# The actions, more trees

Our group usually tends to study and bring to market grassroots solutions that are already working. To stop deforestation, we chose to work on and value natural forests first (conserved lands with intact biodiversity).&#x20;

After bringing to market a biodiversity crediting protocol that generated $30/ha/yr in conserved side of deforestation borders, which halted the deforestation in our zone, we turned our attention to the deforested side of the plots for reforestation.&#x20;

We have 104+ ecological project sites in our pipeline in 26 countries, the most developed countries are Colombia (11), Ecuador (4), Panama (4), and Mexico (3). This gave us an excellent opportunity to watch different agroforestry solutions operating in situ across the world before selecting two that had serious value to Nature, and were appealing to grassroots practitioners.&#x20;

We knew we needed a systematic agricultural protocol that could replace industrial monoculture, and one that valued Indigenous chagra systems (Hernandez Marentes et al. 2022), also known as chakra (Vera V et al. 2019) or chacra (Caradonna and Apffel-Marglin 2018), and other forms of holistic traditional cultivation. These protocols were very different but describe an observed spectrum of grassroots solutions. We decided that if we could address both ends of the spectrum, we could monetize most projects.&#x20;

The chief paradigms of Indigenous systems are better characterized in Indigenous literature. But we often recommend the work by Dr. Lyla June as a starting point on “architecting abundance” (Johnston 2022). As Lyla has pointed out, Indigenous food systems are biologically engineered for overproduction. For instance, pre-contact Hawaiʻi supported an estimated population of 300,000 with ahupuaʻa systems integrating uplands, streams, and fishponds. Precolonial Arctic clam gardens are complex geoengineered structures that holistically benefit the surrounding ecology while providing relatively passive food sources (Nelson and Reed 2025). These paradigms have been suppressed in colonization, but not lost, and we often find them reemerging when Indigenous practitioners are involved in the co-design of agricultural methods.&#x20;

#### Traditional agroforestry cultivation with Indigenous chagras

We include notes on traditional chagra systems for completeness, but humbly admit that our understanding of these systems, and how to support them financially, is incomplete and still in early and non-representative scientific workgroup negotiations.&#x20;

There are many Indigenous experts in this field, but the biggest contributor to our understanding thus far in our working area in Colombia is Miguel Chindoy from the Kamëntšá nation, whose organization Agropueblos has a long history in preserving this science (Miguel Chindoy, Agropueblos, pers. Communication, 7 October 2024). It is worth noting that the context of this chapter, language requirements, and communication style make it the wrong cultural language to include Miguel as a co-author, under ICGME criteria he has to be accountable for the technical content as well as the theoretical content of the work and its written in the wrong scientific language so to speak. Those are several reasons Indigenous experts are not included on scientific work, and chagra science (although in our opinion superior) is still poorly understood and translated. We will instead attempt to summarize basic understandings, economic negotiation points, and ethics concerns from our team to carve out space for an authentic, directly-authored work to follow, which is both necessary and required for a definitive opinion on the topic to be written by Miguel himself and other leaders.

The breakthrough in our understanding of chagras came when we realized they had a role as schools to teach Nature to children (Miguel Chindoy, Agropueblos pers. Communication, 13 January 2026). Indigenous Peoples have a wide variety of nature-friendly cultivation techniques. But the chagras are unique in an esoteric way. In our observation, they are typically run by elder women in the community, often co-occurring with childcare, and incredibly complex and place-based in their content, species, food production cycles, and plant knowledge [(González and Kröger 2020)](https://sciwheel.com/work/citation?ids=18617882\&pre=\&suf=\&sa=0).&#x20;

Our team was entirely stumped on the translation of a chagra to financial rewards until we realized they could not be quantified at all. Instead, we approach chagras as a zen garden. Our understanding is that they are a practical and systematic experience of Nature, and as such, co-occurring with spirituality, culture, and tradition. Any attempt to quantify them fails in this sense, in the same way that writing down Zen teaching is disrespectful to the lived tradition, or a water sample fails utterly to capture the experience of river rafting.&#x20;

While some peers have attempted to measure biocultural credits for chagras we at Savimbo have a core policy that culture is not quantifiable and not for sale. Instead, we have decided to approach chagras like wind on water, acknowledging that one can never capture the wind.&#x20;

