Vana is a Sanskrit term that translates to “a forest, wood, grove, spring, abundance”. It is also the name of our data-driven afforestation initiative. Our mission is to jump-start and fuel corporate and government activism to save the planet and the people on it.
Vana aggregates data in order to identify potential afforestation opportunities in corporate-owned land, what we know of the current usage of that land, and its overlap with maps produced by public bodies and environmental organisations. The land identified using the Vana system will then be used to drive projects to increase tree coverage and/or other rewilding action in the UK where landowners are willing. By using the Vana data infrastructure to identify available landholdings, we can bring corporate landowners together with environmental organisations to devise local tree-growing opportunities.
Vana has confirmed that corporates are overwhelmingly the best hope of enabling the UK to hit its tree-planting targets, in line with the UK 25 Year Environmental plan (2018). The aim of Vana is to increase effective tree coverage, thereby reducing ineffective, damaging, or unstrategic afforestation, and to engage corporate activism in the war against climate change.