On this day, we’d be planting a native hedge – 60 bare-root saplings of Beech, Hornbeam, Hazel, Hawthorn, Blackthorn and Wayfaring Tree.

This International Day of Forests, Ricardo, ITF’s Programmes Manager, shares how forests and rural communities depend on each other for wellbeing.

The question for this article is how? How do we ensure gender equality and equal rights to resources are designed into these large scale restoration programmes?

The project is a wonderful practical way of supporting women, of educating women and giving them the opportunity to experience empowerment.

Join us on the first day of the Worcester Walk Community Project's landscape restoration journey, as we plant a continuous native hedge to protect the rare semi-wooded pasture in the Forest of Dean.

Trees feed my soul. Trees speak to me, no not in words but in feelings.

One unintended consequence of the pandemic will be that when our attention turns to COP26 and the climate crisis, we won’t have had the time to forget that when faced with a threat of global magnitude, governments, businesses and civil society can achieve what was once thought farfetched.

At Christmas time last year we raised money for our good friend Noormichuki, and her tree planting project in the Mara, Kenya. As one of the first woman tree planters of this region, we were incredibly excited to support her in setting up new seedling nurseries and train other women in her community.

If we can raise £20,000, WWANC will create three new fruit tree nurseries, and plant 15,000 fruit trees to strengthen livelihoods and reduce pressure on the forest.

In 2007 this land was unproductive farmland. Two streams flowed sluggishly through it to form a boggy field. With over 1,000 trees have been planted to transform the land and landscape.

Denise Amador Bittencourt, Biologist, Ecologist and Educator writes about different initiatives in Brazil, related to communities and agroforestry, some challenges, positive news and a vision for the future.

To understand how to restore ecosystems across the world, we need vast quantities of data and sophisticated machine learning tools. But this isn’t enough.

An article by Alistair Pask, Ph.D., Founder of Reforest and Director of Reforest Tea. Reforest has supported the work of the International Tree Foundation in sub-Saharan Africa since mid-2019. This article describes his journey from 2015 to the present day.

“This man, to whom people referred as St.Barbe, pinned a small badge engraved with a tree to my school coat – and onlookers cheered.”

In 2017 our partner in Uganda, Pro Biodiversity Conservationists PROBICOU went to court. Fighting for the rights of local communities to conserve and use Kafuga Forest products to sustain their livelihoods.

Now autumn is approaching, at ITF we’re looking forward to another tree planting season in the UK. We recently closed our Call for Proposals for this year’s UK Community Tree Planting Programme. We’re thrilled with the applications, including community orchards, biodiverse hedging projects, to community-owned woodlands.

England’s Tree Strategy is set to be published later this year. Discover why broader social, psychological and environmental benefits should be prioritised over carbon sequestration alone.

Though still not well known, Richard St Barbe Baker or ‘St Barbe’ as his friends knew him, was surely the first global conservationist. He remains one of history’s greatest advocates for forest protection and restoration.

Learn why protecting plant and tree health is vital in 2020, the International Year of Plant Health. Discover simple actions you can take to safeguard our natural habitat, from sourcing plants from reputable sources to reporting any pests to Tree Alert.

This project succeeded in providing a source of livelihoods to vulnerable communities, by creating a shared source of income and access to fast-maturing fruit and nut trees, improving livelihood and food security for 160 households in Embu County, Kenya.