Plant Your Future believes that the most effective immediate method to actually making a dent in tackling climate change and to compensate for our unavoidable carbon footprints, is investing in natural climate solutions and focusing their tree planting efforts in the tropics where they’ll have the greatest effect. Plant Your Future is working towards its target of planting 1 million trees by 2023.
To celebrate World Environment Day, Hogan Lovells hosted our first virtual conference on a wide range of environmental topics, delivered by representatives from some of our most innovative pro bono and social enterprise clients.
More than 700 colleagues from across the firm's worldwide network participated in talks on various topics, including fighting plastic pollution in the ocean and understanding the impact of individual lifestyles on climate change.
As part of this programme, Jenny Henman, Chairman and Founder of Plant Your Future, discussed the charity's work in restoring deforested land in Peru with lawyers from the UK HL BaSE practice.
Each year, 160,000 hectares of trees are cut down in the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest. The vast majority of this is driven by subsistence smallholder farmers, who have no choice but to destroy the very environment they rely upon in order to survive.
Plant Your Future's mission is to alleviate poverty and protect biodiversity and the environment by reforesting the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest. Plant Your Future does this by empowering farmers to transition from destructive and unsustainable agricultural practices to environmentally friendly agroforestry.
Jenny explained how Plant Your Future's sustainable agroforestry model and the use of carbon finance turns the vicious cycle of forest loss into a virtuous cycle of regenerative agriculture, forest restoration and improved livelihoods for local people. Jenny also described how Plant Your Future's programme develops over time, and how the programme supports farmers in the long term by helping them grow sustainable crops, such as cocoa and charapita.
Plant Your Future's programme has been extremely successful, planting over 40,000 native trees on degraded land, and the charity has been awarded the Verified Carbon Standard and the Climate Community and Biodiversity Standard by Rainforest Alliance.
However, the Covid-19 pandemic has created many new challenges for Plant Your Future and the communities it supports. The militarily enforced lockdown in Peru makes it impossible for farmers to leave their homes and sell their crops. Plant Your Future have launched an emergency appeal to support these farmers and deliver food parcels and basic medical kits; details of the appeal can be found here.