Living Earth - The Conservation Foundation

Living Earth Ltd was created as a social enterprise in 2017 to promote the legacy of the Living Earth Foundation. It is part of the Conservation Foundation and based at the Royal Geographical Society in London, UK.

The Living Earth Foundation was set-up in 1987 by Roger Hammond to promote environmental education and was one of the first organisations to facilitate dialogue between communities and the private sector. It has extensive experience of creating and managing programmes and initiatives both in the UK and internationally.

Through Living Earth Ltd, the Conservation Foundation will continue to work globally to inspire, enable and celebrate communities and individuals who contribute to the conservation of our natural world.

Living Earth’s focus is to build the environmental, social and economic resilience of communities in landscapes where there are multiple demands on natural resources, bringing together businesses, donors and investors to develop shared models for sustainable development.

Current Project:

A Sustainable Tea Industry for Kenya
Tea production is an energy-intensive business and Kenya’s biggest export crop. It needs more energy to produce a kilo of tea than a kilo of steel, and most of this energy comes from firewood.

The Kenyan Tea Development Agency (KTDA) operates 67 factories through a cooperative that involves 600,000 smallholders.  KTDA factories consume around 500,000 tonnes of firewood every year (equivalent to about 2 million trees pa).

IKEA Household Energy Center HEC - fullsize

In the wider landscape, most people continue to cook with firewood or charcoal, and despite the modest uptake of fuel efficient stoves, it is estimated that the local tea-growing community typically consumes three times the amount used by the factory.

This project, delivered in partnership with Ikea, the Rainforest Alliance and EnSo Impact, supports local entrepreneurs to market simple alternative energy solutions and assesses the feasibility of a sustainable biomass energy market. Working with KTDA, a commercial biomass briquette production facility aims to change energy consumption patterns at a landscape level.