Rich Forests restores tropical forests while creating livelihoods

By Shanna Edberg
January 14, 2016

Rich Forests aims to protect existing tropical forests and to restore degraded and deforested land by encouraging trade in non-timber forest products. They provide a matchmaking service that connects local people and NGOs to companies and investors in products such as bamboo, honey, and medicinal plants. They also bring forest scientists into the mix to help create farms that foster forest growth. The end result is an enterprise that provides livelihoods for local people in farming or handicrafts, while protecting existing forests and restoring degraded ones with benefits to carbon emissions, biodiversity, and air and soil quality.

This post is part of a series on organizations and leaders who engage in ​multisolving, or climate-smart policies that simultaneously work to mitigate climate change while providing co-benefits such as the ones described above.