The second greatest source of climate change after the burning of fossil fuels is deforestation. Since 1973, the island of Borneo has reported a loss of over 400,000 hectares (4,000 square kilometers) of rainforest. Since 2000, nearly half of Borneo’s forest depletion is attributable to the oil plantations for which the rainforests across Indonesia have been destroyed.
REDD+ stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. United Nations REDD+ projects pursue long-term strategies to address the causes of deforestation and forest degradation.

This project has managed to protect 64,500 hectares of carbon-rich peat swamp forests with a high biodiversity in lowland Borneo from the conversion to palm oil plantations surrounding the entire project area.In total, more than 120 threatened and endangered species live in the project area, including the endangered Bornean orangutan. The project activities prevent the release of 3.5 million metric tons of CO2 equivalents into the atmosphere each year. In addition, local communities are supported by providing training in sustainable agriculture, and biodiversity and wildlife habitat.

With an average of about 300 days of sun per year, India offers the ideal conditions to use solar energy. The project aims at the distribution of solar water heaters in hospitals, schools, universities, and SMEs throughout all of India, that will enable a reliable hot water supply at an affordable price. The required technology has been developed, constructed and produced in India, and the system has a capacity of 200 liters of water per day.

Despite high pressure on the product prices, our partner is one of the first manufacturers of solar water heaters in India and offers a sustainable and climate-friendly technology for 25 years, that reliably provides households and institutions with warm water through clean and affordable energy supply.

Ethiopia's most important economic commodity is coffee, which accounts for a large proportion of its exports. However, it is very sensitive to rising temperatures - an increase of one degree already leads to a loss of quality of the coffee beans, an increase of two degrees to a loss of productivity. Deforestation and climate change thus have a major impact on the coffee sector in Ethiopia.

The project presented here collaborates with Fairtrade Netherlands to reduce the deforestation of local forests by distributing cleaner cookstoves to households of rural coffee farmers in Ethiopia. This includes a cookstove each for general use and one for baking injera, a round flatbread made from teff flour. This will reduce wood consumption as fuel for cooking and the associated carbon emissions by 40%. In addition, reducing smoke inside the houses improves air quality and thus the health of those affected. The coffee farmers pay for the stoves partly in cash and partly with the carbon credits that their use yields.

Thanks to the project, 12,000 efficient cooking stoves have been installed, preventing the deforestation and burning of 25,000 kilograms of wood. This corresponds to a saving of 40,000 tons of CO2e into the atmosphere.

Agricultural operations have been shaping the landscape and the way of life in the Dutch Provinces of central and southern Netherlands for several hundred years. Until today, this is a mostly rural region with relatively little heavy industry, where agro-swine industry still plays the significant role. The excess manure from local farms cannot be disposed of on the fields in the region anymore due to the reached nitrogen absorption limit of the soil.

Biogas plants enhance economic growth by expanding the farmers’ areas of work from cultivation and farming practices to energy production. Hence, sustainable new economic opportunities are created within the farming sector. Through effective waste management, manure and plant residues collected from different farm operations in the region is fed into biodigesters, where emitted methane gas is collected, producing biogas. The gas is used for electricity generation, which in turn is fed into the local electricity grid, whilst the substrate can be separated to form a fertiliser.

Our project partner collaborates with professional farmers and foresters who support in planting trees as well as managing the forest to ensure long-term forest protection, an enrichment of biodiversity and wildlife protection.

This project is located in north west Germany, regenerating the forest with climate-resistant, native tree species, producing mixed forests, consisting of a wide range of tree species in order to maintain the biodiversity of the forest. These include Sycamore maple
Norway maple, Wild cherry, Chestnut, Field maple, varieties chosen according to regional requirements, compatible with the soil and local climate.

Plastic Bank is an initiative working to stop ocean plastic while reducing poverty. By enabling the exchange of waste plastic for money, goods, or blockchain-secured digital tokens. All of the plastic collected through the Social Plastic® ecosystem is sorted, recycled, and sold to companies to use in their manufacturing instead of new plastics.

Plastic Bank believes that before one can effectively clean debris from the oceans, the leakage of waste must be stopped in the first place. In other words, the tap must be turned off. For that reason, Plastic Bank’s primary focus is ocean-bound plastic waste: materials that have not been landfilled and are prone to enter waterways.

Plastic Bank sets up recycling ecosystems in countries that lack sufficient disposal infrastructure and have high rates of pollution and poverty, such as Haiti, Brazil, Indonesia, the Philippines, and, most recently, Egypt.