Ecologi Impact Shop: a deep-dive into the climate impact projects your business can fund

Ecologi members have been funding the Eritrea community boreholes project for 3 years. Here is the latest update from the project:

This Zoba Debub Community Boreholes project will provide long-term access to safe and clean drinking water to hundreds of households within the Zoba Debub district in Eritrea, using borehole technology. The project focuses on rehabilitating existing boreholes, which eliminates the need for communities to boil water using wood fuel. This traditional method of water purification releases CO2 emissions from the combustion of wood. By providing access to safe water from boreholes, the project ensures reduced consumption of firewood, leading to a decrease in CO2 emissions.

There are 163 rehabilitated boreholes in the project area that are maintained by trained community members and the project team on the ground. Community members receive technical training about how the handpump works, how to operate the borehole and how to execute minor repairs or what to do if further maintenance is required. The quality of drinking water from boreholes included in the project has been tested in a lab and has been approved by the Eritrean Government. Working closely with the Water Resource Department throughout the project cycle ensures that regulations are met.

UpEnergy established Community Carbon, an initiative that distributes subsidised, fuel-efficient charcoal cookstoves to thousands of families who lack access to other types of stove and cooking fuel.  At the heart of these projects is the belief that community investments are the greatest enablers of change, both for the planet and for its inhabitants. That is why Community Carbon’s projects extend beyond emissions reductions to the addition of tangible co-benefits designed to further stimulate community development and well-being.

The Community Carbon stove is incredibly durable lasting at least 5 years, and delivers multiple benefits to individual families and communities across the country: 

• One fuel efficient cookstove will reduce daily household charcoal consumption by 45% – 55% thanks to improved thermal efficiency.
• This saves households annual fuel expenditures that can then be repurposed for other priorities such as education and health.
• Cookstoves are 100% locally manufactured creating employment and stimulating the local economy throughout the supply chain
• Cuts cooking time; reduces trips to fetch cooking fuel and time saved can be used for productive activities e.g. education and income generation.

This project is situated in Pringgabaya, on the island of Lombok, Indonesia. The project provides renewable solar energy to a grid which is currently dominated by fossil fuels, helping to displace those polluting energy sources with cleaner power. 

The project has a total installed capacity of 42 MW, across four solar installations: three of 7 MW and one large one of 21 MW. By providing this electricity to the grid and displacing energy produced through fossil fuels, this solar installation generates emissions reductions estimated at just 34,000 tonnes CO2e per year.

The project includes 18 community development activities, as well as providing 69 local jobs. Ecologi has, as of January 2024, supported 20,000 tonnes of C02e avoided for this project. 

Coastal wetland ecosystems like salt marshes, mangroves, and seagrasses absorb carbon dioxide from the air and store it as carbon in soil and underwater sediment. In the long term, these blue carbon ecosystems can store up to five times as much carbon as tropical forests.

The IPCC uses blue carbon as one example of a nature-based carbon dioxide removal method which, as well as absorbing carbon, can enhance biodiversity, ecosystem services, employment and local livelihoods.

​​As trees grow, they store carbon from the atmosphere in their biomass, through photosynthesis. When this biomass is burned in the absence of oxygen (a process called pyrolysis), one of the byproducts is a stable, carbon-rich residue called biochar.

When biomass decomposes naturally, carbon and methane are emitted into the atmosphere. Since biochar is very stable, the production of biochar using waste biomass – such as waste timber from commercial forests – is a more permanent method of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and storing the carbon on long-term timescales, than allowing the biomass to decompose naturally.

Across the UK, we have three partners working hard to restore landscapes from the Isle of Skye in Scotland to Cornwall in the south west of England. The projects we fund are being carried out with great diligence all over the UK by our partners The Future Forest Company (FFC), Protect Earth, and the International Tree Foundation. Planting native species is helping to bring iconic British wildlife back to the UK countryside.

Check out some of the latest project updates from UK projects we’ve funded:

Pine Marten spotted at Dumyat, near Stirling – Pine marten numbers are still quite low in the UK due to hundreds of years of persecution and the clearance of woodlands. Thankfully, in recent years their population has begun to bounce back. But there are still only around 3,700 adults living in Scotland, so it’s fantastic to see that one of these amazing creatures has made their home at a site that we support, caught on camera by a camera trap set by FFC’s Head of Ecology Lindsay!

95% survival rate 2 years after planting at Howards Court and Pantpurlais – The Protect Earth revisited these trees 2 years after planting them, and were delighted by what they saw! Not only did both sites have brilliant survival rates, the trees had grown quickly, many now being taller than Protect Earth founder Phil!

We’re supporting a project run by One Tree Planted in collaboration with several local organisations to restore trees in the Appalachian region, including riparian, suburban and mine land across Pennsylvania. The trees are helping to restore ecosystems that have become degraded, which has an impact on water flow and quality across the region. Working together with local, regional and national conservation groups, as well as commonwealth and federal government organisations and local businesses, funding tree planting in the US through Ecologi is capable of making a big impact on local communities and wildlife. Recently, we funded part of a project that’s now planted over 400,000 trees, restoring 400 hectares of land.

The tree-planting projects we support in Australia include bushfire recovery nurseries, creating habitat corridors for koalas in New South Wales and Victoria, enhancing biodiversity in Western Australia, and promoting sustainable and regenerative agricultural practices with landowners. Efforts are focused on mobilising support for replanting efforts, developing nurseries and planting millions of trees.

Working with a local organisation, we’re supporting a project which aims to restore a 12-hectare area within the grounds of the Federal University of Itajubá in Minas Gerais. The project contributes to the recovery of the Atlantic Forest – one of the world’s hotspots due to its  high biodiversity and state of threat.  The project is  contributing directly to forest densification locally, and is reducing the negative impacts of the edge effect on the native remnant of forest, protecting the remaining fragment further. Because the areas are sloping, the recovery of native vegetation planted is also promoting the protection and stability of the soil, which is particularly important since the project is adjacent to a body of water and so the soil is prone to being washed away.