Tag Archives: Peru

Protecting the Magic of Tropical Rainforests

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Today’s blog is part three in the guest blog series by Rainforest Partnership.  Check out the first post here and the second post here.  This entry was written by Niyanta Spelman, Executive Director of Rainforest Partnership.

Protecting the Magic of Tropical Rainforests

Rainforest Partnership photoCelebrating Five years of Rainforest Conservation: At Rainforest Partnership, in five years we have had many accomplishments and created incredible relationships and strong bonds with individuals in the partner rainforest communities that we work in. We have celebrated many rewarding achievements working with these rainforest communities, including a new palm extraction technique that allows the trees to remain unharmed in an indigenous community of Chipaota in Peru; construction of a broom fiber production facility; infrastructure development to support basic ecotourism as an alternative to deforestation in the Colibri Cloudforest of central Peru; and working with indigenous women who had never been able to earn a living themselves, to make and sell artisan products in Sani Isla, Ecuador.

Rainforest Partnership photoThe Magic of the Forest: As wonderful as all we do is, I would be remiss if I didn’t share a little of what it is like to do this work, beyond our accomplishments and the rich relationships. Rainforests are magical. These forests beg protecting simply because of what they are, what they hold, the incredible diversity of life and the people all living in harmony. As the founder and Executive Director of Rainforest Partnership, in just over five years, I have logged a lot of miles flying, walking, in buses, rickety cars, boats, canoes and even motorbikes (I think my mother doesn’t know this). I have accidentally stepped over—not on–the most poisonous snake in Ecuador to the delight of my nine year old son who listens to my many rainforest stories; and slept on top of a canopy tree which the chief of that community describes as sleeping between heaven and Earth (think mother tree in Avatar). I’ve seen more kinds of spiders, insects, frogs, butterflies, mushrooms, orchids, moths that sometimes defy explanations, and likely include yet “undiscovered” and unnamed species. I have listened to nightly symphonies magically orchestrated with singing night birds,

frogs and insects under clear nights with stars reflecting on still, dark water as fireflies fly among the reeds, such that I have felt that maybe I had left our planet for some otherworldly place. I have slept in more interesting and different places and taken “baths” in even more interesting ways. I, a vegetarian, have eaten roasted grubs (think Pumbaa in the Lion King); and I now have bonds with more incredible human beings that are wise and know ways of the world and of living than we can ever fathom here in the cities and the western-influenced world that we live. And yet, what strikes me is how similar we are as human beings. I find that I can traverse from sleeping on someone’s floor in the middle of the jungle and having a strong bond with them as a fellow human being, and two days later, be just as comfortable in a suit meeting with a minister in a capital city. I realize that ultimately, there is no bridging necessary, that there is no gap to close, that it is about connecting at the very basic level

as human beings. We are all the same, whether we live in the middle of the forest in the Amazon or anywhere else.

Rainforest Partnership photoThis entry reflects the author’s personal judgments and does not represent the views of the United States Government or the Department of State.

Rainforest Partnership in Ecuador and Peru

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This guest blog is by Maurine Winkley of the Rainforest Partnership.  Read her bio and another post  by her here.

The video above is showing the forest conservation and economic development efforts led by Rainforest Partnership and our partner communities in Ecuador and Peru. Rainforest Partnership is an international non-profit enterprise committed to protecting tropical rainforests. We partner with forest communities to help them make an income that allows them to protect their forests. Together we do this by developing rainforest products: raw materials, finished goods, and services that can be found only in the rainforest. By developing the market for these products, locally, elsewhere in Latin America, and in the U.S., sales of these goods and services give residents a financial stake in protecting their forests.

Our model is collaborative, bottom-up, and results-driven. We work with communities that want an alternative to deforestation. By enabling communities to have an active role in project design and implementation and by using market-based approaches we collaboratively prevent deforestation and foster economic development. By creating a global network—linking people to people, community to community—we create long-term economic and environmental sustainability.

We believe that the way to protect the “lungs” of the planet is to help the people who live in those “lungs” have a better standard of living, to grow their economy in harmony with their rainforest. Our mission is to partner with people who live in and around tropical rainforests to develop environmentally sustainable economies to protect and regenerate their forests. Our vision is that, together with our partners, we will become a global leader in the development of sustainable economies to preserve tropical rainforests around the world.

