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Speakers: Jenny Henman, Chairman, Plant your Future and Edward Mitchard, Trustee, Plant your Future and researcher at the University of Edinburgh
Plant your Future (www.plantyourfuture.org.uk) is a registered charity working at the grassroots level in Peru to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers living in the rainforest through the promotion of sustainable agriculture and the commercialization of forest products and ecosystem services. Our goal is to reduce poverty for farming communities whilst also mitigating climate change and protecting high conservation value forest through avoiding deforestation and restoring ecosystems.
Plant your Future aims to provide smallholder farmers a route out of unsustainable low return agriculture by giving them access to a sustainable agricultural model, linking them to the global market. Instead of growing low-value crops on cleared land, we want to introduce higher value crops, assist with the transition to producing higher-value processed products such as fruit pulps, jams, sauces, certified timber and unlock carbon finance. Our goal is to use our innovative market-based model to give some of the poorest farmers on the planet a path to a better future while in the process restoring damaged ecosystems, protecting intact forest from future deforestation, and contributing to climate change mitigation.
Jenny Henman (Chairman, Plant your Future) and Edward Mitchard (Trustee, Plant your Future and researcher at the University of Edinburgh) will talk in more detail about the work that Plant your Future is doing in Peru. We will also talk about the innovative programmatic approach for carbon certification we have developed under the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS), including explaining how the complex slash and burn/fallow cycle of the region was mapped and discussing the quantification of carbon stocks in this type of project. We hope you will come along to find out about a fascinating real-world project, and we look forward to your questions and comments.
Jenny Henman is the founder and Chairman of Plant your Future. She is a specialist in tropical forestry, community development and carbon after a Master’s Degree at Brown University (USA) and 10 years of working in the global forestry and climate change mitigation sector. Jenny runs her own consultancy, Climate Adapt. Jenny led the first project in the world to achieve validation and verification under the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) in the AFOLU sector and is a co-author of the Climate, Community and Biodiversity (CCB) Standard. Jenny holds a BA (Hons) degree in Geography from Durham University, UK.
Dr Ed Mitchard is a NERC Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He completed his PhD in 2011, titled “Using remote sensing data to quantify changes in aboveground biomass in tropical Africa”, in which he developed novel methodologies for using optical, radar and lidar satellite data to map aboveground biomass and woody cover, and perform change detection. Since then he has extended this work to a larger scale, creating and comparing maps of aboveground biomass across the tropics. Ed holds a BA in Biological Sciences from the University of Oxford. He has a widely followed blog, Deforestationwatch.