20,000 tons of forest waste becomes clean energy — and 130 landowners get paid to protect the woods

In Boticas, in northern Portugal, energy company EDP's ReEarth programme pays rural landowners — many of them low-income smallholders — to clear the dry forest waste that fuels wildfires, then turns that biomass into clean energy heating municipal buildings. One year in, more than 130 landowners have joined, 260 hectares of forest are being cleaned and restored, and around 20,000 tons of waste will have been collected by year's end. It is fire prevention, rural income and clean power from the same armful of branches.

SDG 15 · Life on land — Mechanism: community action