Trees4Trees is a program of Yayasan Bumi Hijau Lestari (Sustainable Green Earth Foundation), a non-profit foundation founded in Indonesia. We are dedicated to fostering community forestry as a way to help the environment and reduce rural poverty by planting trees.

The owner of the land the trees are planted on becomes the owner of the trees free and clear. They are under no obligation except to take care of the trees.

There are many ways that local communities participating in the Trees4Trees Program are benefited. Our objective is to help the environment by making it economically advantageous to the people who take part in the program. Here are a few of the ways that they gain from participating:

• They get free seedlings of high value tree species that will grow into valuable assets for them
• They get training to optimize the value of the trees they are planting and to help them improve their local living environment.
• They get the improved local environmental benefit of having greater forest cover, which helps to reduce erosion, keeps cleaner rivers and better air quality.
• Some communities are the beneficiaries of seedling nurseries that Trees4Trees has established. This provides employment and high quality seedlings for use in their own community forests.

The Trees4Trees Program is not a wood certification scheme. In some cases we plant trees to replace those used in the production of wood products such as furniture and building materials. We can show the locations, species and all the planting details from our database but we do not track the downstream use of the trees. Our focus is getting more trees in the forest.

You can help by donating to the cause. You can also buy products that are carrying the Trees4Trees™ logo. Currently we do not send volunteers to the field due to liability and insurance issues however we do collaborate on studies and other environmental and social projects. If you have a project you think would fit with our program or are interested in studying our field data, you can send us a brief description and we'll get back to you to discuss it.

Yes. The planting of trees does absorb CO2 from the environment. Individual trees vary in the amount of CO2 they will absorb during their lifetime so we use the industry standard methods to calculate average amounts of CO2 absorbed across all our plantings. This is a fair estimate of the CO2 that your donation will capture. Although we do not issue certified carbon credits, we use conservative numbers in our estimates and we therefore believe our estimates are a fair representation of the amount of CO2 your donated trees will capture.

Trees4Trees™ is a not for profit Indonesia based charity. To keep our overhead low and apply maximum resrouces to our cause, we have not established legal domicile in other countries. Trees4Trees works though a Fiscal Sponsor in the USA which allows American based donors to make tax deductible donations.

All donations are collected directly through PayPal, a secure payment system. Trees4Trees™ does not receive or retain credit card numbers or other sensitive financial information.

Every donation makes a difference. One tree or as many as you want.

Trees4Trees™ has an inventory of trees already planted but not yet funded. Upon receiving your donation, we assign one or more of those trees to you with a WIN to identify the specific trees. This way you get immediate credit for a planted living tree instead of having to wait until the planting season comes around to have your donation put into effect. BTW, every tree in our stock has been checked at least two times to make sure it is alive and well before we assign it to your donation.

No. Trees4Trees™ uses seeds of the various species we plant that are derived from seed stocks with known natural but superior genetic characteristics. Seeds are carefully graded according to a standard developed by Trees4Trees™ and then planted in nurseries established by Trees4Trees™. From the source to the final planting, the chain of custody is controlled by Trees4Trees™ to assure the best possible result to the grower but within natural parameters.

There are two ways to find out where your trees are planted:

1. If you have a WIN that came with a product you have purchased, just enter the WIN in the WINCheck field at the bottom of this page and we'll bring you to see the location on Google Maps
2. If you want to see where we've planted all the trees, please visit our Achievements page that shows another Google map with all our planting locations and the quantity of trees planted in each area. There you can zoom in to see more details.

A WIN is a World Identification Number, which is used to track the location of the trees we plant. Every donor gets a WIN with their donation and can visit their trees on this website in our map widget. Check it out!