JPS has entered into a three-year climate agreement with DanChurchAid
The agreement focuses both on making a difference to the climate and on helping communities facing adversity due to climate change. The climate agreement will see more than 2,000 trees planted in Uganda, which, thanks to the absorption of CO2 this will achieve, is going to have a positive effect on the climate as well as a positive direct impact on the local community.
“We are happy to have entered into an agreement with DanChurchAid, because it not only means we can make a difference to the climate by planting trees, but also make a difference to the people hit hardest by climate change. Aside from having a focus on sustainability ourselves, we would also like to take some responsibility for the world around us. Planting trees is very much consistent with the work we are already doing on sustainability in the group’s companies – particularly in relation to our production of wooden products and aquatic plants,” Søren Christian Madsen of JPS tells us.
The fact that the planted trees have an effect on the intake of CO2 from the atmosphere aside, the trees will also have a direct impact on the local population of that area of Uganda where the trees are being planted, where there is increasing demand for plant nurseries, and with it for staff to plants trees and tend to them. This in turn is contributing to development locally and to the creation of more jobs.
A wide-reaching climate initiative
Climate change is already having major repercussions for people in the world’s poorest countries, with many forced to flee because of extreme fluctuations in the weather; others, meanwhile, are starving because the weather is so unpredictable, making it difficult to sustain crops.
DanChurchAid’s climate agreement with JPS is a wide-reaching climate initiative based on the following three ideas: Planting climate trees in Uganda, which will absorb CO2 and help to reduce the climate footprint. Climate change adaptation, whereby smallholders in Uganda get to learn about new farming techniques and crops that will be able to withstand climate change. Thirdly and finally, the agreement will see contribution to a disaster fund that will enable DanChurchAid to provide emergency assistance whenever natural disasters strike the world’s poorest people.
General secretary of DanChurchAid, Birgitte Qvist-Sørensen, is looking forward to the new partnership advancing the cause of climate initiatives in Uganda:
“We are incredibly happy to have the agreement with JPS, as it will move our climate work forward in Uganda and help those in poverty in the country through the creation of communities that can withstand increasing temperatures, drought and flooding. There is a real need for private-sector companies to get involved in climate initiatives in developing countries and, more broadly speaking, make a contribution to global targets. It’s a massive task that we as an organisation cannot manage on our own – we need partners across different sectors.”
Over the next three years, JPS will be donating a total of DKK 300,000 to DanChurchAid’s climate initiative. This will go towards the disaster fund, the new trees, new water pumps and water treatment facilities to ensure clean drinking water, streamlining agriculture with more hardy crops, new dams and reservoirs, and much else besides, to ensure better living conditions for the population groups affected.
