VISIONS OF HEALTHY LANDSCAPES, ENERGY & PEOPLE
Welcome to The Emerald Plan Foundation.
The Emerald plan is a practical & pragmatic solution to the challenge faced by degraded agricultural landscape around the world, combining the needs of society in terms of renewable energy (particularly from agriculture), food and water security whilst increasing biodiversity and (human-altered) climate change capacity. What the emerald plan presents is application and promotion of better ways to think and act for communities and societies with direct benefits attained in cost effective and achievable ways from better biodiversity–rich and climate-adapted landscapes.
It achieves these outcomes by combining expertise in sustainable agricultural systems, natural resource management, bio-energy and waste-to-energy resources & engineering. Linked to these skills are the tasks of practical application, promotion, education, funding and on-ground project creation and management.
Foundation members have breadth of expertise in biodiversity, natural resources management, renewable bio-energy (in both resource & engineering), agriculture, agroforestry and, most importantly, social capacity (in both developing and developed world situations)
Abstract for joint IEA FAO Task 43 landscapes and bio-energy pathways
The Multi Role Indigenous Integrated Landscape Design (MRIILD) colloquially called The Emerald Plan was developed in 2006 and was a conceptual document that put emphasis on bio-energies fit into the landscape. Viewed from a larger scale, combined with knowledge of bio-energies and Natural resource management possibilities, what was presented was a possibility that a new energy system at continental scales could be tied to landscape and biodiversity health. This drive by the authors to develop a bio-energy vision of a green future is now gaining more impetus as landscape degradation continues from a range of pressure policy makers are trying to contain. What was once seen as idealism is now a decade later a very probable pathway for bioenergy’s true sustainability credentials to be realised and possibly more biomass feed stock to be developed.
