Seacret and Eden Reforestation: A Powerful Alliance for Global Sustainability

How Seacret Helps

As a partner and supporter of Eden Reforestation's efforts Seacret directly helps and supports with the plantation of mangroves through our website. We give eden around $0.43 the typical costs outlined by Eden for materials and or plantation costs for each tree/ seedling. For every purchase on our store a result of 3 trees are planted as an outcome and a live tracker can be seen on our home page. 

We are proud to call Eden our partners helping to restore vital coastal marine ecosystems.

 

What Eden Do

Every day, Eden's teams work in some of the world's most remote locations to facilities restoration and community development through nature-based solutions to climate change.

Today Eden operates in eight project countries and are able to manage over 241,150 hectares of land by working with the local communities. Through collaboration and science-based restoration practices, Eden works to generate substantive benefits designed explicitly by and for each community that supports their well-being, raising living conditions and restoring their environment.  

How does an Eden project start?

They start their reforestation projects by connecting with local communities and building relationships with local leaders who want their environment to thrive. These communities guide Eden to planting opportunities, they build their citizens’ commitment to restoring and protecting the forest, and creatively overcome restoration obstacles.

Edens' Methodology 

Eden provides economic incentives and simple planting techniques to support local communities in restoring their local environment and economy. Eden keeps its systems simple, so they can be easily replicated and implemented by people who don’t have many resources and must deal with treacherous roads, unreliable electricity, and spotty internet. Putting the local community at the centre of their work inspires great commitment to reforestation in their country and a sense of ownership to protect their forests long-term. Our success and the communities’ success are inextricably entwined.

How do you ensure the protection of your trees? How do you know your trees will not be cut down again?

We make every effort to ensure the forest we plant becomes permanent and sustainable. Towards this end, we have implemented the following steps:

We work carefully with all levels of the government to secure written agreements designating the restoration sites as protected in perpetuity.

We do not plant in logging areas. There is never a 100% guarantee that some form of illegal harvest will not occur. However, we do everything within legal limits to ensure the restoration sites are guaranteed to stand in perpetuity.

We hire local communities to plant the trees. In this way, we alleviate extreme poverty within the impacted community. The community members now have an economic incentive to ensure the well-being of the restoration project. They also have a sense of “ownership” over the trees and restored forest, and they protect it with great care.

We plant agroforestry species (fruit, fodder, and construction species designed to provide food security and benefit legitimate human needs). Over time these trees become a source of sustainable income.

We do all possible to supply the locals with alternative fuel sources (fuel-efficient dry wood stoves and solar parabolic stoves), which reduces and/or eliminates their dependence on charcoal.

We hire forest guards as part of the labor force.

Most significantly, we have seen the locals fall in love with their forest. They also recognise and benefit from the restored forest through increased fisheries, improved farming, cleaner water, and the formation of microenterprises.

Are the trees planted on publicly or privately-owned land?

Land rights and authority vary from nation to nation and from planting site to planting site. However, the overwhelming majority of our forest restoration projects occur on government-owned land under the local community's direct authority. In contrast, we work on smaller scale agroforestry projects, as seen in many of our projects in Haiti. Agroforestry efforts typically occur at sites owned by small-scale farmers. The one consistent determining factor in each nation is that we have established legal Government Associations and/or Non-Government Organizations, which provide us with the authority to operate effectively and in coordination with all the essential regional and local governance agencies on crucial determinants.

Who owns the trees?

The vast majority of the trees at our sites are owned by the local communities who actively participated in restoring their regional forest during their employment period with us. The common but much smaller exception is when agroforestry trees are planted at small plot farmer sites where the land is owned by the local farmer. In such cases, the small plot farmer owns the trees along with the proceeds from the trees.

What are your restoration methods?

We use various restoration methods such as seedling nurseries, bare-root transfers, and mangrove propagule planting. Each nation uses one or more of these methods depending on the species of trees that are native to that given region. To view detailed information about these methods, click here.

 

Where do you purchase the seeds and seedlings?

We collect most seeds from nearby remnant forests. If required to supplement the seeds we collect, we purchase seeds from local, trusted seed banks. We do not purchase seedlings; we grow our seedlings in our nurseries to ensure quality and germination rates.

Why Madagascar?

More than 90% of Madagascar's primary forests are destroyed, impacting people living in undeserved areas.

Madagascar is one of the world’s top biodiversity conservation priorities because of its endemic species and severe habitat loss rates. Restoration in Madagascar is important because the destruction of the mangrove estuaries along the coastline has caused mudflats to wash into the ocean, destroying once-productive fisheries and increasing the vulnerability of coastal communities to hurricanes, tsunamis, and floods. In the inland region of Madagascar, deforestation threatens one of the world’s rarest and most diverse forest systems.

Progress to date

With 46 project sites, Madagascar is our most prolific restoration and community development nation. We have extensive infrastructure such as guardhouses, fire towers, and seed banks. We also developed a training centre for local nursery managers to gain hands-on experience in seedling management and effective reforestation techniques.