Aligning funding, coordinating efforts, and creating opportunities for tree stewards around the world to accelerate the global reForestation movement
Our ReForestation Theory Of Change
Our Theory of Change starts in the Kakamega forest, the last remaining rainforest of Kenya.
Kenya has been hit especially hard by deforestation, losing 11% tree cover across the whole country since 2001. The resulting desertification and drought across the country has devastated communities.
But there was hope when Silvi’s founder Djimo was able to connect with Eliud, a former primary teacher turned reforestation champion. With the help of funds raised through Gitcoin, Djimo supported Eliud in gathering an in-depth understanding on the dynamics between the local nurseries, farmers, schools, and forest agencies, enabling the planting of thousands of seedlings through new nurseries activities.
Our theory of change involves focusing on areas where human activity such as agriculture is most at conflict with natural habitats. Naturally, this impact zone is at the perimeter of forests, and Kakamega is no exception.
We started to see a great opportunity to empower local reForestation heroes through funding, knowledge, and tools that enable them to enlist their communities in service to their local forests. We’ve scoped out reforestation sites and are building relationships with the farmers, the Kenyan Forest Service, and other stakeholders so they are empowered to take collective action on reforestation in a hyperlocal way.
We are now scaling operations with small-holder farmers to implement our model that starts with the production of saplings. On top of working with a dozen schools, we have also worked with over 40 small holder farmers like Laboso and Melvin to implement reforestation stewardship right where they live
This foundational work helped us imagine a world where…
🌳 🌀 Every tree planted and stewarded is done so regeneratively, in a way that enriches the unique local life system and the humans that live within it.
💚 🤝 People and trees around the world engage in mutually beneficial and conscious relationships
❤️🩹🌍 Trees are respected as a key anchor to our movement towards healing our forest ecosystems and larger relationships to the earth
🌴👁️ People grow and share tree wisdom together on a global scale, with rich hyperlocal context.
🌲💰Trees are honored as a high-quality asset class and internalized in our financial institutions and businesses
👨🏾🌾🏝️ Anyone can sustain a dignified livelihood through planting and stewarding the right trees in the right places.
This is the change we at Silvi are trying to create. Are you ready to dive into our approach into regenerating forests and communities around the world? Let’s go.
Pillar 1: ReForestation is key to healing our planet, and needs coordination
Planting and stewarding trees is key to a regenerative future. According to a global study done in 2019, there’s enough land for us to plant 1.2 trillion native trees around the world without impinging on living or agricultural land. So how much impact will this have on climate change?
research estimates that a worldwide planting program could remove between one-third to one-half of all the emissions from human activities that remain in the atmosphere”
Native trees have many other benefits for the ecosystem on-top of carbon storage. These include providing habitat for native species such as birds, butterflies and even bigger fauna, enriching soil health, increasing water storage capacity, and increasing human health in many subtle ways. We see trees as anchors for large-scale ecosystem restoration and healing the relationship between humans and the earth.
So how can we get these trees planted? The article referenced above contains great science on the potential for wide-scale tree planting, but states that the research “does not address how a global tree planting programme would be paid for and delivered.”.
Solving this funding and coordination piece of global reforestation comprises the anchor of what we’re building here.
Pillar 2: ReForestation needs to be done globally and intentionally, with ecosystem intelligence
We’ve seen many amazing movements around reforestation that have planted millions of hectares of trees. But many of these movements have sacrificed the longevity of these trees and the health of the overall ecosystem in exchange for large numbers.
On one hand, we need a massive global movement for replanting trees to heal the damage from the 420 million hectares of forest that have been destroyed since 1990.
On the other hand, we recognize the importance of the right placement and species of each individual tree within the context of the larger ecosystem and the financial incentives and social norms of how the local community relates with the tree, which ties into our next pillar.
Pillar 3: We need long-term community social and financial buy-in
We’ve seen agriculture cause around 90% of deforestation worldwide. We can’t continue to separate our tree planting from farmers around the world. Rather, we see great opportunity in paying farmers at the fringes of forests to plant native or ecosystem-friendly trees as a part of their operation. When they realize the financial and ecological benefits of tree planting, they’ll tell their neighbors. We’re creating tools that empower this peer-to-peer chain-reaction of native reforestation on the frontlines of our decimated forests.
Many reforestation projects fail because trees aren’t maintained over their lifecycle. When long-term relationships of care between trees and humans flourish, forests can gain a foothold and start to heal again.
