A tree in the ground is the unit that everything else is measured against. The carbon is real because the tree is real. The income is real because the tree fruits. The landscape recovers because the tree holds the soil.
Sponsoring a tree is the most direct way to participate in the project. You are not funding an idea. You are funding an individual sapling, grown in a community nursery, planted by a household custodian on land they live on, registered to the project, monitored for permanence, and counted in the net VCUs we deliver to the voluntary carbon market.
You do not own the tree. The custodian does. You do not clear it; they do not clear it. For forty years, that tree is the one standing thing at the intersection of their livelihood, our carbon accounting, and the river's recovery.
We do not import saplings. We do not fly in contractors. The tree you sponsor is grown, placed, planted, and watched over by people who live on the land it is planted on.
Indigenous to the Lowveld. Drought-hardy. Fruit- or nut-bearing where possible. We do not plant fast-growing exotics because fast-growing exotics do not belong to the landscape we are restoring. The list below is the species we have planted thus far — it grows as the project grows.
Every tree has a custodian. A custodian is a household — not an individual, not a cooperative, not a contractor. The tree is planted on their homestead. They water it through the first dry season. They know where it is without looking.
This is the mechanism by which the project becomes permanent. No ranger force can guard two and a half million trees across 630,000 hectares. The household can. Because the household earns from the tree standing — not from the tree cleared.
Custodian onboarding happens through the Traditional Authority. It is voluntary. It is in the Tsonga language. It is consented under FPIC.
A nursery is the upstream infrastructure of the entire planting programme. It is where the saplings come from, where the community operators are trained, and where the first jobs in a carbon-financed rural economy are actually created. Sponsoring a nursery is a more capital-intensive pathway, but it is the one that unlocks thousands of trees downstream.
Sapling propagation, substrate, irrigation, and the wages of community nursery operators for a full growing cycle. This is the smallest viable unit of infrastructure.
Three to four linked nurseries under one TA, enough to supply the household planting for the chiefdom. Includes training, tools, seed bank, and the monitoring layer.
The 2026 planting window begins with the first rains in November and runs through early April. The targets below are what the nurseries are currently scoped to deliver and what the custodian onboarding pipeline can accept without compromising survival rates.
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