OpenForests

Funding was named the #1 challenge for rewilding organisations in the Global Rewilding Survey 2025.

Grupo Ecológico Sierra Gorda IAP has spent 30+ years building a way to address it in Mexico.

Their answer: Carbono Biodiverso, a financing model linking a state carbon tax, private-sector obligations, and local landowners across the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve, supported by a transparent registry system developed with OpenForests.

Today, more than 900 people and 40,000+ hectares are part of this system.

Next week, our CEO Alexander Watson will join Pati Ruiz Corzo, Ricardo Javier Torres Hernández, and David Ross for the “Funding to Scale Rewilding” webinar organised by Global Rewilding Alliance and chaired by Alister Scott.

🗓 17 Sept, 4–5:30 PM CEST / 10–11.30 AM EST
📍 Online

Reserve your spot here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/funding-to-scale-rewilding-grupo-ecologico-sierra-gorda-tickets-1998419733218?aff=oddtdtcreator

A line of beehives is helping keep elephants away from farmland in Tanzania.

In Ngorongoro, a wildlife corridor connects highland forest to the Selela salt lake, a route used by more than 1,000 elephants to reach food and water.

But local communities depend on the same landscape.

So the corridor alone isn’t enough. Elephant Guardians monitor the route, while beehives installed along its edge help discourage elephants from entering farmland.

These measures aim to preserve the livelihoods of local communities by, among other things, protecting the permaculture garden, which feeds more than half the community, and by contributing to their livelihoods through the sale of honey and beeswax.

It’s a useful reminder that wildlife corridors are not only about habitat connectivity.
They also have to work for the people living around them.

In our latest article, we look at what wildlife corridors are, the different types, and what makes them work in practice.
→ https://openforests.com/media/articles/wildlife-corridors/

For more information about this project, go check

How many trees can you fit into a space the size of 6 parking spots?

If you said "not many," the Miyawaki method may surprise you. Densely planted native trees, all competing for sunlight, growing faster together than they ever would alone.

Tiny space. Big forest. Real outputs.
We wrote a full article about them that you can read here :https://openforests.com/media/articles/what-is-a-miyawaki-forest/

How does climate change look like locally?
Climate change is usually told to us in global numbers.Global temperatures. Global emissions. Global scenarios.

Numbers that matter, but that rarely match how the change actually reaches us: a summer that feels off, a river running lower than it used to, a farm where the seasons no longer line up with what the family remembers.

We built Local Climate Stories to fill that gap between the global data and the local experience. What we hear in the news and what we actually experience. What feels different around us and the scientific data behind it.

We took 75+ years of climate data and brought it down to the scale where people actually live: a single place. Then we added something the data alone can't hold, people's memories of that place, sitting right next to the numbers. Data tells us what is changing. Stories tell us what that change means to the people living through it.

Because environmental data shouldn't stay locked in databases and scientific reports.
It should be visible, understandable, and tied to the landscape it describes.

→ Check what the data says for your city or country, share it and tag us. We’d love to see the results. https://climate.openforests.com/

Why should a company back your restoration project?

The honest answer: great work on the ground isn't enough anymore to unlock funding. Funders want proof, not promises. They want to see exactly where their money lands.

With thousands of conservation and restoration initiatives chasing the same pool of budgets, and public trust shaken by scandal over the recent years, transparency has become the real currency.

Today more than ever, trust builds on communication, transparency, and facts.

explorer.land lets organizations show sponsors, in concrete terms, what their contribution actually does:

> A specific project, connected to a real site and location on a map
> A dedicated sponsor page and contribution timeline
> Field updates with photos and videos showing the work as it progresses
> Data they can examine themselves: from tree-cover gain and canopy height to change over time

Seeing beats telling. Check out how Grupo Ecológico Sierra Gorda I.A.P. (GESG) handles sponsor transparency with explorer.land: https://lnkd.in/enhaNBiE