Restoring tropical forests

Eyes on 20th July! It’s when the best women footballers in the world from 32 countries are kicking off down-under. And we’re in on the action. We are thrilled to be releasing the new version of the app, which features the Women’s World Cup edition. This tournament kicks-off the 2023/2024 season for F4F, which will run until 31 May 2024. Our very first official season – yes!! So update your app and enjoy the new World Cup feature screen – let the goals fly in.

Our first forest restoration site is in the vicinity of the city of Florencia in the incredibly biodiverse Colombian Amazonian foothills. Our implementation partner Amazonía Emprende is doing an incredible job managing habitat restoration activities on our behalf, extending nearly 30 football pitch sized areas of degraded land. As of July 2023, active forest restoration by our crew has occurred on 7 pitch sized areas, with the remainder of the land being enriched through natural regeneration. That’s impact! 🌳 🌳

The second ongoing F4F restoration site is located in the savannahs of the Orinoquia region – that’s the northeastern part of Colombia. The ambition of this amazingly beautiful reserve is to enhance biodiversity conservation and drive regeneration and restoration of native ecosystems to allow for recovery of native fauna. Our restoration project here – thanks to you – is working on creating biological corridors between natural forests in the area. Active forest restoration supported by F4F has so far occurred on 26 pitch sized areas as of July 2023.

Football for Forests aims to train as many young people as possible to be ‘Zagueros del bosque’ (guardians of the forest) for their home forests and to lead football schools in their own communities. In 2022, 20 guardians of the forest were trained already.

“Football for Forests offers an innovative opportunity to finance forest restoration activities in Colombia – football pitch by football pitch, so to speak,” says Juan Pablo Castro, director of GANSO. This non - profit organisation offers technical and financial support to land owners wishing to transition to sustainable land use practices in Colombia. Many of these include cattle ranchers residing at the forest frontier.

We had the pleasure of talking with Sports for Social Impact in today's podcast. In our discussion, we explored the possibility of financing nature-based solutions and reforestation through sport. Sports for Social Impact seeks to explore and educate on the power that sport has to create a positive impact on society.

"Football has rarely made positive headlines in recent weeks. The World Cup in Qatar was overshadowed by discussions about human rights violations. But football moves people." [In German] Frank Mertens talked to Charlotte Streck, one of the co-founders of Climate Focus, about Football For Forests for @electrifiedmagazin.

The 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference – more commonly referred to as COP27 – was held from 6 November until 18 November 2022 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. Our team was represented there by a number of colleagues, where we connected with likeminded initiatives, government programmes, and private sector actors on F4F’s missions and activities. It was fantastic to represent F4F at this event.

With generous support from the German government (GIZ), we have been busy preparing the first two restoration sites in Colombia. The first site concerns a 35-football pitch-sized farm in the Amazon region, while the second project covers a 20 pitch-sized farm in the Orinoquia region. As we release the first fully functional app this November, we hope to be able to start restoring these sites as the goals of your favourite teams start flying in!