Exclusive interview with Tim McClellan, CEO, Trees for the Future, a gold sponsor at the upcoming Carbon Markets Africa Summit.
Greetings. I’m Tim McClellan. I’m the CEO of Trees for the Future. I’ve been in this role about 3 1/2 years, and I joined an organization that’s 35 years old. It’s dedicated to the service of smallholder farmers in Africa.
Our purpose is to assist them in building agroforestry systems and we help them to do that on degraded lands that they have typically inherited through many generations.
What does Trees for the Future do?
Our mission at TREES is to assist farmers to restore land and unlock prosperity. In doing so, we expect them to grow into what we call thriving climate changers. They are the people in the world most vulnerable to the changes of climate change.
With our assistance and with their hard work and ambition, they are also the people who can be one of the most powerful agents of change in mitigating climate change.
With our programs, we want them to benefit through increased income and increased food security. We also want their lands to be restored in such a way that there’s increased biodiversity.
And this is an and it’s not a purpose, one of their crops is carbon – because of the way we support them to change their land use, they are great sequesters or mitigators of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
And in that way, great partners with all of us to stem the challenges of climate change.
What is the Forest Garden Approach?
About 10 years ago we consolidated around this approach, and we’ve now instituted about 70,000 of what we call forest gardens.
The forest garden first and foremost is a portion of the property that the farmer agrees to take out of annual mono crop production and shift into a multi strata agroforestry system.
And the first initiative is usually to surround the property that they wish to put into production, usually between an acre and a hectare of land and that perimeter that we ask them to make is a live fence. It’s a tightly spaced, densely packed set of trees around the full perimeter of the property.
It’s first and foremost a barrier, particularly to animals, so there’s typically a thorny species on the outside.
There’s a nitrogen fixing species on the inside that’s good for soil amelioration, but also good for Fodder and fuel.
The wall itself initiates what our overall purpose is with the farmer, which is to proliferate new enterprises. Once the barrier is well established, then you can accelerate that process.
We typically encourage farmers to engage in vegetable gardening, both for their own use and for local markets.
Fruit trees are introduced based on the market dynamics and what’s most suitable for sale, either locally, regionally or hopefully internationally with many of our farmers.
So the idea is to add this diversified approach to their overall resilience strategy and it’s first and foremost before carbon, an approach to make their day-to-day income from the farm, much more reliable and diversified.
Where does carbon fit in?
The carbon comes about because there are so many densely packed trees on the property. It’s actually a great carbon play also.
And so, what the carbon becomes for them is an additional crop and their share of the carbon sales, which we’re able to arrange in international markets on their behalf, becomes a payment every three years. That’s an additional crop for them of very high value.
Obviously for any land use program, we like other projects in this area have to deal with the issue of permanence. Our approach to that is I think foundational in the way we set up the agreement with the farmer.
So, we enter into a long-term agreement with them as part of our free prior informed consent activity.
We first and foremost have to help them understand what all this is about. So how is carbon created? How does that add up on their farm? What types of practices are likely to maximize carbon, and how is that likely to affect them? And how it fits in with other strategies that they have for the land, be that selling fruits, selling timber.
Balancing all of those needs. It’s the holistic approach, I think, that allows the farmer to count on lots of different sources of income and benefit, both for subsistence and also for new income.
That means we’re looking to invite the farmer into a generational impact that is consistent with the long-term nature of a carbon project. We typically are currently operating under standards for 40 years.
It’s our ambition that the farmer and his or her descendants are getting so much out of the farm, both from a carbon perspective, but from a product and enterprise perspective that it’s just a great business for them.
It’s an intensive model, so we work with the farmers in an intensive way for four or five years and in a lighter touch thereafter, all for the purpose of creating a sustained impact.
How do small holder farmers and carbon fit together?
If you think about Africa with 30 million smallholder farmers, many of them are still making difficult decisions, whether to stay on farms that are increasingly difficult to manage in the face of climate change impacts, droughts, floods, pests, or move to the city.
