Tohum Association

Tohum Eğitim Kültür ve Doğa Derneği (Tohum Education, Culture and Nature Association) was founded in Ankara in 2017; in line with the conservation and development of terrestrial ecosystems through natural resource management, the development and implementation of projects and programs for sustainable use of natural ecosystems, and the development and implementation of social-cultural based projects and programs, increase institutional, legal and financial capacity, contribute to research, contribute to the national economy and employment, and benefits to disadvantaged groups.

As a non-governmental organization, Tohum Association aims to increase the contribution of Sustainable Nature Management to national economy and employment and for this purpose produces studies, trainings and projects.

More specifically, general purposes of Tohum Association are to:

• Increase the contribution of Sustainable Nature Management to the national economy and employment in terrestrial ecosystems.
• Enhance carbon stocks of natural ecosystems by increasing the quantity and quality.
• Enhance biological diversity of the ecosystems by conserving their health and vitality.
• Ensure social-cultural welfare by sustaining particularly production and protective functions of forests amongst others through implementations, projects and programs extended to all stakeholders in an integrated and participatory approach.
• Analyze social groups, disadvantaged groups, gender equality and culture.

For all these purposes; Tohum Association uses scientific methods, reporting and carry out monitoring-evaluation studies. Tohum Association works to develop better management systems for the conservation of natural ecosystems, to create good practices (demo), to make home widespread, to create healthy models by examining the socioeconomic, sociocultural and socioecological variables of the systems, and to design remedial solutions against the negative effects that affect humanity, especially climate change.

It works under the guidance of the international guidelines developed by the UN agencies, namely, “Global guidelines for the restoration of degraded forests and landscapes in drylands”, “Climate change for forest policy-makers – An approach for integrating climate change into national forest policy in support of sustainable forest management”, “Climate change guidelines for forest managers”, “Gender and Action Plan of the UNFCCC”, “Guidelines for implementation of forest management operations”, “Voluntary guidelines on national forest monitoring”, “Guidelines on urban and peri-urban forestry”, .

Tohum Association, affecting the integration of capacity building activities, surveys, gender dimensions to forestry practices in Turkey and is a unique organization that conducts studies mainly on afforestation, rehabilitation, capacity building trainings, surveys, analysis and monitoring and evaluation. It has created awareness on sustainable forest management, progress tracking and socioeconomic analysis  through the workshops that has given to various units of the society.

Tohum Association cooperates with members of various professions (mainly forest and agriculture engineers, biologists, environmentalists as well as sociologists, linguists (i.e. Arabic), economists, etc.) including the various organizations, volunteers, individual experts namely, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization, Municipalities, Universities and Research Institutes and the national and international consultants. There is a long-standing cooperation with the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry on the integration of forestry practices (afforestation, capacity building, monitoring and evaluation, technical support and trainings, etc.).