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We take our responsibility for thriving trees very seriously! With rigorous planning and monitoring, we ensure our saplings become strong, healthy, life-giving trees.

If you take a trip by plane there is often the choice to ‘offset’ the carbon emitted by your flight. But are these carbon credits actually doing good? And is there a better way?

It’s currently the rainy season in East Africa and planting and restoration activities are in full swing. Joshua, Edwin, Korir, Mercy and Wycliffe have been spending a lot of time visiting all of the projects, away from their families.

Trees pre-date us spectacularly. Not only have they stood through the seasons while kingdoms have risen and fallen, they have survived from before the rise of the dinosaur to long past their extinction.

This month I travelled to Kenya to visit the communities and local organisations with whom we are working and to spend time with our amazing local team to see the impact of our work on the ground.

Some organisations focus on dealing with carbon – the cause of the climate crisis. Others deal with the consequences – working to support climate-vulnerable communities. ITF is responding to both. 

The question is how we can bend the graph quickly? How many species can we save? And how can we mitigate the impacts for those who will suffer the most?

We listened to families and leaders and two things struck me most powerfully – the desire of the Batwa to maintain their connection with their ancient traditions and their determination to find a way forward in the toughest of circumstances.

“We are often looking at the big picture, seeing landscapes being steadily restored. We see the forests and the woods but we also care about the individual tree.”

Summer ebbs away, the evenings begin to draw in and it won’t be long before the clocks change. And so the tree planting season gets under way.

“As I perch here quietly on a fallen log I feel a gentle internal shift towards organic time. It is a peaceful summer’s day in the forest, the sun shining through the oak and beech canopy.”

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

How upstream land degradation can have brutal knock on effects downstream.

Some people are dog people, some people aren't. But James Whitehead believes that deep down, we're all tree people.

Some people measure the value of our natural world on an abacus but there are hidden costs when we reduce nature to numbers.

James and the team in Africa recently visited our partners in Uganda to see how communities are planting trees that build resilience and transform landscapes for a better future.

To make the biggest difference for the communities we work with we can’t be complacent about what we do and how we do it. This has always been the case, but it is even more important now in the context of worsening climate change.

This week, The Guardian published an article claiming that more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by the world’s biggest provider are worthless.

James looks back on all the achievements of our partners and team and looks ahead to the year to come.

There is an increasingly strong appetite for companies and individuals to be ‘net zero’. The desire to say, “on balance we are not contributing to climate change”. The ‘we’ in question can be a person, a family, a company or even a government.