Program Development - , ,
The Art of Forests was founded in 2020 to bring together some of the world's largest and most innovative ecosystem restoration organisations in a loose coalition to share knowledge and best practices and to create a supportive community. You can read in our initial posts about our first gathering at COP26 where sixty of us met in person for the first time. The blog is written by Celia Francis who had the initial inspiration to found this Alliance. As a group, we are committed to helping each other scale our ecosystem restoration projects so that both people and the planet thrive. Together we plant 250 million trees per year and our aim is to collectively learn to rapidly multiply this number through information gathering, knowledge sharing and creative problem solving. We believe that a small group of forest makers (and investors) can make a difference if we stand together and commit to speaking about how the right pricing, verification, and standards can impact quality and scale in on-the-ground execution. In The Art of Forest group (online and in group calls), we discuss topics of common interest to accelerate combined efforts in ecosystem restoration, including currently: auditing and tracking and biodiversity credits - with more topics to come. We look to enable safe, supportive, and trusting conversations between members of the group via conversations online, on group video calls, and in person once a year or more locally. We are currently building community via two platforms: Whatsapp for casual communications and information sharing and Slack for deeper collective work and the preparation of online and in-person events.What sets us apart? All members are involved in Restoration Forestry, and while there are countless coalitions and alliances on Nature Based Solutions, Forestry and Redd+, very little is being said on the complexity of restoration