Ecosystem Restoration Camps

Our Mission

Healthy ecosystems underpin everything that humanity needs, but 75% of our Earth is degraded. Climate Disruption, the biodiversity crisis, desertification, flooding, loss of livelihoods, poverty and hunger are directly linked to collapsing ecosystems. Humanity is degrading and depleting its most important resource: functioning natural systems.

The need for addressing these crises and for a change to a resilient, regenerative and sustainable co-existence with our natural world is understood. Yet, worldwide, people feel powerless to turn the tide. In response, we are catalyzing a global movement to restore and rehabilitate our degraded ecosystems and change the way we live with nature through introducing regenerative productive systems.

Ecosystem Restoration Camps ("ERC") is a global, inclusive, bottom-up movement. We catalyse action towards restoring and rehabilitating natural systems to maintain the web of life. We do this by facilitating the emergence of Camps around the world. Camps are living labs where local communities, lay people, experts and scientists come together to restore and rehabilitate degraded ecosystems. Camps empower local communities to restore their environments and livelihoods by providing them with the tools, skills, and knowledge to bring back abundance and increase their resilience.

OUR VISION: We envision a fully-functional, peaceful, abundant, biologically diverse Earth brought about through cooperative efforts for the ecological restoration of degraded lands.

OUR MISSION: To work together to restore ecological functionality, to build Research, Training and Innovation Centers for Ecological Restoration, to engage people in inquiry into ecological restoration, and train people in how to restore degraded lands in perpetuity.

OBJECTIVES - To train people in techniques for restoring land and provide practical opportunities for people to practice new approaches to landscape restoration. - To build research, training and innovation centers to engage people in ecosystem restoration. - To manage a flow of volunteers of all ages to restore agricultural and natural ecosystems. - To increase the organic matter, carbon content and water retention capacity of the soil to stimulate large scale carbon sequestration. - To improve the livelihoods of farmers, landowners and local communities around the camps.

OUR VALUES

Restoring Earth positively impacts both livelihoods and communities. To ensure that our contribution to humanity is ethically sound, we have embraced a set of core values that guide the work of the Foundation:

- We believe that all beings are equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights; - We recognise that without thriving ecosystems we are nothing and feel a profound obligation to preserve and restore degraded land where it may be found; - We are not self-seeking but rather committed to working together towards a collective outcome that is bigger than any individual, that benefits us all, and that benefits future generations; - We voluntarily, joyfully and with peaceful intent wish to restore basic ecological function so that all people and other living things can live together in harmony; - We willingly share our knowledge, our time, our expertise and our labour, making it as accessible as possible, knowing that we are doing the right thing; - We treat one another with respect and as equals in our shared endeavour, no matter how much or how little each of us may be able to give; - We believe in collaboration, and therefore work with organisations, experts, and local communities in partnership; - We work as a bottom-up movement, each Camp is an independent entity designed and organised according to its own local context, ensuring that the benefits are really felt by the local population; - We communicate openly and honestly celebrating our diversity, and embracing our differences without allowing these to impede progress towards our shared goal; - We act with open minds and hearts, prepared to learn new skills and methods for land restoration from those with knowledge and expertise in this area; - We strive to communicate the essence of our work to others such that together we can build a movement that restores resilient abundance to land and ecosystems that we have degraded.

ERC Foundation works with an executive Board of Directors, a volunteer and financially responsible Supervisory Board and a strategic Advisory Council made by the world's leading experts in agroforestry, permaculture, regenerative farming, and ecosystem restoration. ERC is a supporting partner to the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.