OUR IMPACT

Sustainability is at the core of our business

“We believe that a holistic approach to farming can turn the root cause of many of today’s problems into solutions. Successful outcomes require an intimate understanding of the landscape as well as the challenges facing the people living in it.”

THREE PILLARS OF SUSTAINABLE IMPACT

Our Theory of Change (TOC) is structured according to three key areas of sustainability: CLIMATE, COMMUNITY, and BIODIVERSITY. These pillars strategically align with the social and environmental impact verification methodologies of international standards for land management projects aimed at convincingly mitigating global climate change, conserving biodiversity, improving well-being, and reducing poverty in local communities.

THEORY OF CHANGE

Our corporate Theory of Change (TOC) provides the vision and guidelines for why and how we will drive positive impact through our projects. That vision is made tangible through the detailed and monitorable actions developed in our corporate policies and standard operating procedures (SOP), which we track using progress and impact indicators. Independent third-party verifications and audits from internationally recognized and industry leading certification bodies help us to measure and report our impact to both investors and the general public. In every way, these different components of the Sustainability Framework are complimentary and reinforcing, meaning that as international standards become more rigorous, so too will our policies; likewise, as our vision becomes more ambitious over time, our progress and impact indicators will reflect the higher standards that we are achieving.

From concept to practical implementation

Each individual 12Tree farm builds sustainable practices into its operations in a way that is relevant to the specific ecological, cultural, and agronomic context of a protect. Moreover, the progress and impact indicators tracked by 12Tree are directly aligned with the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)- allowing us to evaluate our contribution towards these universal goals. We look forward to reporting our progress and impact using this new framework from 2022 onward.

impact results

2018-2023

1,700 jobs created

Salaries above minimum wage + benefits
Access to health insurance
Training and Capacity Building Programs

20,000 hectares sustainable use

Soil improvement
Reforestation
Increased ecosystem resilience

4,000 hectares conservation area

Biodiversity protection
Protection of water catchment areas
Wildlife habitats

2.5 million tons of carbon sequestered

Climate action
Reduced greenhouse gas emissions
Every farm on average has more than 1 milion trees!
*over 20-year project timeline

CLIMATE

CLIMATE

Today a growing global population is driving up the demand for food, yet production is struggling to keep up with this demand as crop yields level off in many parts of the world, and natural resources-including soils, water, and biodiversity-are now also stretched dangerously thin. Over the past few decades, global climate patterns have been increasingly affected by human activity, particularly through the emission of greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere.

Further complicating this challenge is agriculture’s extreme vulnerability to climate change, with many of its negative impacts already being felt in the form of increasing temperatures, weather variability, invasive crops and pests, and more frequent extreme weather events.

Unfortunately, this problem also works in reverse.

Conventional approaches to agriculture act as major contributors to our climate crisis. Unsustainable land use activities -such as deforestation, and overgrazing- and degradative agricultural practices -such as intensive soil tillage, monoculture cropping, bare fallowing, and heavy reliance on chemical fertilizers and biocides- have considerably altered our terrestrial ecosystems and now play a key role in the global climate system. It is estimated that conventional food and agriculture systems currently generate 19–29% of our total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions[1].

12Tree, through its various initiatives, is actively working to reverse these trends and to change agriculture from being a culprit, to being part of the solution.

Rather than function as a source of carbon emissions, agriculture under our auspices is quickly becoming an effective carbon sink. At both the regional and global levels, a growing body of scientific literature is confirming the potential that our particular approach to regenerative and climate-smart agricultural practices can play in sequestering carbon and helping to mitigate climate change while making croplands more productive and resilient. Moreover, these approaches have the potential to put us on track for achieving SDGs by halting and reversing land degradation (SDG 15), ensuring sustainable production (SDG 12) and reducing greenhouse gas emissions (SDG 13). In more general terms, we are spearheading the transition towards implementing better farming practices at scale that will reduce GHG emissions, store additional carbon in soil and woody plants and deliver other important environmental and health co-benefits.

Restoring carbon into the soil and perennial vegetation, where it belongs, and removing it from the atmosphere, where it is causing havoc, is one of the few win-win solutions for climate change.

At the farm level, we are employing carbon farming-a suite of perennial crops and practices such as agroforestry-to increase soil carbon levels, benefiting yields directly through the enhancement in ecosystem services such as nutrient cycling, water infiltration and pest control.

Simultaneously, enhanced ecosystem services allow us to achieve a reduction in carbon emissions by minimizing the use of agrochemicals on our fields, whilst planting perennial crops reduces the amount of carbon-releasing tillage events in our fields.

