Keeling Curve

Primary Project Category:

Project Summary / Description:

The Ebony Project is a partnership where business, communities, and researchers work together to protect a valuable timber species, reforest degraded land, and improve rural livelihoods. 
The projects has four main objectives: 
1) Work with rural communities to create a scalable program for the sustainable production and stewardship of ebony. 
2) Model West African ebony distribution and assess harvesting rates and appropriate planting areas. 
3) Understand the basic ecology of ebony to enhance natural reproduction and dispersal, and test restoration approaches. 
4) Test alternative propagation approaches, including tissue culture, to identify optimal conditions for cultivating ebony.

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Best Estimate of GHG Avoidance/Reduction of This Project (Tonnes CO2 Equivalent/Year):

Impact on Underrepresented Groups:

The Ebony Project seeks to create a model to enhance the sustainability of the species, its rainforest habitat, and participating communities. It has a quantitative target‚Äîto plant 20,000 ebony trees‚Äîbut it is much more than that. It seeks to add capacity, especially for rural women in communities where we work, and knowledge at every stage of the life cycle to ensure that those trees, and the people who care for them, will not just survive but thrive. The project provide materials and training to community members to construct and manage a small nursery and is also developing a Sylvicultural Booklet to document where saplings are planted, what species they are, and who planted them. This is an effort to address the challenge of ownership of the resulting mature trees. We currently support the production of ebony and locally valuable fruit, medicine, such as safou (bush plum), avocado, bush mango, and moabi grown from either seed or cuttings.

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