Freetown in Focus: Engaging the Private Sector on Nature-Based Solutions

Metro21 attended the UrbanShift webinar, "Freetown in Focus: Engaging the Private Sector on Nature-Based Solutions" to learn what the residents of Freetown, Sierra Leone, are doing to bring biodiversity back into their city.

Eric Hubbard, Technical Advisor on Environment, Freetown City Council, Sierra Leone

• In response to devastating landslides, Freetown is investing in planting trees to stabilize slopes. The tree planting and growing work is done by regular citizens, who use the “Freetown Tree Tracking” app to share the tree’s growth and verify its continued viability.
• The tracked trees and images are shared on the app platform, where users can see a map of all the trees and look at a series of images showing the growth of each individual tree.
• Critically, the citizens are paid through the app for their work. The payment comes from local and global business sponsors to cover their carbon offsets and net-zero energy commitments. The private sector partnership is essential for funding this effort, as Freetown does not have the financial resources to fund this initiative on their own. Additionally, engaging individual citizens creates incredible buy-in throughout the city and spurs additional economic benefits.
• They financially incentivize planting in specific locations based on the areas that they believe most need to have trees planted in for maximizing benefits.
• One funding partner is a clothing company called FinorX in Freetown – they sell t-shirts that directly fund the tree planting. Each t-shirt is linked to a specific tree that can then be tracked by the t-shirt purchaser from anywhere in the world.
• How can this model be applied for other sustainable and green infrastructure projects in Freetown and across the world?

View a brief summary video here.