As a matter of principle, monitoring and reporting measures have the highest priority for Plant-for-the-Planet. For this reason, since January 1, 2016, we have been recording both the seedlings grown and delivered from the nursery to the restoration areas and the trees planted during the planting period in daily logs, each of which is double-certified by the signature of two senior employees. All daily logs are linked and viewable on our homepage: https://www.plant-for-the-planet.org/de/yucatan-reports/
At the end of each planting season, we have been submitting the number of newly planted trees since 2015 to CONAFOR, the state forestry commission, which also made field visits in the early years of planting and issued certificates of the amount of annual planting upon request. Until 2018, there were about three inspections of our work by CONAFOR forest engineers each year, after which the visits were greatly reduced or even suspended due to cost-cutting measures on the part of CONAFOR.
We have engaged the auditing firm PKF, Mexico to audit the ‘tree accounting’ and all financial statements of the non-profit Plant-for-the-Planet A.C., Mexico. On August 13, 2021, PKF confirmed that a total of 6,207,614 trees have been planted and cared for by our own staff since 2015 and issued an unqualified opinion for all six years 2015-2020.
Since July 2021, our employees have also been using the Treemapper.app to record the geodata of the planted trees and the tree species planted in each case, together with the time of planting. This app was invented by the young team of Plant-for-the-Planet and developed together with developers in India, Germany and America. This app is also open-source, free of charge and is intended to contribute to increasing transparency in ecosystem restoration worldwide.