These pillars underpin each aspect of the Silvi platform, which we’ll break down in the next section.
Silvi — A Multifaceted Protocol To Empowering Tree Stewardship Around the World
As we started grasping the magnitude of this vision, it became obvious that building it within a conventional tech company container would create obstacles to systemic progress in ReForestation. We’ve conceptualized a suite of tools to empower ReForestation that support each of our pillars in their own unique way.
Global ReForestation Network
Part of our launch strategy is to create a network for regenerative reforestation, and seeding it with innovative tools for communities, tree-focused organizations, investors, and tree-steward education initiatives. We need an integrated solution that empowers regenerative reforestation efforts across the planet.
We eventually want to leverage the coordination potential of distributed governance, using blockchain ledgers and smart contracts to create a global, decentralized hub for catalyzing regenerative reforestation.
Silvi App
The Silvi App is where it all started — Silvi is a webapp in beta that enables tree stewards to easily track and report ground truth on their reforestation projects, share the process of stewarding individual trees with community and funders, and engage in reforestation-based challanges with friends. We see it as a key tool for making MRV decentralized, engaging, gamified and low-cost. Eventually, the vision is that the Silvi App can empower anyone to be a tree steward, inspiring harmonious relationships between people and trees.
Treekipedia — The Tree Intelligence Commons
Treekipedia is place where anyone can go to see best practice for planting and stewarding different species of trees, with species-specific and location-specific information. Since there are around 70,000 tree species out there, we need an entire library of methodologies, and we only see this library reaching scale via a peer-to-peer network. This platform will document the collective intelligence on planting and stewarding trees with real-world examples from organizations and communities. As tree intelligence increases, it can be used to teach tree stewards all around the world. We see Treekipedia as a DeSci hub where nurseries and stewards such as those in Kenya can document their process for stewarding a native seedling to adulthood, creating a place for this valuable knowledge to live for all in the region to access and for price discovery to be tied to. Which takes us to our next pillar
TreeForwards — Low-Risk, Milestone-Based ReForestation Funding
TreeForwards are for trees what Carbon Forwards are for carbon — they represent a way for funders of ReForestation to invest in projects with transparency, higher upside than carbon credits since it also collateralizes other eco credits such as biodiversity, and mitigated risk through community involvement. We’ll use milestone-based payouts to ensure that that tree stewards are incentivized to steward the tree throughout the tree’s lifecycle
The tree stewards can use the Silvi App and get paid after verifying the progress of the trees they propagate or plant, providing ground-level transparency for funders and ecosystem credit issuers. Initial tree forwards will only be issued in vetted sites where we can broker the right to future returns. Over time, we hope to make this tokenization universally accessible and driven by real world contracts, probabilistic confidence and governance
The Silvi Token — High-Growth ReForestation Investments
When this engine comes together, we’ll create a normalized asset class that represents new tree inventories across our portfolio of reforestation sites. Our aim is to have a de facto token asset that equates to high-integrity ReForestation and delivers high returns to early investors. What’s the value backing the crypto currency, you ask? Trees, and the revenue from eco-credits produced by them. All pieces need to come together before we launch a token
Our Progress and Next Steps
We’re making some great progress on creating and activating the grassroots connections that set the stage for the Silvi platform. Here’s what we’ve done so far:
- Distributed thousands of saplings across Florida within schools, reforestation partners and urban neighborhoods
- Partnered with Fire Flies Forest, a conscious music Festival in Tennessee with planting hundreds of indegenious species in a retired golf course. Check out our video!
- Connecting farmers, forest agencies, schools, and ReForestation champions in Kenya to restore parts of the Kakamega forest deforested for agriculture. Have propagated over 130,000 trees from seed to date!
- Launched Silvi web-app beta, documenting the planting of trees and building tools for agroforestry, seed beds and social media features
Over the course of 2023 and 2024, we aim to:
- Convene a network for ReForestation, including major tree-planting organizations, forest technology platforms, grassroots leaders, and climate investors to accelerate the global movement.
- Launch the Treekipedia tree-stewardship library, enabling tree stewards around the world with knowledge about how to grow native trees to adulthood.
- Piloting tree-forwards (in progress), giving climate investors a low-risk way to invest into ReForestation projects.
- Connect the Silvi App with carbon-credit issuers, enabling payouts to tree stewards and investors as carbon credits are minted from ReForestation efforts.
Keep up with our progress by following us on Twitter.
