Despite being located near the Nile, a river from which most Uganda’s electricity is generated, Kaginga village, Panyimur sub-county in Pakwach district, has never been connected to national electricity grid.

Located near the Lake Albert Nile Delta Ramsar site, the Kaginga village receives between 8-11 hours of sunlight on most days, making solar energy a good electricity alternative.

This has made it easy for Environmental Defenders (ED), a nonprofit organisation to satisfy its quest for native eco-system restoration.

Sarah Lonyo, the Environmental Defenders Senior Programme officer told Watetezi.org that since 2022, they established a Seed Bank powered by solar technology to plant trees on a large scale, while also monitoring the health and survival of the forests they are planting.

Lonyo said the tree seed bank and a nursery bed which is 3kms away from the nearest power grid have worked well to scale up their environmental work.

The only regional seed bank, which is housed in a container, is meant to help ED in restoration of depleted forests and to distribute or sell seedlings to land owners.

It is part of ED strategy to protect biodiversity, restore degraded land and create connectivity corridors.

The seed bank is renowned for supplying farms, private tree growing projects, government entities and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) with indigenous species such as mahogany, sheer and fruit trees like Ovacado, Guava, Jackfruits and mangoes, to support agro-forestry business.

Lonyo avers that before its establishment, the organisation operated a small seed collection facility where they would keep seeds collected from forests and the wild in a house, even in the sunshine, a practice which was not good and archaic.

While the gospel to plant as much trees as possible is widely accepted, the general trend has been to plant exotic species such as Eucalyptus and Pine, whose natural habitats are in temperate areas such Europe, Australia, North America and parts of Asia.

“For us we want to reverse this. We collect seed from natural trees which are on the verge of extinction and vulnerable,” Lonyo added.

This is because deforestation is increasingly threatening these indigenous trees through industrial agriculture, mining, cutting for firewood-charcoal burning and timber extraction.

To stop the threat of extinction and ensure quality seeds of naturally occurring trees, ED depends on its solar powered seed bank.

For as long as the season isn’t right, the seeds remain in a seed bank and being a water stressed area, solar power desalination helps keep these important tree seedlings safe until the rains are adequate for planting, in a nursery bed.

From the nursery bed, the seeds are distributed to the community for planting with the guidance of agronomists.

Lonyo says they have trained foresters and collectors to collect these wild seeds from forests to the seed bank. The community has also been inducted on how to protect these wild seeds.

Environmental Defenders has a network of 500 seed collectors in its area of operation.

The organisation has further trained each to work with their community monitors.

In addition, farmers through these trainings know how to set the nursery bed so that they can supply or sell to earn revenue as a way of empowering them economically.

The long-term goal, Lonyo said, is to provide; firewood for cooking, wildlife habitats, regulate temperatures, and water tables, provide carbon removals from the atmosphere and attract rainfall to smallholder farmers.

The hi-tech solar-powered seed bank works alongside green climate technology through the use of android mobile technology, google earth, Terra ware and other forest monitoring tools such as Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri) to facilitate real time 24-hour monitoring of remote project sites.

Solar panels and temperature regulation have to power three gigantic refrigerators with capacity to store seeds up to 50 years without the seeds going into dormancy.

ED also purchased seed processing equipment for drying, labelling and packaging.

It has capacity to store 2 trillion seeds annually. The initiative is what the world and those doing large scale conservation need to accelerate restoration even in the deepest remote areas.

Lonyo says ED has fully stocked the seed bank to support training and skilling of the community members in seed collection and advanced project sustainability.

The beauty of this is that it is not only a seed bank but has also created jobs as nursery bed keepers, seed collectors and foresters.

She said the bottleneck is the availability and supply, adding that a seed bank like theirs is important so that the community, government and NGOs can be in position to plant trees.

“Some goals may not be met unless there is a deliberate effort to have as many seed banks as possible because to plant like one trillion or 3 trillion trees, you need 5 trillion. The reason is that some seeds may not grow due to environmental conditions and lack of skills in handling seeds,” she added.

The ED Senior Programme officer says by collecting different native seeds, this prevents them from getting extinct.

Reports indicate that there are nearly 60,000 indigenous tree species but with one third of them at risk of extinction.

There is need for more seed banks to be established in semi-arid areas.

The Global Seed Bank Index by Terraformation shows that a small seed bank can support an estimated 2,200 to 22,000 hectares of planting, and an estimated 46 to 450 seed banks are needed per million hectares of restoration project, depending on the need for seeds.

The index adds that the four countries needing the most seed banks (USA, China, Australia and Brazil) are among those with the most existing seed banks.

The report calls on governments to provide centralised seed banks to enable long-term storage at larger scales, while investments in a hub-and-be spoke network of seed banks could empower much-needed localised restoration with adapted, resilient seeds.

Though countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Bolivia and Malaysia have the most biodiversity specimens facing threats, they don’t have seed banks.

The report adds that native ecosystem restoration-with the right plants in the right places-is currently the best carbon sequestration solution that has proven both effective and scalable.

In addition to addressing climate change, ecosystem restoration can simultaneously stem biodiversity loss. Although many other actions such as greenhouse emissions reduction and protection of existing ecosystems are urgently needed.