BIODIVERSITY

BIODIVERSITY

WE VALUE NATURE

Today, biodiversity and agriculture are at odds with one another in several ways.

About half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture and thus agriculture production is largely responsible for deforestation and the loss of other valuable habitats such as wetlands and grasslands. As a result, food production is responsible for the majority of global biodiversity loss- including as much as 70% of terrestrial biodiversity. At the same time food production highly depends on well-functioning ecosystems. Nature provides numerous ecosystem services - such as fertile soils, food, natural remedies, drinking water, clean air, a climate regulation. When ecosystems or any of their components are damaged in the long term, the services provided by nature are at risk [5].

Despite this reality, only recently have science and industry begun to practically consider the role that large scale agriculture can play in restoring biodiversity. Prior approaches to integrate the two typically promoted conservation set-asides adjacent to agricultural and forestry developments. But the conservation paradigm that focuses on setting aside pristine forests while ignoring the agricultural landscape is a failed strategy in light of what is now conventional wisdom in ecology. Some habitats like tropical forests harbor great biodiversity, others, like agricultural systems, less. But in the fragmented landscapes that characterize almost all of the world’s terrestrial surface, those habitats that are biodiversity “poor,” may be extremely important as passageways for the habitats that are biodiversity “rich.” Given the fragmented nature of most tropical ecosystems, agricultural landscapes need to be an essential component of any conservation strategy. Transforming our agricultural systems into biodiverse agricultural landscapes is therefore key to reducing biodiversity loss, mitigating climate change, and ensuring human welfare as it relates to the most basic rights of clean air and water and nutritious food. Hence, our ability to achieve the SDGs will hinge on the protection and restoration of global biodiversity, from ending hunger (SDG 2), to clean water (SDG 6), to reduced inequality (SDG 10). But the process of transforming our food systems will require, as WWF eloquently puts it, a paradigm shift from intensive commodity production that tries to minimize the role of nature, to “farming with biodiversity to achieve nature-positive production at scale”.

12Tree’s farms are a living testament that large scale, profitable farming can be done in harmony with nature, and that regenerative agriculture can actively conserve and enhance biodiversity and other important ecosystem services. We have adopted a number of strategies to increase biodiversity on our farms. The most fundamental include practices like protecting as well as monitoring conservation and restoration areas, and introducing multi-tiered, mixed varietals and crops into our productive systems.

12Tree’s farms are empirically proving that a collection of biological reserves in a sea of diverse agroecosystems[6] managed regeneratively and with diverse vegetation cover is precisely the path forward for restoring global biodiversity through agriculture.

watch our biodiversity video

COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY

WE VALUE PEOPLE

The commodification of agriculture and food chains has transformed our society. Crops and raw materials generally produced in the world’s rural areas now feed and sustain an increasingly urbanized and globalized population. On the one hand, commodity agriculture has made food more affordable and accessible. On the other hand, the very principles that underlie commodity agriculture- efficiency, economies of scale, and cost minimization- are often associated with a sort of “race to the bottom” where low prices are achieved at high environmental and social costs [2].

Some of the obvious losers in this game are the small farmers, forced to compete in a heavily distorted market with ever declining margins, or abandon farming altogether [3]. Similarly, agricultural workers have become an undervalued and expendable cog in the machine, often toiling under difficult or dangerous conditions for meager wages [4].

12Tree’s mission to de-commodify agriculture is founded in the belief that agricultural workers, farmers, and rural communities are the necessary foundation of global value chains and essential for climate adaptation. Intimately connected with the landscapes in which we produce and source our products, these rural communities are truly stewards of the land. Under their watchful care, ecosystems will be protected and restored. Moreover, the empowerment of local farmers is critical for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals of eradicating poverty (SDG1), abolishing hunger (SDG2), and sustainable production patterns (SDG12).

Starting with the initial conception and design of our farms, and continuously integrated into our on-going operational decisions, 12Tree seeks to maximize positive social impact in ways that are monitorable and measurable. At the foundation of our projects are good jobs, healthy working environments, and beneficial sourcing programs. This includes inclusive hiring processes and reliable contracts that provide fair salaries and benefits; safe, sanitary, and welcoming working environments that exceed the highest industry standards; and transparent, reliable, abovemarket offtake agreements with smallholder farmers.

Over and above this foundation, our focus on developing human capital leads us to invest in worker training to improve existing skills and knowledge and foster new areas of expertise. Local empowerment includes investing in basic community needs and working with communities to identify and address underlying structural issues. Finally, de-commoditize agricultural sourcing means creating mutually beneficial partnerships by: facilitating farmer organization and transparent communication; improving access to information, inputs and markets; and benefits sharing.

watch our community video