The scale of the global rainforest destruction is measured in football pitches – close to 30 pitches of forest are lost every single minute. That is nearly 2,500 pitches in the duration of a single football game.
Football for Forests is turning this powerful metaphor around: with the help of the global football community and the enthusiasm of football fans, we restore tropical forests, pitch by pitch.
Football for Forests in a nutshell
Football for Forests’ mission is to leverage the passion for football to help restore the world’s forests.
At the heart of our initiative is a digital platform that allows football fans to donate to the cause and earn tokens that are turned into restoration impacts.
The premise is simple – football fans sign up to the phone app and choose the club they love:
- They contribute a small sum to tropical forest restoration each time their team scores
- As the goals fly in, fans see how much they and their teams contribute to restoring forests
- Fans can earn additional tree tokens by answering football trivia and predicting scores
This creates a competition between different fan groups and teams these fans back, which runs throughout the season. And this is where football clubs and corporate sponsors come in.
Partnerships
Through the Football for Forests platform, clubs and companies can support long-term restoration programmes managed by us in Colombia that are monitored and visualised on our public dashboard. With this, these partners can bring their restoration commitments to life in a unique and engaging way, and show global fans leadership in climate and biodiversity action:
- Football clubs that support Football for Forests can team up with their fans to help restore essential ecosystems that harbour an immense wealth of biodiversity and are essential to stabilise our climate.
- Corporate sponsors can match fan contributions and use Football for Forests to meet restoration requirements.
Visualising impact
We keep fans and our backers up to date on the progress of restoration projects with a transparent and robust impact monitoring system. Implementation of restoration activities is being monitored through a combination of professional and community monitoring, who report progress on the ground on a regular basis.
Our monitoring and reporting protocol tracks the area of forests restored in football pitch units (full and half pitches, penalty areas, etc.), the number of trees and species types, and estimates on carbon sequestration, among others. Data is fed into our system, which is visualised both on the phone app and a publicly available dashboard hosted on the Football for Forests website.
Football for Forests is a joint initiative of Climate Focus and Planet Super League. We have been kick-started by funding from the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), which on behalf of the German Ministry of Environment (BMUV) and Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI), has been a fantastic backer of Football for Forests since the very start of our journey.
Find out more at: www.footballforforests.com
