Optimizing Land for Green Impact

TGB's Approach in Mount Elgon

Ecotrust Uganda

Scaling with Care

Navigating the unique challenge of small land parcels in Mount Elgon, the Trees for Global Benefits (TGB) initiative takes a distinct approach. With an average of just 0.3 hectares per farmer, land utilization becomes a careful art. Farmers adopt dispersed interplanting and agro-forestry, integrating trees into coffee and banana plantations. To enhance market viability, concerted efforts are applied to aggregate these small land holdings, establishing a marketable scale for carbon credit sales in this landscape. The TGB initiative in Mount Elgon harmonizes environmental impact with the practicalities of limited land resources.

Trees for Global Benefits in the Mount Elgon Landscape

Automation for Operational efficiency

Embracing the power of technology for operational excellence, the Mount Elgon landscape has witnessed a transformation through the adoption of mobile apps. These apps digitize land-use maps and plan vivos, significantly expediting the process of tracking acreage and setting tree targets. The automated system not only ensures operational swiftness but also improves accuracy in parcel data. By detecting overlapping or duplicate parcels, it prevents any instances of double counting. Following meticulous Technical Specifications, these digital land-use maps play a crucial role in estimating the expected carbon benefits arising from the implementation of restoration initiatives. Beyond that, they serve as valuable tools for monitoring progress.

Coffee Value Chain Insetting

The project activities prioritize enhancing the coffee value chain to fortify community-based adaptation in the Mount Elgon region. The project collaborates with coffee companies to comprehend the risk of lower coffee production due to water scarcity. It engages with coffee growers to invest in watershed management systems and pay for watershed services, mitigating the risk of lower production and improving the livelihoods of smallholder producers. Through insetting, supply chains become more resilient and sustainable by evaluating ecosystem-related risks and integrating payments for ecosystem services into products ('insetting'). Introducing trees in coffee systems through dispersed interplanting not only elevates the quality of coffee produced but also bolsters the resilience of productive systems against the impacts of climate change variability. This way, instead of competing with other land uses, trees enhance the existing land use. Using the GALS methodology, TGB also supports producer groups to align their tree planting initiatives with market demand. This ensures that, rather than being an end in themselves, performance-based payments are used to trigger the creation of multiple income streams.

Stacking Carbon with Watershed Services

As part of efforts to make the PES payments worth their while, TGB farmers in the Mt. Elgon landscape have received additional support in recognition of the watershed services provided by these farmers. The Mt. Elgon National Park and peaks dominate catchments, ensuring a continuous hydrological cycle that supports agriculture, water for domestic use, and urban supply within the Mt. Elgon Landscape of Uganda and Kenya. The mountain serves as a crucial water catchment for systems like the Lake Victoria Basin, the Nile River basin via Lake Kyoga, and R. Turkwell, L. Turkana. Increasing tree cover is vital for maintaining this critical environmental service.

TGB farmers in this landscape integrate watershed conservation methodologies on-farm, such as digging trenches lined with Napier grass. In addition to tree planting, this enhances the catchment's ability to provide watershed services, mainly by slowing down water runoff, reducing soil erosion/sedimentation, and regulating water flow. Enhancing natural forest cover binds soil, enhancing water purification, soil conservation, stabilization, and moisture retention, helping to reduce flood and landslide risks that threaten local agricultural livelihoods.

This initiative started with support from the UNDP-funded Ecosystem-Based Adaptation project (EbA – 2012 – 2015) to enable farmers to integrate soil and water conservation measures alongside tree planting. These efforts have received additional support from generous donors such as KUA Coffee (Australia), who are interested in the role of such initiatives in building the resilience of organic coffee value chains.

The UNDP Ecosystem-Based Adaptation project (EbA – 2012 – 2015)

Gender Inclusivity

The application of Gender Action Learning Systems (GALS) as a community engagement methodology has enabled our farmers/community to embark on their own vision road journey at the community level, aligning the community's needs with the restoration objective. Each participating household has a vision (vision road journey) accompanied by a land-use map showing how the household's land will contribute to the household vision. Both the Vision Road Journey and the land-use plan demonstrate how the needs of different household members will be addressed, resulting in the preparation of gender-based community visions aligned with the restoration goals. Additionally, the gender balance tree has been utilized to assist families in examining balance within the family concerning work, expenditure, decision-making, and property. This process identifies changes women and men may want to make in gender relations to fulfill their human potential.