Projects we're building

GRO Foundation is planting indigenous trees across deforested institutional land in Uganda, at a scale few projects attempt — a registered afforestation and reforestation programme under the International Carbon Registry with a 45-year crediting period. The programme is built on a census-based accounting approach, measuring sequestration species by species rather than relying on broad averages.

That level of precision is exactly where most projects run into trouble. Census-based accounting only works if every tree can actually be found, identified and re-measured years later — across thousands of hectares, through multiple verification cycles.

That's where we come in. Flora Carbon AI provides the digital MRV layer for the project: per-tree tagging and geolocation, structured field data capture, and registry-grade monitoring reports that hold up under third-party verification. We also support the project through its certification workflows, so the evidence generated in the field arrives at the validator in the form it's expected in.

India has one of the highest concentrations of small and marginal farmers anywhere in the world — the people with the most to gain from a second, predictable income stream, and the least ability to access one. Carbon finance should reach them. In practice, transaction costs usually mean it doesn't.

We're building a farmer-centric agroforestry programme designed to change that, starting from a pilot in Purulia district, West Bengal. Purulia sits on the eastern fringe of the Chotanagpur Plateau: shallow red-lateritic soils, roughly four-fifths of cultivation rainfed, large stretches of degraded and low-productivity land alongside existing tree-based livelihoods in lac and tasar sericulture. It's difficult farming country, and precisely the kind of landscape where agroforestry does the most good.

What this programme will not do is convert prime cropland to forest. Instead we integrate native, locally suitable species into working farms — boundary planting along field perimeters, row-and-alley intercropping, block plantations on marginal plots, homestead and orchard enrichment, riparian and shelterbelt strips. Farm productivity and food security are preserved or improved while carbon stocks build steadily. Species are chosen for what farmers actually want from them: timber, fodder, fruit, fuelwood and NTFPs, matched to local rainfall, soils and market access.

The programme is structured as a grouped project, so new farmer plots can be added continuously rather than requiring a new project each time. The first instance covers 3,000 hectares in phases — beginning with the Purulia cluster, then additional village clusters across West Bengal — building toward a national programme of 100,000 hectares.

Every tree is tracked individually. Through FloraTrace, our QR-based mobile and web platform, each sapling receives a unique Tree ID linked to its GPS location, planting details, photographs and subsequent growth measurements — auditable, per-tree digital evidence across the full project duration. That's what keeps monitoring costs low enough for smallholder carbon to work at all.