Wild Forest: Our Partnership with ON A MISSION

Whether you’ve been with Wild from the beginning, for a few months, or whether you’re new around here (a Wild welcome to you if so!), you may have heard about our partnership with the wonderful organisation called ON A MISSION. This is a non-profit organisation enabling businesses (and individuals) to invest in carefully selected sustainable reforestation projects to offset their carbon emissions. Wild is proud to be partnering with them and even prouder to be carbon negative as a result! This means we take more CO2 out of the atmosphere than we put in, covering our processes from production to delivery!

Sustainable reforestation is the most effective solution to capture CO2 and solve climate change and restore a balance to the world’s fauna and flora. So how do ON A MISSION help us do this? Firstly, they help calculate our carbon emissions with us and then, after outlining any areas when emission could be reduced, they help us to offset our remaining emissions with verified or certified sustainable reforestation projects.

In an effort to make Black Friday a little greener, as well as helping welcome as many people as possible over to the Wild side, we've been boosting our contributions to ON A MISSION. With every sale made in our Black Friday sale, we committed to planting a tree for each one, on top of our standard off-setting efforts! We are proud to announce that we have planted 71,981 trees! Considering that our aim was to plant 50,000, we are over the moon to have not only achieved this, but exceeded it too.

Want to know more about the projects you're helping contribute to? Sure thing!

ON A MISSION have sent over insights, stories, photos, and stats for some of the projects your orders with Wild have been having an impact on. In order to choose which projects to work on and with, the leads at ON A MISSION, Fred and Auréline, researched and mapped out all of the potential reforestation projects they could get involved with. Then, after a selection process to pick the most promising and effective projects, they got in contact with with the local organisations behind them, not only to get to know the people behind the projects, but also to ensure their values matched - namely establishing long-term partnerships based on trust, collaboration, transparency and a strong willingness to have a positive impact on our climate. Here are 3 of the current active projects which Wild is contributing to, thanks to your support:

ON A MISSION’s work here on the northeastern Tibetan border in Nepal is set from November 2019 - November 2024. The reforestation site is well underway, with 123,750 trees planted as of September 2021, out of their goal of 412,500 trees.

In this project, ON A MISSION has partnered with Eden Reforestation Projects to help the community in one of Nepal’s least developed districts. The forests here are a lifeline, important for food, fuelwood, livestock fodder, and medicinal plants, meaning the impacts of climate change, deforestation, and topsoil erosion and degradation post a significant threat to livelihoods, and the community as a whole. One of the project’s aim through a social lens is to offer opportunities to women, and the project has 100% female leadership, and the planting and nursery management teams have a women majority

This project between ON A MISSION and AGRO-MAP began in January 2021, so is nearly at the end of its first year. So far, 4, 962 trees have been planted, and there are no plans of stopping anytime soon, with the project site covering 6 hectares, with a capacity of 1,100- 1,200 trees/ha. The tree species produced are used for the reforestation of degraded areas to create forest plantations - some of the trees being planted include Framiré, Fraké, Niangon, Mahogany, Tiama and Cedrela. The project is so much more than bark and leaves here too - beneficiary communities around the project site are being trained on themes such as climate change, agroforestry, forestry code, and tree ownership. So far, this training has been given to just under 2,000 people.

This is another 5-year project, like the one in Nepal, from November 2019 - November 2024, bringing together ON A MISSION with ForestEver and GreenHope Columbia. Their goal? Helping to reforest part of the Colombian Amazon which is home to the indigenous Arara community - a community severely impacted by the development of the Trans-Amazonian highway. There are 29 sites, all being run and managed with local farmers. As of June 2021, 5,893 trees have been planted in 2 of these sites as well as the site of a local community college to help provide shade for the students on campus. Many trees are waiting to graduate from the plant nursery (4,000 seedlings, to be precise) to be planted in some of the remaining sites. Working again with the community college, the tree planting is carried out in groups of 35 people, completed with a workshop on agroforestry which now over 200 people have been involved with.

We are humbled, thrilled, and truly honoured to have the opportunity to contribute to projects which have been so well-considered and researched to ensure a positive and meaningful impact on communities who have experienced the harsh realities of climate change first hand.