Company: AFFOREST FOR FUTURE
Category: Harnessing the Winds of Change award
The company AFFORREST FOR FUTURE (Afforest4future) merges environmental entrepreneurship and advanced AI technology to address a pressing and almost unspoken about global challenge - desertification. The UN states "12 million hectares of arable land are lost to drought and desertification annually, while 1.5 billion people are affected in over 100 countries. Halting land degradation has become an urgent global imperative"1. Afforest4future has developed patented technology that excavates sediment from the bottom of human-made lakes which is then spread across the desert, where the nutrient dense soil is created, upon which multi-level local forests are planted. The result is a water-efficient agricultural system, which serves as a CO2 sequestration ecosystem that will grow to be human independent in 20 years. Afforest4future presents an integrated solution for creating soil, food and carbon removal, which are some of the most entrenched and difficult challenges of the 21st century.
Afforest4future has a 'moonshot', or the ultimate ambitious project, to green the Sahara desert. This moonshot challenges the orthodoxy that there is physically little that can be done to reverse desertification, besides policy changes and education. However, Afforest4future is challenging this mindset and disrupting the climate change adaption industry, one desert at a time. In particular, a stand out category on the value curve, eliminates the belief that no tangible action can be taken to halt desertification. Recently the American National Research Council commented that "scalable, sustainable, economically viable carbon removal solutions do not exist today"2 - until now. Afforest4future has created a new market and standard for technological advances within the climate change industry while raising the expectation for real solution generation.
In the Climate Change Industry, carbon sequestration is forecast to be worth billions of dollars of revenue in the coming years. The food and agribusiness also have a significant economic and an environmental footprint, being worth $5 trillion USD 3....
