Help preserve the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest by working with Iracambi to re-launch their ‘forest futures’ project
:: 03 december 2009
Less than one tenth of one of the richest bio-diverse tropical forests in the Western Hemisphere remains: the Atlantic rainforest, an ecosystem once covered an area as great as the whole of California, Nevada and Arizona together, but now covers an area less than South Carolina. It is still being cut: in the decade of the 1990s an area the size of Delaware was cut. The reason is that smallholder farmers are pushed by economic necessity to maintain their income levels in the only way they know: increase the land cultivated – cut down the forest. Iracambi aims to confront this threat by making conservation of the forest more attractive than its destruction.
Iracambi is located in the Serra do Brigadeiro, in the highly endangered Atlantic Forest area of Minas Gerais. Smallholders privately own most of the forest and they face the same challenges as the rest of the community they live in: how can they make a living with what they have, while conserving our globally important biodiversity?
The forest futures project is a brilliant idea that has been around for a while, but needs a boost to really make a significant impact. The aim is to transform degraded lands to their former beauty and fertility so that the once mighty rainforest can flourish once again. The scheme uses public or corporate donations to enable Iracambi to purchase patches of redundant forest adjacent to areas of protected forest. Iracambi then work to reforest them and place them under permanent protection, creating a new forest reserve to complement the existing Iracambi reserve.
What the project really needs is a re-launch of the web-based scheme in such a way that it will be an effective conservation tool that is attractive to clients, and easily manageable by Iracambi staff.
