Smart, Integrated Rural Land Projects That Go Beyond Carbon
Science agrees that reforestation of the planet is required to mitigate climate change and moderate local ecosystems. Therefore, habitat restoration must be integrated, despite the competing demands for rural land resources that have often pitted habitat, agricultural, and sustainable wood stock interests against each other.
Spades responds with a reforestation zoning model to engage the planning discussion for a sustainable future: Terrazone™.
Terrazone rural landscape planning harmonizes land use. Inclusive, integrated land use design, as part of forest landscape restoration, aligns multi-functional landscape synergies to:
- Promote sustainable land use and ecosystem restoration
- Improve economic opportunities
A diagram depicting five primary zones of integrated landscape restoration is shown below. Agriculture occupies approximately half the land. Large forests would obviously have different layouts. Preserving existing forests would be a priority.
Spades’ model integrates all local interests so that long-term sustainability and biodiversity can more reliably be achieved.
Simple Science Lessons
Producing and Harvesting Timber
The Terrazone model recognizes the importance of sustainably managed forests to protect trees, ecosystems, wildlife, watersheds, microclimates, and indigenous cultures. Taking woodland preservation, regeneration, and forest health into account is the key to sustainable timber production.
With high demand and limited timber supplies, multispecies forestry will be applied with high-value, locally-appropriate species. Timber stands will serve as habitat extensions and buffers. Sites will be monitored.
One of the requirements of funding will be sustainable harvest standards.
Implementation with Spades
The Terrazone approach maps the synergies between rural interests, including the people that live there, governments, environmentalists, businesses, agriculture, and foresters. These interests are all rooted in the same ecosystem. Unity is found in the urgency of climate change, locally apparent damage, good business and jobs, and climate resilience. Spades enables this effort with a suite of services that unlock opportunities:
- Diversity of partnership capacities serve the interests of stakeholders and ecosystems for long-term economic, environmental, and social sustainability, not just a planting phase.
- Integrator support from planning to implementation to a permanent presence. Includes plan review, monitoring, reporting, verification, sustainability, and fundraising.
- Specialized biotechnology that determines and improves the viability of tree species to survive in current and future conditions.
- Blended capital that incorporates investment banks, institutional banks, development funding, and donors while advancing the objectives of all. Considers project design, financial structuring, fundraising, risk mitigation, fund management, etc.
- Technical tracking solutions that provide intimate details on the life of the trees from planning through 50 years of growth.