Basic info
Hazard: Soil erosion, lack of good quality of air, loosing biodiversity, and heat waves
Nature-based Solution: Planting and adopting new trees
How it started
Starting point: community
First approaches: community
Getting started: After a windy storm, we lost many old trees in our neighbourhood and we have realised that we have too few young trees. It is essential for our community to be surrounded by green places so we decided that we have to do something about it. We have direct experience with heat waves and how pleasant it is to have trees which provide shade but it takes many years for a tree to grow.
Finding (Nature-based) Solutions
Selecting a solution: Our solution was pretty simple to find but harder to implement it. As an individual, you cannot plant a tree wherever you want - you have to ask many permissions.
Assessing needs: Financial support
Co-creation – Finding collaborators
Collaboration: Firstly, we got informed under what conditions we could plant trees - we needed to know what kind of trees they could be planted and where. We contacted people from the municipality who could give us information on how to proceed. We also contacted a dendrologist and landscape architect to learn about the composition of the trees. We wanted to support biodiversity because there are many birds; thus, we wanted trees which would provide richer habitats. Then another idea came up: let's do a bird's path. We chose the uninterrupted path where we planned to plant some trees, especially, for birds and where we decided to build information tables along the path. This way it became even more interesting and educational for people.
When: During the entire project
Financial Support
Before: We needed financial support: firstly, we wrote a project which was called "green oasis" and we motivated children from our neighbourhood to draw a tree they would like to plant. We wrote a project and made photos, we were even in the local newspaper but, in the end, our project was not approved. So, we came up with the idea of adopting a tree. We communicated this to our community, we explained the idea, general cost and we told them that we have some sponsor to support our idea but still it does not cover all costs. We calculated how much money we would need for each tree plus a name tag for each tree with written name of the tree in Slovak and in Latin plus the name of an adopter. Usually, trees meant to be for children born within 10 years in our neighbourhood. In this way it feels very personal and it could guarantee that the tree will survive next years because every adopter needs to water it regularly especially during the dry seasons.
After: After implementing our idea further finances were not required...required is time and willingness from an adopter.
Beyond the project
After the project: Our hearts were filled with joy:) It makes community stronger and more supporting, new ideas came up for future projects and even for more tree planting. Once we went through the process it is easy to continue.
Overall Experience: Beautiful, we felt that everyone is helpfull and excited about it. And even though we did not get financial support from the initial project, we were able to do it on our own with the idea of adopting a tree. Some neighbours even payed for trees for other neighbours who could not afford it.
Lessons Learnt: It was time consuming. We had to invest a lot of our time in managing in relation with local authorities.
Best Practice: I would encourage not to give up and to focus on creating a good supporting team. But I believe the most important is the awareness about our climate change and to have strong inner motivation to change it.
Narrator's Details
Name: Story: OZ Severna; Photos: Andrej Fortiak
Email: ivagab17@gmail.com