, is most familiar with this issue of human-nature interaction and will be conducting the study.

Before observing the impact of arboRise on people, we want to understand how people interact with trees and forests. This is the purpose of this first research mission, which will be followed by two other field missions.

This first mission is therefore about understanding the context of the Linko sub-prefecture and, in particular, the question of ‘what pushes a villager to cut or not to cut his trees‘. This is what Léa Ackerer, a specialist in sustainable development, will be observing over the next two weeks, in total immersion in two villages near Linko. Léa knows Guinea well as she has already conducted impact studies there for Biotope, an ecological consultancy company.

As this issue is independent of arboRise’s activities, Léa will stay in the villages of Forono and Kissidou (2 x one week), where no reforestation activities have yet taken place. In order to understand the context and the relationship between the population and the forest, it will be necessary to understand the issues of everyday life, the constraints, the culture, the social roles, etc. by meeting many people. In each village Léa will conduct semi-structured interviews with the village chief, 2 heads of family, 2 wives, the chief of the hunters, the village elder and the village youth. Since she will be staying with the local people with her interpreter, she will also get a lot of spontaneous information during these two weeks.

The journey from Europe went very well and the welcome in Forono was sensational:

The Fedevaco selects arboRise and invites us to submit a development project for the Diaspora Award. This training programme is aimed at associations and social and solidarity-based enterprises run by diasporas established in the canton of Vaud. Three prizes will be awarded to the winning projects: the first prize winner will receive CHF 10,000, and the second and third prize winners will receive a promotional video of their project.

For arboRise, this is an opportunity to strengthen our skills and to develop a cooperation project that complements our reforestation action, by benefiting from the expert advice of Fedevaco (remember that this umbrella organisation of 49 associations active in development cooperation has been putting its expertise and know-how at the service of public authorities in the Canton of Vaud for over 30 years).

What is our project?

In the context of our reforestation activities, we note that traditional knowledge related to trees has been lost, whereas a few generations ago, communities maintained real agro-forests. Fortunately, not everything has been forgotten and our intention is to revalorise local silvicultural knowledge.

On the one hand, we want to use the skills of recognised national Guinean institutions. The ENATEF in Mamou, for example, trains around 30 young forestry professionals each year. On the other hand, we want to engage older women who have traditional knowledge. They are the ones who know the old recipes, who know how to prepare traditional remedies, who remember the ancient wisdom linked to the trees and their products. We want to organise a dialogue between several of these elders in the presence of the young women farmers, so that the diversity of memories can be expressed and so that this moment can be a memorable collective learning experience.

The aim is therefore to enhance the local intangible heritage related to trees and to contribute to agricultural outreach in the community.

Of course, our initial intention will evolve. This is precisely the aim of our participation in the Diaspora Award: to enrich and improve our initial idea to ensure a sustainable impact.