Water is Life

December 9, 2011

Water is essential for life and every human being must to be able to access clean drinking water. Our vision in SCAD is to make this possible across Tamil Nadu. Trees are essential for water as they hold water in the ground, increasing the ground water storage and bringing more water to wells. They also stop the water from running off the surface of the soil and causing flash flooding and erosion, which is increasingly common in this location when the monsoons do fall.

Cletus Babu, the founder of SCAD Charity, says that with all the planting trees that SCAD has done the area now “gets the highest rainfall in this district. So people get water. Water is life”. More trees means more rainfall, which means that we can help to shape the climate in this area so that future generations do not suffer from a lack of water. We plant over 100,000 indigenous trees every year at SCAD and we want to plant more to help more people.

As you can see from our images, we plant a lot of our trees next to traditional water storage tanks called Ooranies. Ooranies are large bodies of water that feed wells, thus enabling people to have access to water. When the monsoons come these tanks fill up, providing water for the region, but when the monsoons don’t come remote villages are left with very little water – trees around the Oonaries will help retain the water that is already there and attract rain to the region, helping keep the Oonaries topped up.

Please help us plant more trees so that we can provide more water to help more lives. $12 a month will plant 10 trees a month and go a long way to meeting our goal of planting 100,000 trees next year. Thank you.