Transcript:

So it's automatic resilience. it's land restoration. It's increased income. It's increased food security. It's enhanced biodiversity, all in a one acre plot of land.

My name is Tim McLellan. I'm the CEO of trees for the future. We're an international NGO working in Africa in five countries. We support farmers with transformational agroforestry systems for their farms.

I'm a person who's worked in, in the development sector for my career and I think looking at a horizon where smallholder farmers, can be connected to the global financial markets is just such a crazy idea at one level. Anytime you can transform opportunities for people, you're doing a good thing. So at a personal level, this project means everything to me. The idea that we can take a model that I know works, to many more people at a time when they need it most, is really critical.

We've chosen four counties now on the eastern coast of Lake Victoria. We're hopeful to transform that landscape and to make it much more productive. And importantly, the people we're working with together, they're among the most vulnerable to the traumas that we're experiencing now and will in the future experience from climate change.

We've put together a couple of principles that are fairly straightforward to communicate and to promote for farmers.

The first is to pick a piece of property that they are willing to put under a new system of, of working. Typically they've been growing maize and beans, once a year. We're going to ask them to put that plot into production for the full year. We're going to help them to grow and situate a living fence, which is three rows of, of closely spaced trees that soon form a barrier. It's also, a set of native plants on the outside and fast growing, nitrogen fixing species on the inside that's very, very helpful for improving, the soil.

In addition to that perimeter, you then have alleys of, again, nitrogen fixing plants that create further biomass and further soil amelioration. And then we do a plan with our farmer and we say, okay, well, what do you want to get out of this? And we literally sketch out a plan together. And we help them over four years to implement that plan.

So in this is a variety of enterprises that provides the farmer not just one sale of maize a year into an already saturated market, but a variety of things coming to fruition each month that give them options to sell things every month of the year.

So it's automatic resilience. it's land restoration. It's increased income. It's increased food security. It's enhanced biodiversity, all in a one acre plot of land. With Catona's partnership, we're of course entering vast numbers of farmers, into the global carbon market.

Their portion of our carbon sales is going to come to them personally. One of the important pieces of our work is that 50% of the farmers are women. And so return of carbon revenue directly to women who've been doing the work on the farm is extremely powerful socially in western Kenya and in Africa in general.

It starts to become the way of doing business around there. People will see and understand the benefits and they'll quickly try and and transition their own farming activity to it.

We've measured in all of our locations the food security in it by year three, it's already ascending into what is kind of a global standard of acceptability by the UN and other agencies that measure these things.

I think overall, the communities, especially if we can saturate with with the forest gardens, it becomes a much more resilient community.

So it may be obvious, but I think we're engaged in a pretty pioneering effort. Certainly, Catona, I think, is engaged in really developing a whole new investment class.

So I think the first fundamental is that we come with complementary strengths Catona, with its marketing, position, its ability to bring in buyers of credits, its ability to, market credits. We with the on ground capacity.

But I think with the transformational investment that Catona has made, I think we're able to supercharge our scaling and serve many more people than we otherwise would have.

And if we're successful in bringing in, new buyers of our credits, we can go as high as 75,000 hectares.

It's been a very important partnership. We're at a point where, investors can really feel good about, what they're doing. And the change that they're bringing. It's it's really at the crux of people most in need at this time. And I'm very, very proud of it. We're just going to be better and our credits are going to be very, very powerful in the marketplace.