We think that there’s a great opportunity to restore over 600 million acres of degraded land, treat the resilience needs of this many millions of farmers and their families, and stabilize food systems for the duration of what’s going to be a difficult time period in the next several 100 years with respect to climate change.
We need to have better answers for farmers, and I think Africa brings both the opportunity for cost-effective offsetting for other companies and countries that are looking to support climate response and it fits very well with the needs for capital here in in Africa to deploy for the betterment of both land and people.
What is the role for Africa?
I think what we’ve experienced in the last five years or so is the various jurisdictions on the continent trying to assess and develop their regulatory environments so that they’re suitable and aligned with the global compacts that we’ve made through the UN and through the Paris Agreement and subsequent efforts.
These are hard things and frankly the standards are shifting all the time on the jurisdiction so I think what you can see is that the countries that have gone furthest the fastest and been nimble
in getting their legislation in place and getting their policies set up are reaping the benefits already.
And then I think the second piece is Governance around projects. I’ve worked my entire life in global development, and I think my experience so far in the carbon markets is that the requirements for transparency for traditional kind of monitoring and evaluation and learning now MRV in the carbon markets.
It’s simply at the very highest standard, and it will continue to become that much more rigorous.
Projects, regardless of where they are, not just in Africa, it could be in Iowa or Brazil, you know, they just need to meet up with the market requirements and we need to proliferate the number of projects that are a counterfactual to the noise that we’ve seen in the market so far with various gaps in transparency, gaps in integrity. You know the new projects coming online need to be determined to show that this can be done, it can be done well with reliability and and good integrity.
Where is TREES working?
For TREES, our initial carbon investment has been in Kenya. We’ve situated that investment on the Eastern Shore of Lake Victoria.
We have a global ambition to have a landscape scale intervention with farmers who are partnering with us surrounding the lake.
So we want to move as soon as we can into other countries where we’re already operating, that being Uganda and Tanzania with carbon initiatives.
We’re also invested in West Africa and Senegal and Mali. We would also love to move our carbon initiatives there.
And we have ambition to be useful throughout the continent, where that makes sense for countries that are progressing on their strategies and our own skills.
And at some point, we hope that others will take up our techniques and amplify them further.
We don’t feel like we have to be everywhere and do everything. We foresee a day where our methods become replicable and become taken up by others, and we would find great joy in that.
Why is TREES at CMAS 2025?
I am so looking forward to CMAS and having a really strong presence at the conference.
We feel it is a huge opportunity for learning. You have investors, you have other project developers, you have standards agencies, specialists, vendors of all types.
So you have the right ecosystem in the room to really accelerate everybody’s partnership and learning on the continent.
And secondly, I think we have a particular role to play.
We really are a farmer first organization that wandered into carbon because it seemed to make sense because of the way our overall programs were situated.
We really haven’t adjusted our projects in terms of how we do them much to make them into carbon projects.
We’ve had to build the pieces around that. You know our forest garden approach has had to be supplemented with the MRV and all the technical aspects of being in the carbon market.
But Ayub, who’s a member of our team, you know one of our farmer partners from Migori in Kenya, is going to be joining us.
And I think that’s been very important for us to really center some of the discussions around the farmer’s voice, the community’s voice.
If we’re not serving Ayub and his community members, we have no reason to exist, carbon or not.
So we’re keen to bring that perspective that is maybe unique and and additive to the overall plenary activity
What do you want to gain from CMAS 2025?
I’m most excited to be in this room with so many other practitioners – it’s a really important time for the carbon market.
We are seeing some resistance to the market in various sectors. We’re also seeing successes.
So, I think maintaining the momentum, maintain the momentum for the African market as a great place to develop projects and to fund projects, I’d love to be a part of making that be true through our conference and through our readouts to the broader community.
We have a special place in Africa in the global response, and it’s time now to make that emphatically our message collectively.
Final thoughts before CMAS 2025?
I’m Tim from Trees for the Future. I’ll be there with several colleagues. We are so eager to meet all of the many partners, investors, colleagues, practitioners and can’t wait to be with you all.
