Global Outreach
Welcome to Bio4Climate’s Global Outreach page.
Through our work at Bio4Climate and within the EcoRestoration Alliance we are deeply immersed in restoration issues and get to meet people and projects around the world who are directly engaged in restoration work. After extensive research conducted with Linsey de Jager, our Ecological Research Intern in South Africa, we have vetted a list of organizations that meet our criteria and where we are confident donations will make the most difference. You can see the full research paper here.
These people are our heroes! On this page we are featuring a few of those organizations we feel deserve our and your support. The list of such organizations is, happily, growing. We will periodically rotate new organizations onto this page. We invite you to peruse these, click on the links to the fuller descriptions of any that interest you. On those pages you will find more details about what they are doing and how to support them.
Here are the projects we encourage you to support. Please email staff@bio4climate.org to let us know which organization you have supported and how much. That way we can keep track and make sure your support arrives.
Please click on the photo in the boxes to go to pages with a longer description and information about how to donate funds.
Citizen Science Project at Cape Winelands Biosphere Reserve
Training Citizen Scientists to address water pollution, as well as buying equipment needed to ensure the project is successful.
Dinkwayane Water Smart Project
Purchasing equipment for the water project, training to make the local community self-sustainable, and any tools, seeds, and stock needed.
GWANISHI Initiative
Growing spekboom plants in a nursery for the GWANISHI project as well as soil restoration and soil erosion control initiatives.
Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve
Purchasing resources needed for clearing of alien species and restoration of critically endangered fynbos.
The Future of the Amazon Foundation
Purchasing resources needed for clearing of alien species and restoration of critically endangered fynbos.
Uilenkraal Project (Greenpop)
Growing and planting trees for the Uilenkraal Restoration Project.
Why we think it is important to support other organizations
For those who would like to read more, we would like to tell you why we think it is important to support other organizations that are doing on-the-ground ecorestoration work, and to contrast the power of nature-based solutions to cool the planet with the more mainstream emissions-reduction focused efforts.
According to estimates from experts like Rob de Laet (one of Bio4Climate’s Advisors), an area the size of France needs to be reforested or restored in the near future to help cool the earth.
However, currently much of the world’s attention, effort, and funding is directed towards technological infrastructure aimed at decarbonization. While this is important, the impact of those efforts are often limited. We believe greater impacts can be achieved through ecosystem restoration. (See Richard Heinberg’s Restoring Nature Is Our Only Climate Solution.)
Background
The urgency of our mission cannot be overstated. Global heating and climate chaos are accelerating, and while reducing emissions is crucial, that alone is unlikely to slow or reverse these trends in the near term. Emissions reductions, capture, and transitioning to an electric economy are expensive, have their own environmental costs, and may not be geophysically feasible at the scale needed.
Many regions around the world have entered tipping points, including the Amazon, the Congo, Arctic ice, and Arctic tundra. Research from experts like Atossa Soltani and her colleagues at Amazon Watch (which Bio4Climate featured in the presentation “Amazon Deforestation: Why it matters to us”) and recently deceased Spanish researcher Millán Millán demonstrate the severe impact of forest loss and the resulting desertification (see this excellent post by Rob Lewis about Millán Millán and his work: “Millan Millan and the Mystery of the Missing Mediterranean Storms”).
Investing in greening efforts in already green regions has minimal impact compared to the significant benefits of re-greening desert or near-desert areas. We face a choice: invest in expensive projects in developed regions or allocate funds to low-cost reforestation projects in less-developed areas.
We would also like to highlight the work of the more than fifty Ecosystem Restoration Camps around the world (begun by John D. Liu), as well as the many projects being led by many of the more than 400 members of the EcoRestoration Alliance (which Bio4Climate co-founded) — see, e.g., ERA’s Big Map to Save the Future.