Thank you so much to everyone who has jumped in to help our Orangutan Tree Project take root. You have donated over 700 seedlings in just the first two months – fantastic!
We’re well on our way of reaching our initial goal of 2,000 seedlings by the end of 2019, and 12,500 in the first year.
The first of four steps towards that goal is going on right now — collecting forest seeds. Through November and December our team in Borneo is scouring neighboring intact rainforests collecting a mix of seeds. Seeds from over a half-dozen tropical
Young seedling awaiting its journey upriver to begin rebuilding tropical peat swamp rainforest.
trees will then be delivered to the care of local village women’s groups who will plant and nurture the seeds into three-month old, knee-high seedlings. Those young trees will leave the nursery and travel upriver to the landscape once ravaged by fire and left for dead. Their planting and protection by our team over the next two years insures their growth and survival. Two years of nurturing for just $3 a seedling — an insanely cheap investment connecting and protecting species, people and our planet.
When we launched the Orangutan Tree Project (September 2019) we had high hope that you would see it as a positive way of doing something real-world about saving orangutans, helping put the brakes on tropical rainforest loss and applying more than just words to our climate change challenge. Each and every tropical rainforest seedling planted by our partner Yayasan IAR Indonesia is a step towards greater stability for endangered Bornean orangutans and other species. The trees you are helping plant and protect at Pematang Gadung in West Kalimantan Borneo is a tremendous signal that we can change the fate of the forest and the life that resides within.
Storing gigatonnes of carbon, tropical peat swamp forests in Borneo protect over half the world’s sequestered carbon beneath their roots from becoming part of the climate change problem. Their security depends on the maintaining the living forest.
“Peatlands cover only about three per cent of our planet’s land, but account for nearly half the world’s wetlands.” According to the United Nations Environmental Programme.* They store vast amounts of carbon—twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests.” Much of that three percent is found in the very Bornean tropical peat swamp forests that you are helping us protect and regenerate.
These trees are needed now more than ever. Fortunately, rains came before this year’s fires reached the devastating scale we saw in 2015. The rescue of orangutans by Yayasan IAR Indonesia was critical in August and September, and now we need to secure a new home for these rescued primates. The forest that grows from your seedlings will be part of their future. If you would like to be a part of this new and growing forest donate a seedling.
— Gerry Ellis
