#14 Climate change

This project planted 1,000 trees in Mezam Division, focusing on water catchments that are vulnerable to erosion and extreme weather events.

We did not have a category for environmental projects, so we could not estimate the cost-effectiveness in carbon sequestration of planting 1,000 trees. We estimated it is roughly 10 tons of CO2 per year. This is great, but we can't compare it with any of the other projects. In the category of food security, we are trying to evaluate the capacity of projects to transfer income to beneficiaries, and in health we are looking at direct lifesaving effects. For immediate lifesaving, it is much easier to save a life by giving out mosquito nets and preventing infections (some of which could be deadly), than by planting trees, you need lots of trees to clean the air enough to reduce the incidence of respiratory diseases, and Mezam has clean air. However, we are not sure this is a fair comparison. We have created an environmental category in our 2023’s contest and then we will compare projects for their capacity to capture carbon.

This project had other long-term effects, skill-building for children, improving water quality, and possible aversion of some casualties during extreme weather events. Those were difficult to measure for us, but we could have considered if these would have been measured (eg. Pre/Post tests with children showing their improvement in skills and knowledge, which we could account as increased capacity and as future environmental effects, health effects of improved water quality, and analyzing destructive effects of extreme weather events in the locality before and after the project).