Trillion Trees

Trillion Trees is an unprecedented collaboration between three of the world’s largest conservation organisations – WWF, BirdLife International, and the Wildlife Conservation Society – to help end deforestation and restore tree cover. Our partnership is founded on our commitment to a shared vision, and the belief that working together we can achieve more than we can individually.

Tree cover is an essential part of what makes Earth a healthy and prosperous home for people and wildlife, but the global stock has fallen – and continues to fall – dramatically. In fact, we are still losing 10 billion trees per year.

The consequences? More carbon emitted and less absorbed, dwindling freshwater stores, altered rainfall patterns, fewer nutrients to enrich soils, weakened resilience to extreme events and climate change, shrinking habitat for wildlife and other biodiversity, insufficient wood supply to meet rising demand, harsher local climates, and harder lives for more than one billion forest-dependent peoples across the world.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The two key steps that will reverse these trends – keeping existing trees standing, and restoring trees to the places they once grew – are within our capabilities.

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The International Gorilla Conservation Programme

The International Gorilla Conservation Programme (IGCP) was established in 1991 as a coalition of three international conservation organisations. Its current partnership consists of Fauna & Flora International (FFI) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Mountain gorillas, listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN Red List, live in the Afromontane forest habitat of Central Africa, spanning the borders of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Their numbers are estimated to be around 880 as of September 2016. The aim of the IGCP is to protect the remaining numbers of mountain gorillas and their natural habitat.

The primary threats to the mountain gorillas are habitat destruction, poaching, disease, and civil war and unrest. IGCP’s conservation projects aim to mitigate these threats by collaborating with local communities and key stakeholders to strengthen mechanisms for transboundary migration of the gorillas and increase protection of their borders. Restore Our Planet supported IGCP to protect the Gorilla’s shrinking indigenous habitats within the national parks. By providing the local communities with an alternative source of wood for fuel and construction, as well as promoting the use of energy-saving cooking stoves, they helped to preserve the habitat by reducing pressure on the surrounding forest. Restore also helped support IGCP’s work with communities who are planting fast-growing exotic tree species and native bamboo in carefully managed woodlots – reducing the need for illegal harvesting within the national parks and maintaining critical food sources for the gorillas.

While the forest itself has been boundary fenced to act as a physical barrier to illegal encroachment, successfully reducing human-wildlife conflict, the IGCP projects also encourage sustainability through the establishment of community-based livelihood strategies. Amongst these are enterprises like curios-making and beekeeping. The most recent research, conducted in 2010, shows an annual growth rate of 3.7% in response to these efforts. IGCP, along with its partners, hope to continue with these strategies in order to ensure the viability and longevity of the mountain gorilla species.