What is the Songs For Forests Tour?

We’re travelling through 6 cities in India, singing in gardens, collaborating with local environmentalists to start important conversations and aiming for the tour to be carbon neutral.

 

Who is going on tour?
I'm travelling with friends from Tangy Sessions, an initiative wherein they curate experiential gatherings in an attempt to build a sub-culture around music, art and conscious conversations.

 

How are we reducing our carbon footprint?

We plan to cut down our carbon emissions by choosing to travel together rather than take separate vehicles, opting for trains instead of flights, eating locally, reducing our meat/dairy intake, staying with friends instead of at hotels, carrying rechargeable batteries and our own water bottles etc. 

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How do we aim to make it carbon neutral?

This tour is aimed to be carbon neutral. Greenlane ,an organisation that helps businesses track their social impact metrics, will help measure the carbon footprint of this tour. Ditty will be planting a local, indigenous food forest with the help of local environmentalists at the Pollam Farm, Hyderabad, that, in time, will offset the carbon emissions caused by undertaking the tour. Her goal is to set up a charity/ organisation called WeWild that can help artists, businesses and everyone else offset their carbon footprint by investing funds into afforestation projects.

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Calculations

Tree offset calculation is based on a tree planted in the humid tropics absorbing on average 50 pounds (22 kg) of carbon dioxide annually over 40 years. Each tree will absorb 1 ton of CO2 over its lifetime; but as trees grow, they compete for resources and some may die or be destroyed - not all will achieve their full carbon sequestration potential. This calculator* assumes that 5 trees should be planted to ensure that at least one lives to 40 years or that their combined sequestration equals 1 ton. Note that 

 

As per our calculations below, we would need to plant 4 trees to offset our carbon emissions over 40 years. Following the above, we will plant 5 trees for everyone 1, making the total 20. To make a positive impact and reduce the time for sequestration we will be planting 30 trees. 

 

Note: Carbon sequestration describes long-term removal or storage of carbon dioxide. This can be achieved through many methods, including afforestation - the planting of forests and trees. Also, Forests cannot be created buy only planting trees. A forest is a complex ecosystem with several layers of plants that co-exist with other species. This is a very simplified way of explaining how we plan to create the forests.