It’s Arbor Week

We’ve been so caught up with rhinos and planning our World Rhino Day event that we haven’t had time to pay attention to the other stars of this week – trees! Arbor Week runs from 1-7 September in South Africa. We’re great fans of trees – sleeping in luxury treehouses, photographing great baobabs, watching leopards lounging on their branches, canoeing past big leafy ones bustling with pretty tweeting winged creatures, and more. So in celebration, read on…

As part of our Going Green initiative at Rhino Africa, we’re organising some green initiatives. For starters, we’ve procured some trees, compliments of the kind folks at the Grootbos Foundation, to donate to one of our favourite charities – Khumbulani Day Care Centre. We’ll help plant them with the staff and children at Khumbulani, so watch this space for the photos!

Khumbulani is a centre for HIV infected or affected kids between the age of 0 to about 13 years, managed by an amazing lady called Gloria Bebeza. We at Rhino Africa have been supporting Khumbulani for several years with monthly donations, and by feeding Gloria’s children. Now we’d like to green their space too!

What is Arbor Week?

National Arbor Week serves to promote awareness for the need to plant and maintain indigenous trees throughout South Africa, especially for the many disadvantaged communities who often live in barren areas. Every Arbor Week celebration highlights two specific trees, one common and one rare species. Arbor Week aims to:

• promote a better understanding of trees, particularly indigenous trees;

• highlight the important role trees play in sustainable development and the livelihoods of people and their environment;

• encourage communities to participate in various greening activities within their own surrounding;

• raise awareness of South Africa’s urban greening initiatives.

Grootbos have their own tree planting project called Future Trees, which has planted over 1,000 local indigenous trees as part of a forest rehabilitation programme on the Grootbos Nature Reserve. This project not only has obvious ecological benefits but also contributes financially to the Green Futures project. Seeds and young saplings collected by the Green Futures students in their milkwood forests are grown in the Green Futures nursery for 5 years.

2011 Trees

Common Tree – Jacket-plum (Pappea capensis)

Rare Tree – Bride’s Bushes (Genus Pavetta) and Common Wild Elder (Nuxia congesta)

You can see more about the charitable work we undertake on this short video:

How we’re getting involved

Rhino Africa has partnered with the Heritage Environmental Management Company to create an ethos of environmental responsibility and sustainable development with its preferred partners. In other words, to better green our practices, offices and the environments we affect. Read more about our Going Green initiative here.

A crucial aspect of travelling long haul to Africa is to offset your carbon footprint and that is why we are looking into several tree planting initiatives for our clients.

One such initiative is at Grootbos where for an extra R350 for a tree you can either plant the Milkwood tree yourself or have them planted by Promise (an ex-Green Futures student now employed full time to manage this project).

The tree will be named after you and you’ll also receive a certificate including the GPS locality of where the tree is planted. This information is uploaded onto Grootbos’ tree planter supporters’ page and the locality uploaded onto Google Earth. The tree donor can thereby identify the tree’s locality and monitor their progress over time.

According to Grootbos: One Milkwood tree stores 1.4 tonnes of carbon by the time it is 20 years old.

If you have any questions or tips to offer on how we can boost our eco-friendliness, feel free to post a comment below! To find out about the greener safari lodges and mobile tented camp holidays we offer, contact one of our travel experts!