Treeplanting and Jane / JGI – the TACARE approach

Working with communities to protect and replant forests has long been at the heart of the work of the Jane Goodall Institute.

“In 1990 I flew over my beloved Gombe National Park which was part of the great equatorial forest belt,” explains Dr. Jane Goodall. “But when I looked down, it had become a tiny island surrounded by completely bare hills. This was when it hit me. If we don’t work with the people who are cutting down the trees because they’re desperate to grow food for their families, we’ll never be able to save the chimpanzees.”

This is when JGI’s holistic TACARE approach was born – a model which starts with immediate needs of the community (such as healthcare, education and sustainable livelihoods) and leads to positive community-led conservation programs which benefit Animals, People and the Environment (APE!).  

This approach began with the communities around Gombe and Lake Tanganyika, and now extends to many hundreds of villages in the six chimpanzee-range countries where JGI works.

The hills around Gombe are no longer bare.

 JGIs around the world

“People say to me all the time: ‘What can I do? What’s one thing I can do?’,” shares Dr. Goodall. “You can plant a tree! Whether you plant the tree in your own backyard or whether you donate to JGI to plant trees in Africa.”

Treeplanting is also an activity that our local JGI Chapters (+25 around the world) and Roots & Shoots youth groups (10,000 in 62 countries) have taken up in their own local communities. Today, JGI plants and protects millions of trees each year to fight the climate crisis.

In 2021, JGI committed to planting and/or restoring five million trees as part of the World Economic Forum’s Trillion Trees campaign to fight the climate crisis.

 Burundi - background

On the other side of Gombe National Park, also on the banks of Lake Tanganyika, lies Burundi.

One of the smallest countries in Africa, Burundi's land is used mostly for subsistence agriculture and grazing to support its large population of 11.5 million. This has led to deforestation, soil erosion and habitat loss. As of 2005, the country was almost completely deforested, with less than 6% of its land covered by trees and over half of that being commercial plantations.

As well as poverty (Burundi has the lowest GDP per capita as of 2022), Burundi has a complicated history of civil war and suffers from corruption, weak infrastructure and poor access to health and education services. This region also sits within a band of land most at risk of climate change in Africa.

Why treeplanting?

JGI has been working in Burundi for many years - planting more than 2.4 million trees to date, and involving thousands of young people and community volunteers.

In the short term, local communities benefit from the activities by having access to seedlings, health insurance, fruit trees, education and improved environments on which they depend for their daily livelihoods.  In the long term, thousands of people will benefit from the trees planted and protect them from environmental degradation and the danger of, for example, landslides and mud streams caused by erosion. Finally, on a national and international level the increased forest cover will encourage biodiversity to flourish, including chimpanzees, and will have a climate change mitigating effect.

Methodology:

The activity is led by Roots & Shoots Burundi and amazing project co-ordinator David Ninteretse – there are currently 2,100 groups made up of 44,000 members.

The groups manage eleven nurseries which provide the seedlings needed for reforestation activities. They focus on indigenous species, as well as fruit trees (which are fast-growing and support livelihoods) and species, such as yellow bamboo, which are well-known for water and soil conserving capacities and can help to stabilise river banks.   

Roots & Shoots Burundi use biodegradable pots hand-made from banana bark - to avoid the use of plastic bags in tree nurseries, as shown on the right.

The planting of the trees is led by JGI and Roots & Shoots Burundi and involves children, local authorities, the army, the Church and ordinary citizens – all participating in planting days. The planting sites are strategically chosen and include state land, private property, plots of rural populations, roadsides, watercourse buffer zones, the buffer zone of Lake Tanganyika, the boundaries and degraded portions of protected areas, school yards, along roadsides, church properties and health centres. The sites that are prioritised for restoration are in and around protected areas in southern Burundi, an area where the few remaining chimpanzee groups live in danger due to habitat destruction.

School groups are part of the planting activity and workshops are given at schools about chimpanzees, their habitats and the importance of biodiversity. Local media are used to relay awareness messages and increase visibility of the planting activities, often attended by local/provincial political representatives. Ongoing monitoring of the trees is carried out by JGI-trained forest monitors, using JGI methodology.

 Thanks to the ongoing support of our team in Burundi, by JGI Chapters and corporate partners (including Luminus, in Belgium), we have been able to increase our treeplanting activity year on year. 

We are hugely excited to partner with Walk2COP27 on the ambition to plant 1 million trees – for steps walked by participants! We look forward to seeing how far everyone can walk between 22 September and the beginning of COP27 in Egypt, and sharing the stories and pictures of our treeplanting activities with participants in 2023!

Thank you for supporting this important work in Burundi – and supporting the communities there as they deal with the sharp end of climate change.             

Notes on Walk2COP27 kilometres travelled to trees planted

NEWS! From 26/10 every km traveled (whether walk/ run/ cycle or wheelchair counts for 1 tree planted).

Target for trees = 1m.

Prior to 26/10: 2 kms of walk, run, wheelchair = 1 tree planted, 4 kms of cycle = 1 tree planted.

Funds for treeplanting still building, but current funds raised allow for >200,000 trees to be planted by the Jane Goodall Institute. Number of trees is dependent on the size of that fund at completion.

Funds raised by participants will also go to the Jane Goodall Institute, who may use this for treeplanting - to meet the target above, should that be necessary. Funds raised over and above the total needed to plant 1m trees, may go towards other JGI work tackling climate change.