Challenge: How Can Individuals and Corporations Manage and Reduce their Carbon Contributions? 

Solution: INGA Foundation

The INGA Foundation provides a sustainable alternative to slash-and-burn agriculture using alley cropping and nitrogen-fixing inga trees. This alternative keeps families’ land healthy, produces higher-value crops every year, and sequesters significant carbon in tropical soils. 

About Mike

Mike is a tropical ecologist specializing in the ecology of Tropical Rain Forest; and particularly in the ecology of slash-and-burn subsistence agriculture.  After some years’ experience in development projects in the World’s tropics, and a lifelong naturalist, he began, in the mid 1980's, the studies that have led eventually to IF’s present Land for Life program.  Following a pilot project in Costa Rica, he spent the following 14 years as Senior Research Associate in the University of Cambridge; working almost entirely in Central America.  In this role, he directed four successive research projects in Costa Rica and Honduras.   These four projects upheld and expanded his initial hypotheses and findings; they led to the development and proving of Inga alley-cropping as a sustainable alternative to slash-and-burn.

In 2007, he and colleagues established Inga Foundation as a registered UK Charitable Trust to continue and expand this pioneering work in the world's rain forests.