Executive summary
HOW to fund, farm, and reforest trees that have side-benefits – and babies!
Nature does not respond to talk. We've crossed 7/9 planetary boundaries. In 2026, we don't need to quantify why to plant a tree. We just need to plant one — or pay the person who did.
This methodology works at smallfarmer-scale (one hectare). It works to fund more trees in three ways (agroforestry, reforestation, or natural regrowth) — more trees are alive and growing. It also works for agrobiodiversity, and these layers overlap. It's a payment protocol, in other words grassroots people get paid, cash, not talked to or about. It was co-developed with Indigenous Peoples and local communities in the humid tropics, then translated for global markets by a small team of scientists. It pays cash in exchange for outcomes anyone can verify by walking the plot — and peer validators who do.
Smallfarmers decide what grows in the tropical forest belt. Roughly 600 million farms under two hectares feed about a third of the planet on a tenth of the agricultural land (Lowder et al. 2021). One billion people live inside the forests themselves (Newton et al. 2020). They have not been paid for the land-use decisions they make every day. Less than 1% of global climate finance reaches them (Gjefsen 2021). This is the largest under-priced lever in tangible planetary outcomes, and it is the lever this methodology is built around.
The mechanism is intentionally simple. $1 to plant a tree. $0.50 if the tree is alive at six months. $0.50 if it's alive at twelve months. One sentence, communicable verbally at a farmers' market anywhere on Earth. The first time we paid for outcomes instead of plans, we hit suspiciously high survival rates — farmers replant when they're paid for living trees, which is the point. All-in cost lands closer to $5 per surviving tree once you include nurseries, monitoring, and field operations. We say so to funders up front; clarity is efficient.
The supply chain runs through women's groups. Mobile community nurseries, ~$2,000 to set up, sell seedlings at ~$1/unit. They sidestep most nursery certification regimes, cut transport emissions, and route cash to women who need to stay home with children. The nursery is the most important piece of infrastructure in this protocol — not the kiln, not the drone, and not the eDNA filter.
Two agroforestry systems bracket the work. Inga alley cropping (Inga edulis and related species) is nitrogen-fixing, native to the humid tropics, has three decades of field evidence (Hands et al. 1995, 1998, 2021), and produces a sweet sap that pulls insects off production crops — a benefit smallfarmers see in weeks, not years. The second is the chagra: ancestral Indigenous food forests, place-based, typically tended by elder women, simultaneously food production, childcare, spiritual practice, and school. Between the industrial simplicity of Inga and the biological sophistication of the chagra lies most of what is worth saving.
Credits follow trees, and stack; they do not bundle. The same trees generate biodiversity, carbon, and water data across the dimensions of the Ecological Benefits Framework (EBF), in separate layers. Tree-based carbon via per-pixel drone NDVI. Biochar via low-tech Kon-Tiki kilns using Inga prunings. Biodiversity uplift via eDNA collected through the Water Bucket Protocol. Each is measured ex-post. We credit what happened, not what a model said should happen — under current conditions, there is no other defensible choice (Lorenz 1963; Sakschewski et al. 2025).
This methodology is bricolage by design. We name what we don't yet know:
We do not claim to be agronomists, agroforestry, or forestry experts. We are grassroots economics negotiators living and working on planetary boundaries. We describe a payment mechanism that rewards them, specifically if they are at a disadvantage in advocating for themselves.
We do not claim to have the final word on crediting climate credits from these systems. This science is rapidly evolving, and markets are in upheaval. What we can do is tell you how we are currently derisking our data collection and market strategy. In general, trees are paid immediately, pilot data is collected now; IBUs and other credits are credited retroactively once the science clears.
We do not credit ex-ante climate credits of any kind. With seven of nine planetary boundaries crossed, modeling future ecosystem trajectories isn't epistemically defensible. (Less than one-fifth of carbon credits surveyed in recent literature constitute real emission reductions; Probst et al. 2024. The receipts are public.)
We do not quantify some Indigenous work, such as the chagra. It resists standardized metrics by design, falls under protected Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), and our role is to financially support its preservation through agrobiodiversity markets, not to flatten it into a credit.
The funding model is insetting, not REDD+. Trees are sold directly via grants and supply-chain agreements with European companies sourcing agricultural products from project regions. Land is not for sale. (European climate funds keep asking. We keep saying no.)
This methodology was designed for behavior change. Carbon was the wrong initial transaction point for tropical smallfarmers — invisible, slow, and structured around timelines that grassroots economies don't run on. Trees are visible, verifiable, and immediately tangible. By making restorative agroforestry the most financially rational choice at the one-hectare level, and by routing revenue directly to the farmers and Indigenous Peoples who generate it, the protocol moves money to the people with the most direct power over tropical forest outcomes. They have always been the lowest-cost restoration force on the planet. Now they get paid like it.
Status. We're already planting and selling #SexyTrees. Google it; we usually come up third. The protocol is in active pilot across sites in Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, and Mexico. It has been reviewed publicly and privately by global experts in agroforestry, biodiversity science, complexity theory, and market design. It is published under CC BY 4.0 — free for academic, NGO, community, project developer, and commercial use with attribution. Certifiers incorporating it into paid certification services enter a royalty agreement with Savimbo Inc.
The question this methodology was born from is the one it still asks: what's worth more, an ideal scientific protocol that nobody plants under, or thousands of trees alive at twelve months while the science iterates? We placed our bet on the trees. They're in the ground.
“Trees have already been invented.” — Hecht et al, Carbon in woodlands
The Savimbo Team eco at savimbo.com savimbo.com
© 2026 Savimbo Inc.
Suggested citation: Savimbo Inc. (2026). The Savimbo SexyTrees Methodology (#SexyTrees): Executive Summary.https://sexytrees.savimbo.com Full methodology: Burbank, D., Lopez, J., Jamauca, L., & Lopez Rojas, A.I. (2026). https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/EUYMP
The #SexyTrees methodology is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Anyone — academic, NGO, community, project-developer, or commercial — may freely use, adapt, and build on the methodology, with attribution.
"#SexyTrees" and "Savimbo" are trademarks of Savimbo Inc. and are not licensed under CC BY 4.0. Applying the methodology is free under that license; using the #SexyTrees name or seal to brand, market, or sell a certification service requires a separate trademark licensing (royalty) agreement with Savimbo Inc. Certifiers: contact eco at savimbo.com
Last updated
Was this helpful?