Areas of action

We introduced the pupils to composting and planting, building a market-garden system together with them. Composting is central to the approach: watching their canteen waste turn into fertile soil, the children grasp the idea of a cycle in tangible form, one where nothing is lost and every material finds a use again. The school garden does not end when the workshop does. It becomes a living classroom the pupils tend week after week, learning patience, regularity and the direct link between the care given to a plant and the food it eventually offers. By connecting waste, farming and food in this way, we hand the youngest the keys to an everyday ecology, rooted in simple gestures they can repeat at home and pass on around them.

A group of children from the American school followed a botanical trail, learned to recognise the local flora and sowed forest species. As an environmental association we place education at the heart of our mission: protecting ecosystems for the long term means passing on, from the earliest age, a taste for living things and an understanding of natural balances. Every workshop is designed as a concrete experience, where the child does not simply listen but puts their hands in the soil, sows, observes and follows the cycle of a plant from seed to tree. Along the trail, discovering local species becomes a way into wider questions: the fight against deforestation, the importance of native species, the role of nurseries in restoring landscapes. These sessions, run in partnership with associations such as Oceanium and Nebeday, draw on expertise in environmental education, agroecology and nursery management. Beyond awareness alone, our ambition is to bring up a generation more conscious of its territory, and able tomorrow to act as its guardian.

We carried out a mission to identify and track the African clawless otter (Aonyx capensis), a species classed as vulnerable in Senegal. Active mainly at dawn and dusk, this otter leaves few traces, which makes every observation valuable for documenting its presence. After several days of surveying along the bolongs and the banks, a single male was observed, on 27 December 2021. A rare sighting, which confirms how fragile this population is and how urgently it needs better monitoring. This kind of mission rests on reading the ground closely, recognising signs of presence such as prints and slides, and knowing the wetlands the species frequents.

We support a sea turtle conservation programme led by a community initiative. Two local rangers, trained and rooted in their village, raise awareness among fishers and schools about protecting these emblematic species and carry out rigorous scientific monitoring: protecting nests, identifying species, assisting hatching and filling in the monitoring records. By entrusting this work to members of the community, the programme turns former users of the resource into guardians of the coast, and sets conservation in the long term rather than in a one-off action. It is this joining of scientific knowledge and local commitment that gives a protection effort, to our minds, both its strength and its staying power.

Our ghost net campaign brought up more than 2,000 kg of nets and waste, giving back life to rocky areas and wrecks that had been smothered. Run with Oceanium, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the local authority of Gorée island, the operation draws on expertise in diving, logistics for work at sea, and sorting and recovering the waste brought back. To carry the action underwater across to those who stayed on land, we also offered an immersive virtual reality experience: wearing VR headsets, volunteers and visitors could dive virtually into the seabed and see for themselves the scale of the pollution smothering it. The youngest, too small to dive, took part through interactive games about collecting waste in the ocean, turning awareness into something playful and memorable. Beyond the clean-up itself, each campaign becomes a real lever for awareness, showing the public in every form the reality of the pollution lying beneath our waters.

The communities living in a national park in Laos saw their hunting and gathering of forest products, which had kept them alive, sharply reduced to preserve the park’s biodiversity. They were then supported, in particular through innovative participatory workshops (see the « Methods and tools » axis), first to become more aware of the value of their knowledge and experience, especially about the forest’s biodiversity. A promising sector was gradually identified: high-quality basketry, made possible by their detailed knowledge of the different varieties of bamboo and pandanus to combine. The villagers were helped to organise themselves step by step, so as to produce and sell enough to replace their former forest activities.

These new activities now bring them much higher incomes: a family’s monthly income today equals the cost of building one of their homes (see the building in the photo). The villagers have organised themselves into action groups, some running the workshop and sales at fairs, others handling production, and others again the sustainable management of the natural resources used.