The conference entitled 'The Importance of Trees for People and Planet' was held in two online sessions on 21 and 22 January, 2021.  The event was organised jointly by the Schumacher Institute (UK), Social Change and Development (SCAD, India) and GreenDependent Institute (Hungary). Participants of the online conference where mainly from the UK, Hungary and from India. Participants came from very different backgrounds, including treeplanting related organisations, environmentalists, academics and individuals interested in tree planting.

The first day was opened by Ian Roderick (The Schumacher Institute) who presented about 'Trees, Climate and Livelihoods: Introduction to the project, partners and this event and links with Convergence'. Ian's presentation was followed by a group discussion moderated by the Tree Circles team where participants had a chance to shortly introduce themselves and start a discussion about their thoughts related to the issue of trees.

After the breakout groups, Veronika Kiss and Ágnes Zólyomi (from Ecosystem Evaluation) talked in their presentation about the importance of trees from an ecological perspectives, including but not limited to climate change. They discussed how trees are important from an ecosystems perspective, what other significant services they provide, and how they can be integrated even into our built environment. Veronika shared the results of two interesting studies carried out in Hungary in the field ecosystem services.

Mr. P. P. Saravanan, Senior Scientist at Gandhigram Rural university, Dindigul, Tamilnadu spoke about social forestry and community engagement. Among others, he spoke about the very interesting concept of 'Sacred Groves' in India which are protected patches of forests that are dedicated to local folk deities or tree spirits.

After the inspiring presentations there was a chance to raise questions and people could reflect on the information provided.

On the second day of the conference, wildlife educator and surveyor Dr Jennifer Lloyd Pain gave a presentation titled 'Planting for Biodiversity and Local Food Resilience'. She emphasized the importance of people's own experience relating to trees, and she encouraged everyone to meet and really get to know a tree in order to strengthen experimental and emotional relations to trees.

Afterwards, Charles Amirthan Christy talked about tree planting at SCAD in India. In his presentation we heard from women’s groups involved in village tree planting work organised by Social Change and Development (SCAD) in Tamil Nadu India and the history of the greening of the campus at SCAD. He also introduced what trees are mainly planted for, and what kinds of trees they usually plant.

Edina Vadovics talked about the TreeDependent programme initiated and developed by GreenDependent in Hungary. In her presentation, she talked about the start of the programme 10 years ago with the aim of making GreenDependent's own events more responsible, and how it has since developed into a programme linking biodiversity conservation, carbon compensation and the creation of local fruit production opportunities and jobs with the involvement of communities.

After the presentations, workshops were held about the topic how to get 'Tree Conscious'. Participant of the workshops tried to answer how can we all increase knowledge and awareness of the importance of trees, and how to care for them,  in our local context? Many great ideas were mentioned in each group, such as mapping the existence of trees and indicating where trees would be needed; the need for the rising awareness of soil biodiversity; individuals should become responsible for trees; twinning with other countries in the field of tree planting;  adopting a tree; tree planting by highschool graduates in Indonesia; 10-million-tree-programme in Hungary.

We believe that the conference raised a lot of valuable information and inspiration, and the organisers hope to continue the TreeCircles movement :)

Summarized by GreenDependent Institute

Should you have missed the event, you can watch and listen to the presentations here:

Day 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxGIJOQnTg0&feature=youtu.be

Day 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiX0wFuU6A8&feature=youtu.be

To learn more about Tree Circles or donate to support its purposes, please visit:

https://convergence-alliance.org/