Guest Blog: Maurine Winkley of the Rainforest Partnership

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Maurine Winkley, Rainforest Partnership (Courtesy Photo)

Maurine Winkley, Rainforest Partnership (Courtesy Photo)

Maurine Winkley is the Director of Operations at Rainforest Partnership.  In both professional and academic experience, she has sought opportunities to combine her passion for entrepreneurship and finance with her desire to create lasting economic alternatives to environmental destruction.  Specific focal areas have been in carbon finance, financial analysis and international business management.  Her experience spans both the non-profit and privates sectors and notably includes two businesses she started, managed and sold.

Maurine enjoys being outdoors as much as possible and joining local volunteer efforts in her home town of Austin, TX.   Other core interests include gourmet cooking, international travel, conversing in Spanish & Portuguese and staying active.  Read her guest blog below!

Photo courtest of Rainforest Partnership.

Photo courtest of Rainforest Partnership.

When it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, much of the focus today is on new technologies for renewable energy and other cool stuff like electric cars and high tech green buildings. While these are an essential part of the solution, sometimes old tricks are the best tricks for making big reductions in emissions: saving the rainforest.

Not only do rainforests take out carbon from the atmosphere and store it, but they also produce oxygen, hold 50% of the species on the planet (think monkeys, butterflies, trees) and regulate weather patterns beyond their immediate location.

One of the best ways we can reduce global carbon emissions is by stopping people from cutting down and burning trees in rainforests. Cutting and burning of forests adds up to one fifth of the annual global carbon dioxide emissions (CO2). For rainforests, that is the equivalent of about 24,000 football fields a day that get cut! If we can stop tropical deforestation, it would be like stopping every car and truck from emitting CO2.

It’s that simple!

But, it is not that easy. As much as we would like to, those trees in the Amazon cannot be protected unless they are worth more standing that cut down, or the land they are on is worth more with them on it. So we must work to find innovative and effective ways to protect rainforests.

Photo courtest of Rainforest Partnership.

Photo courtest of Rainforest Partnership.

Experts agree that empowering communities to act as stewards of their forests works better than fencing off large sections forest and hoping that it remains untouched – working with the communities that live in and around the rainforest ensures that everyone benefits.

Over the past decade, Peru has lost more than one million hectares of rainforests to deforestation. In a new study using satellite imagery to estimate the carbon stocks of forests in Peru, researchers at Carnegie Mellon found some telling numbers.

The researchers mapped out 4.3 million hectares of the Amazon forest in the Madre de Dios region of Peru. They found that the trees in this region contained some 395 million metric tons of carbon and measured a release of 630,000 metric tons of carbon per year. They also found that older more diverse forests stored 3 times as much carbon as replanted forests.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations cutting deforestation rates by just 50 percent over the next century would provide about 12 percent of the emissions reductions that we need to meet the carbon dioxide concentration target of 450 parts per million at the end of the century. Obviously this is just part of the solution, but I think that we can do better than 50 percent. Prudent forest conservation and management efforts combined with aggressive reforestation will go a long way towards saving the planet from catastrophic climate change that our current trajectory is steering us towards.

Photo courtest of Rainforest Partnership.

Photo courtest of Rainforest Partnership.

This is where we step in. At Rainforest Partnership, we are partnering with communities that live and depend on the forest to create sustainable economies that protect and regenerate their forests. We believe that the best stewards of the rainforest are the people who live in the forest.

Every forest and every community is unique. Using a bottom-up approach, Rainforest Partnership matches the needs, desires, culture, knowledge and skills of local communities with sustainable economic development opportunities unique to each local forest.

At Rainforest Partnership we work with rainforest communities at the local level but there are also steps that we can all take as global consumers of products that come from the rainforest. My advice would be to become aware of what you buy. The rainforest provides us with a cornucopia of goods: coffee, chocolate, tea, fruits, and not to mention wood. As consumers we need to purchase goods that are grown and harvested sustainably and that provide real benefits to the communities that harvest them.

Visit http://www.rainforestpartnership.org/ to find out more about our projects and learn how you can partner with us, become a Facebook fan, follow us on Twitter and check out our Youtube Channel.