We wish to find a way to reward chagra preservation financially, as we consider it a global service in the preservation of rare crops.  Also, many leaders have asked for funding to preserve their chagra teaching centers. Our early negotiations with Indigenous experts have debated what could be used as a transaction point.  Charity funding often relies on external NGOs to advocate, report, negotiate, or pay. For streamlined autonomous market access, we could measure outcomes (consulting transaction) or payments for ecosystem services (employment transaction). We believe that tangible outcomes payments tend to preserve autonomy and independence in how results are delivered. It also preserves cultural privacy, so communities don’t have to explain why or how they did things as much of the teaching is esoteric.&#x20;

For outcomes-based payments to the chagras, we have tentatively concluded the best market to access is the agrobiodiversity market that incentivizes the preservation of biological diversity related to agriculture  (Ducros et al. in prep.), including neglected underutilized species (NUS; [(Talucder et al. 2024)](https://sciwheel.com/work/citation?ids=18626668\&pre=\&suf=\&sa=0).&#x20;

Area-based models like nature-based carbon credits have traditionally been the primary vehicle for climate finance, yet they differ fundamentally from gene-based models such as agrobiodiversity or seed banks in scope and collateral. These models focus on land tenure and titling as the primary financial collateral because they are often priced by the hectare, generating revenue from the physical extent of the land.

Chagras, in contrast, are relatively small areas, often only 1-2 hectares or less, as compared to industrial cultivation. But they are incredibly high value as a living tradition. Payments for Agrobiodiversity Conservation Services (PACS) schemes, such as those implemented by the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT in Peru's Puno region [(Drucker and Ramirez 2020)](https://sciwheel.com/work/citation?ids=18750332\&pre=\&suf=\&sa=0), are more reflective of the value chagras give than area-based cultivation. Furthermore, this unit, which could be easily produced from the number and variety of species in a chagra, could be translated to the Agrobiodiversity Index [(Jones et al. 2021)](https://sciwheel.com/work/citation?ids=11838938\&pre=\&suf=\&sa=0) with a minimum of fuss.&#x20;

The development of gene-based units will need to be aligned with several emerging international standards. For instance, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has an internationally negotiated mechanism aimed at fair and equitable benefit-sharing from the use of Digital Sequence Information (DSI) on genetic resources. This is operationalized as the Cali Fund, a multilateral financial mechanism for the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits from the Use of Digital Sequence Information on Genetic Resources.&#x20;

How this fund will be compliant with Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDSov) the field of translation of Indigenous rights to data and IP rights, is still unclear. But what is clear is that in the past, genetic information such as Digital Sequence Information (DSI) has been treated as a “free” raw resource to be mined for global markets (including the pharmaceutical industry). Now, this process is termed digital colonialism or biopiracy. These ethics are under intense scrutiny, and genetic data are being negotiated as an inherent biocultural asset [(TDG 2024; Flores 2025)](https://sciwheel.com/work/citation?ids=18625961,18626900\&pre=\&pre=\&suf=\&suf=\&sa=0,0). A gene-based unit does not require the physical alienation or "fencing" of land to generate value. While land tenure is a prerequisite for security, the Agrobiodiversity Index Unit (AIU) derives its value from the information density and genetic diversity within that land. It shall allow for “genetic data sovereign exports” where the economic input is control over data (IDSov) rather than the physical extraction of resources.

By using a simplified peer-rating algorithm for cultural authenticity of chagras, we could obviate the need to seek Western approval for intact esoteric traditions. However, we still need accessible measurement and operationalization of more tangible characteristics. These claims ideally aim at genetic diversity to meet climate resilience, climate adaptation, or food security funding. We think DSI information might be unnecessary, and ethically problematic to obtain, house, or measure.  Thus, this protocol is still under active negotiation with representative Indigenous communities, scientists, and certifying bodies in several countries.&#x20;

It’s of interest to us that these two real-world holistic agricultural systems have ended up accessing radically different markets with different units (area-based vs gene-based). However, we note that over the course of our community feedback period, most grassroots AFS fall somewhere in the middle of these two systems on a spectrum, so two overlapping protocols for the two ends of the spectrum could be adapted to a wide variety of agricultural sites as needed and fit several different place-based AFS.&#x20;

To narrow the scope of this chapter, we will only address area-based crediting from standardized systems in the following sections. But we do hope to add gene units to further discussions.

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