Motivation

Undoubtedly reforestation and forest restoration represent one of our best hopes to meaningfully address climate change. Yet, despite promises to plant billions or even trillions of trees by governments, businesses, and NGOs, forests worldwide continue to reduce in size, diversity, and carbon capture potential.

Tree planting is simple, relatively easy and cost effective, and therefore is an attractive intervention strategy – but the question of how to ensure that planted trees grow, survive, and thrive (and how to demonstrate this permanence to funders) still begs adequate answers. Planting billions of trees changes nothing if those trees do not survive.

Further, reforestation is typically costed out in a way that considers the planting itself, but not the maintenance, monitoring and evaluation necessary to ensure that trees survive into the future. These structural assumptions mean that most reforestation efforts rely on ongoing contributions by invisible partners that are not included in per tree planting costs, confounding efforts for full transparency and scalability.

Purpose

RealTrees is meant to:

• Register every tree planted as a unique entity, preventing double counting or the assignment of one tree to multiple donors

• Capture and provide ongoing data on tree growth and carbon capture for every individual tree planted, allowing for unprecedented precision in impact reporting

• Provide donors with next-level transparency, in which every single tree sponsored can be followed online

• Direct donors’ cash incentivizes for tree planting to community partners, benefiting Amazonian native communities and smallholder farmers

RealTrees consists of:

• Field App: a simple-to-use, proprietary smartphone application that allows the rapid registration and monitoring of trees

• Data Platform: all tree records, including first-time planting registration and ongoing monitoring captures, live on a state-of-the-art data platform

• Blockchain: all tree records are blockchained, rendering them indelible to any form of tampering or manipulation

• Artificial Intelligence: sophisticated algorithms analyze tree photos to calculate the size and carbon storage of each tree, and ensure that no tree is counted twice

• Donor Portal: tree sponsors log in to a rich user experience with personalized content including photos, species profiles, and tree-by-tree for the trees sponsored

• Research: RealTrees will improve our understanding of the growth rates for hundreds of tree species; the technology is also useful for forest inventories, urban tree inventories, and in other applications yet to be discovered

RealTrees is coming soon!

This program is implemented at the following centers: