My name is Leopoldina Guterres.
People call me Mana Leo.
I live in Baguia.
Baguia is extremely rural area.
It is not in long distance, but because of the broken road,
we have a long trip to go to Baguia.
My principal job as a teacher at school,
but in my extra time, I work with my community
for agroforestry.
When I was young,
we walk in the shade during the day, is all forest.
But when the civilian war start,
all the forest was chopped out,
but not only for the security,
a lot of people come and stay in one area.
We have to make garden or farm to grow corn or beans for food,
so then all the forest gone.
In the early 1970s,
the forest cover in Timor-Leste
was with over 75 percent,
today it's under 30 percent.
So if that continues at that rate, then you're going to find that in another
15 or 20 years,
there’s not going to be any primary or secondary forest left.
My husband, John Tadeu Gusmao, work as a teacher.
He loved the environment, trees like forests,
so he collect the seeds and he start to germinate and propagate,
and when it get the good seedlings he gave away to his community.
John had been very passionate about planting trees,
and he was a great man at bringing people together.
We just sort of
clicked.
One of the things we went and did was have a look around Baguia.
Very quickly became apparent
this wasn't going to be about maintaining the forests.
This was going to be about putting the forest back.
We start work with 12 farmers
and that time I was as a translator.
We came up with this idea of, well, let's pay the farmers
an incentive payment for each tree
they plant and each tree that stays alive.
The idea was that we would pay the farmers a dollar a tree per year,
but we would charge the farmers $0.50 for each tree.
Because I'm also of the view that if you give stuff away, there's
not necessarily any skin in the game for them to be able to look after it.
After two or
three years, John passed away.
It was just prior to his death that I learned that
he wasn't going to recover.
I felt very weak that time.
He was just everything for me and children.
And we had six children.
Very soon that time as well,
Mau Andrew came over and we went to visit his grave.
And I still remember
seeing Leo sort of coming towards me.
We embraced and had a bit of a cry and pretty much
the first thing that Leo said before I could say anything was
that it's really important that John's work continue.
There was no way I could then say no.
I did wonder how the hell we were going to do it.
But, Leo’s one of the most extraordinary people that you could meet.
And, when she puts her mind to something, it gets done.
I then approached some other people and said, look, if we get ourselves
certified, we could then start making some income out of
selling the carbon
that gets stored in the new forests in the international carbon market.
It took us a couple of years, though, to get there.
It wasn't, it wasn't an easy task.
We did all the process,
like stakeholder consultation, guided by Mau Andrew.
Then when we heard that our program is approved by Gold Standard,
it is, I don't know how we expressed,
but we feel that what we do
in Baguia, in extremely rural area, is valued
by other people, other organizations.
The model that we built means we've got to count every tree
each year to know how much to pay the farmers.
And there's a tree count being undertaken now
where the staff go out and count every tree.
And at the end of that process, we know
exactly how many trees have survived and how many trees each farmer has.
Currently, the payment per tree is $0.50.
So if a farmer has kept their 500 trees alive, they'll get paid $250,
which in many cases is doubling their annual income.
So, in the program there is farmers' cooperative,
they can come and draw money.
So this is a help a lot of the farmers
like they start to repair their house
or maybe like young people they buy a motorbike.
So all this happen with the payment of the carbon credits.
We are starting to generate a good reserve of funds
and one of the benefits of doing that was highlighted during COVID.
When it was COVID, no transport
came to Baguia, no delivering of the food.
There is not enough food for us.
We were able to allocate around $150,000
to get 15 truckloads of rice up into the community.
And the subdistrict administrator said to me, oh, Andrew, that's fantastic.
And I said, look
it's actually it's your money,
it's the money
coming out of the community from growing trees and from carbon funds.
These new ways of of generating income out of nature,
I think is a significant way forward for these countries.
Now the Government of Timor-Leste has been reliant on oil
and gas for a long period of time.
The world is moving away from from fossil fuels.
And so I think there's an opportunity to be able to look at it, at setting up
a similar wealth fund as the petroleum fund,
but doing it through nature based solutions.
As a teenager
I knew the weather pattern in Timor-Leste,
when is rain time,
when is dry season,
now entirely unpredictable.
It affects agriculture.
Right now as we speak,
we have a new floods damaging farms around the country,
roads, access to some remote areas of the country.
What we can do is to plant trees
and with the inspiring example of One Seed, results
is there, 300,000 trees planted in the last 10 years,
some cash went to the community, improved people's lives.
Now the trees start to grow up
and we love to be in the forest again.