Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

Slash-and-burn farming emits more carbon than all global transport combined (2 billion tons). Mike Hands first witnessed the devastation of slash-and-burn in the 1980s while working as a tropical surveyor in a dozen tropical countries--becoming a researcher, then implementer.
Regenerating steep degraded land is the largest and lowest cost carbon sequestration landscape restoration opportunity--sterile, eroded land is restored in 2 years to sustainable plots for food security, ecosystems, diversity, and economic management with Inga alleys.
The resilient and nitrogen-fixing Inga regenerate/enrich depleted soil dramatically recreating forest-floor conditions--transforming the lives of subsistence farmers in the tropics-- by providing food security and organic cash crops as well as significantly reducing global carbon emissions, protecting wildlife and marine habitats, and preserving water sources. This low-input, debt-free/bottom-up approach provides farmers and their families the means to achieve agricultural practices that preserve and increase biodiversity, protect rivers/oceans, and create biological corridors while ending slash-and-burn agriculture.

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The PROCESS: In between the rows of Inga which are 20 inches apart and the rows 13 feet apart, farmers plant their basic food crops (corn, beans, rice). In 18-24 months when the trees are about 20 feet high, they are pruned to chest-high, the leaves are stripped and applied as mulch and the branches are valuable firewood. Now the sun reaches the seeds planted for food and cash crops and when their season is finished, the Inga have regrown--the cycle repeats. An IPCC special report on Global Warming of 1.5C authored by 133 scientists and relying on more than 6,000 peer-reviewed climate change articles emphasizes the critical importance of nature-based climate solutions and clearly states that enhancing carbon sinks in natural ecosystems is key to limiting warming to 1.5C. Emissions reduction pathways which limit global warming to 1.5C require afforestation and reforestation, land restoration, and soil carbon sequestration and the Inga Model achieves all of these.
CARBON AVOIDANCE-(200,000 acres burned each day from slash-and-burn).The Model has saved an estimated 650 hectares from slash-and-burn by Inga alley cropping as families stop this practice as soon as they plant their basic grain alley. In 11 years, none of the 450+ families with alleys have gone back to slash and burn with no unintentional but inevitable escaped agriculture fires.Trees are not cut for firewood (the annual pruning provides a year's worth of valuable fuelwood for the families.Air pollution from the burning of 3,960 ha. of fallow vegetation prevented.No wildfires.Land restored in 18-24 months: to agroforest 15,840 ha.; fallow spared burning: 10,560 ha.Standing trees not cut for firewood
CARBON SEQUESTERING IN THE SOIL AND BIOMASS-NO AGROCHEMICALS-The production of synthetic nitrogen is energy intensive and is leading to nitrogen saturation and greenhouse gas flux in many systems. Reducing the use of nitrogen in food production in line with global boundaries could create a net GHG benefit of 0.69 GtCO2eq per year. Families tell us they save at least 40 days of manual weeding in addition to the 20-30 gallons of herbicide required before they planted Inga alleys.Gasoline saved as heavy equipment is not used/no agrochemical inputs. The alleys improve and stabilize soil, provide biological weed prevention from the shade and organic pest control. A program like the Inga Tree Model allows smallholders to adapt to climate change--withstanding heat and severe drought (7-months).We work in a region that has political and economic challenges of stability and if changes this transformative can take place in Honduras, they can be made anywhere in the humid tropics. The Inga alley species used are native to nearly all of Central and South America.9-current impact. The Model assumes an 8 ha. holding and establishment of these components by annual increments. By year 12, the family will be sequestering / avoiding 88 tons of C. per annum, and will have accumulated 712 tons C. by that time.

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Inga Foundation (IF) is socially inclusive with a "do no harm" approach, working with the entire family rather than individuals to increase equality and social stability. The model encourages the empowerment of girls/women by establishing a secure family life with safe working plots, near to home and raising income to support access to education for all children. Land tenure and inheritance rights are equal to women in Honduras. Inga Foundation support is given to the family as a whole; all training, planting and first pruning is given without regard to household status. Young people can remain in their rural areas without having to migrate to cities, thus reducing climate refugees. We provide assistance for families who don‚ t have able-bodied members in response to requests to establish Inga alleys with single-parent families (often headed by widows) and remote families with young children. IF places boots on the ground to ensure that the alley plots are planted and growing well; and will be pruned when appropriate. After that, plot owners will contract neighbors at annual pruning time and pay them by sharing the firewood. In this way, the system is economically and socially flexible; adaptable to the needs of either gender. The model promotes food sovereignty, local leadership, and the sharing of knowledge among indigenous farmers. 
The families bring about the change as they are the ones determining what they will plant (nourishment crops and inter-planting of fruit/and hardwood trees for future income) as they provide the land, labor and care.

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