When Deforestation Breeds Poverty
GreenStand is a startup tech nonprofit that specializes in creating jobs for victims of poverty driven deforestation, in East African countries and other landscapes.
Co-founder/ CEO, Ezra Jay, had the idea for the company after spending time in East Africa himself, seeing the effects deforestation had in the communities he was working in. Ezra decided to find a way to use tree planting to create employment in rural areas of extreme poverty, and launched GreenStand in April of 2015.
“We needed a way to value and incentivize long-term survival of trees planted and to attribute that value to the individual responsible. To do this we needed to identify who was actually planting and how long trees were surviving by tracking individual trees over time. The success of the project relies heavily on image recognition, machine learning, encryption, and blockchain.” Ezra stated about the company's app, TreeTracker-Planter.
GreenStand has already helped select landscapes by planting tens of thousands of trees while hiring locals in deforested areas. In five years, they hope to create widespread environmental employment in some of the poorest, most remote and desolate areas on earth. Ezra stated during an interview that the company’s long-term goal is to create the opportunity of employment in reforestation. “We’re getting there by creating a value system based on the growth of living trees. We represent this value as a digital token that can be sold and converted into income for the tree planter.”
This goal may seem impossible to achieve in arid climates, but it was completely attainable in Isreal for the Yatir Forest created by KKL-JNF. In 1964 the Jewish National Fund planted its first trees. According to the video below, one tree absorbs 0.7 tons of carbon dioxide that pollutes the atmosphere, an added bonus deed to organizations like GreenStand. One person should plant about 200 trees in order to compensate for the pollution he or she has produced throughout their lifetime.
So how can we become active users or contributors to projects and impact organizations like these? “You can donate toward the completion of our project, contribute skills, raise awareness, or support any tree planting organization and demand verification and follow up data on any tree planted,” Ezra shared during an interview. Data can be provided from the app TreeTracker-Planter by GreenStand.
