The Rejesha Principles

At Eden: People+Planet, we created The Rejesha Principles (kuRejesha means "to restore" in KiSwahili) to ensure that our approach to landscape restoration is rooted in long-term sustainability and community impact. These principles guide every project we undertake, setting us apart from other nature-based solution providers by prioritizing holistic restoration and direct collaboration with local communities. By working hand-in-hand with those who rely on restored ecosystems, we ensure that our nature-based solutions bring tangible benefits to livelihoods, biodiversity, and the climate.

With nearly two decades of experience and involvement in global initiatives such as the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, our Rejesha Principles go beyond industry standards to guarantee that our reforestation and landscape restoration work delivers enduring positive outcomes for communities and ecosystems, positioning our projects as global examples of best practices in restoration.

The Rejesha Principles are the foundation of our work, ensuring every project is designed and executed with integrity, inclusivity, and adaptability.

What Are The Rejesha Principles?

    • Fundamental to our model is a people-centered restoration approach. Communities and institutions are active stakeholders in every project and are partners in the design and implementation of each ecosystem restoration project. This includes developing and administrating benefit-sharing arrangements.
    • We prioritize environmental integrity to ensure that landscape restoration and carbon projects are implemented in a way that prioritizes ecological context, strengthening forests and local economic opportunities. This is a commitment to ensure that restoration benefits as well as emissions reductions and removals are real, verifiable, and permanent.
    • We are dedicated to ensuring the long-term resilience of communities and the environment by providing funding for ongoing site maintenance and employment. This commitment is crucial for the proper fulfillment of monitoring, preservation, and conservation activities. Through these efforts, we aim to build social capital and create transformative economic impacts while ensuring that our carbon projects meet the permanence thresholds mandated by carbon standards and the Paris Agreement.
    • We approach landscape restoration in a holistic manner, involving the monitoring of a full range of ecosystem services to restore ecological function. Going beyond just basic reforestation and restoration, our approach includes ongoing conservation activities, biodiversity monitoring and enhancement, hydrological monitoring, and implementing socioeconomic programs with continuous monitoring. To ensure our work is of high quality, we adhere to best practices, drawing guidance from reputable sources, such as the Royal Botanical Society, in all our landscape restoration activities.
    • We embrace a culture of adaptive management through an iterative, data-driven approach to continuous learning and improvement. This encompasses various aspects, including ecosystem restoration techniques, community engagement, partnerships, monitoring tools, communication of lessons learned, and quantification of impacts. Integrating our Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification methods is crucial to ensuring transparency in every landscape restoration project. Our approach is based on fulfilling standards, with management decisions guided by rigorously generated empirical evidence, providing a robust and effective strategy.
    • We use country-approved methodologies for quantification and project development along with best practices, such as IPCC Good Practice Guidance, in both voluntary and, where applicable, regulatory contexts. When a methodology is unavailable, we collaborate with reputable research organizations to develop a rigorous, defensible approach. We remain committed to revising and updating these approaches as refinements are made.

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