Logs passing through an Iquitos port. According to the new study, many of these giant logs may have come from unauthorized areas, including protected areas and indigenous territories, outside of legal concessions (photo: Matt Finer).

Dr. Matt Finer, ACA’s Research Specialist, is the lead author of a paper published on April 17th, 2014 in Scientific Reports, an open access, peer-reviewed journal affiliated with Nature. Focused on logging in Peru, the paper analyzes 609 logging concessions with data obtained from OSINFOR, the supervisory body in Peru that oversees post-logging inspections. Finer, along with colleagues representing the Center for International Environmental Law and the Instituto de Pequisas Ecologicas, found that 68% of officially inspected concessions are either cancelled or under investigation for major violations of Peru’s forestry laws. 

Each logging concession represents a 40-year lease to officially manage public land for timber use. Reasons for cancelling logging concessions include timber extraction outside of concession limits, extraction or transport of illegal timber, non-compliance with management, and submission of false information; often, as this paper describes, OSINFOR discovered no stumps where legally sanctioned logging was to have taken place.

“Our new study presents evidence that the illegal logging concession system is in reality enabling an illegal logging crisis in the Peruvian Amazon despite important reform efforts,” says Finer. “As a consequence, logging is not contained to concessions, and instead it threatens all forested lands, including protected areas and indigenous territories.”  But another key finding is that OSINFOR’s regulatory work is critically important to improving the concession system. Finer adds, “OSINFOR deserves additional support, not less, as the office is increasingly criticized by loggers whose concessions have been canceled.” Read more about this topic in Newsweek or The Guardian»

For 11 communities in Challabamba, just south of Manu National Park’s tip in southern Peru, the Amazon Conservation Association’s work can be measured in hundreds of acres of one particular bean: tarwi.

For these Andean communities, subsistence farming is a way of life. But growing potato and corn crops on the same land year after year is hard on the soil. Eventually, yields suffer and farmers typically “slash and burn” forest to open up new farmland and add nutrients to the soil.

However, these fires can easily spread out of control, devastating hundreds of acres of forest, often even burning into Manu National Park.  

There’s a connection between burning for farmland, soil quality, and Manu—and that’s where sustainable crops like tarwi come in.

Tarwi, or Lupinus mutabilis, is a native nitrogen-fixing legume; it naturally converts atmospheric nitrogen into a form usable by plants. Planted alongside corn and potato crops, tarwi helps to replenish nutrient-depleted soil. Crop rotation ensures that farm soil stays fertile, and that in turn diminishes the need to burn (or otherwise clear) forest for farmland.

But that’s not all. As its nickname “Andean soy” suggests, tarwi is protein-rich and an important source of calcium and iron for the area’s residents (some of the poorest in the region). The bean is hardy enough to thrive in the chilly mountain highlands, and boasts low start-up costs, high yields, a strong regional market—and, as ACA discovered, an unmet consumer demand.

Since 2010, ACA has helped 40 families produce and sell more than 20 tons of tarwi annually through Flor Azul, the local producers’ association. Surveys done this year confirm that 72 percent of participants no longer burn for new farmland (and can better control fires when they do occur, thanks to ACA’s trainings on forest fire prevention and control) after growing sustainable crops like tarwi.

In 2014, ACA aims to improve ways Flor Azul can bring its tarwi to market, as well as engage at least 20 new members in the group.

We can’t do that without your support. Help ACA promote sustainable agriculture to reduce “slash-and-burn” deforestation for farmland in one of the regions with the highest levels of biodiversity in the world.

Meet Marisabel Dumas Ramos, the first female leader of the indigenous Matsigenka-Wachiperi community of Santa Rosa de Huacaria in southern Peru.

Since the start of her term in 2011, Marisabel has worked alongside the Amazon Conservation Association (ACA) to protect her community’s land. Huacaria borders Manu National Park, where many indigenous people still live in voluntary isolation.

Huacaria’s location on the Piñi-Piñi and Palotoa rivers makes it a major point of illegal entry into the park, and both Marisabel and ACA were concerned about squatters invading Manu through their land. 

In 2012, ACA and the Huacaria community thwarted an attempted invasion of the Park and then went on built a guard post and began funding community members to patrol the Huacaria side of the park’s border. 

Now, ACA is going a step further by helping the 130-person community officially expand its indigenous territory by 22,211 acres—forest that would have been otherwise lost to logging or agriculture. 

Marisabel explains: “We want to preserve this area for our brothers and sisters living in voluntary isolation. They need space for hunting and fishing. This area used to all belong to the indigenous people.” 

ACA is also helping the Huacaria residents develop sustainable economic opportunities, such as ecotourism and farming native fish, that allow them to earn the funds they need to access better healthcare and education while protecting their natural resources. 

Fish is a major source of protein for the area surrounding Huacaria, but concerns about overfishing and mercury levels (in both the river’s fish as well as its water) make aquaculture a great solution. In 2014, ACA plans to help the Huacaria community build four aquaculture ponds and a production lab for fish hatchlings, which currently must be shipped in from the coast.

Sadly, the gray woolly monkey pictured is endangered.

ACA is tracking these monkeys in the cloud forests in and around Manu National Park in southern Peru. Groups are moving higher into the mountains to escape the overhunting and habitat loss they face at lower elevations. As fruit eaters, these monkeys play a little-known, but important, role in the seed dispersal of canopy-level tree species—significant as trees need to migrate upslope in response to climate change. 

While ACA studies these monkeys (species: Lagothrix cana), we are also taking important action to ensure that their habitat is protected. For the past two years, ACA has been assisting a group of young conservationists from Alto Pilcomayo—children of loggers who moved near Manu’s Andean slope decades ago—to create a new 12,040-acre conservation concession.

Led by Mario Ocsa (pictured), the young conservationists plan to call this new reserve “Qosilloq llaqta qcahuanan”—“land of the gray woolly monkeys” in Quechua. ACA is already training the community to patrol the concession, prevent access by hunters, and closely monitor the woolly monkey populations living there. In 2014, we plan to complete the process of officially establishing Alto Pilcomayo’s concession, one of eight new protected areas we are working on in the greater Manu landscape.

This past December, ACA was awarded a grant of nearly $1 million by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to support forest conservation and sustainable livelihoods for indigenous communities in southern Peru. Developed cooperatively with our indigenous community partners, this project will protect over 260,000 acres of Amazonian forest while improving incomes and food security for more than a thousand families in remote indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon.

Communal indigenous territories cover 15 percent of Peru’s Amazon region – an estimated 25 million acres of forest lands – and provide the natural resources that indigenous households depend on for their livelihoods. Activities such as harvesting wild food, medicinal plants, and fuelwood are central to the economies of indigenous families, although some also engage in subsistence agriculture, timber extraction, and day labor in order to earn cash income.

Accelerating development and expansion of the agricultural and inhabited frontier in southern Peru presents imminent threats to the livelihoods, cultural traditions, and forest resources of these communities. Furthermore, lack of sustainable means to earn the cash income families increasingly need can lead to out-migration of youth seeking greater economic opportunity in nearby towns, further weakening control over territories and community economies, and to more informal, and destructive, timber extraction of the type that relies heavily on middlemen.

objective of the IDB-funded project is to provide seven indigenous communities in southern Peru with tools for interacting with the cash economy in ways that protect their forests, are culturally appropriate, and in accordance with their customs for managing community resources. To achieve this, the project will focus on building entrepreneurial and financial management capacity and fostering links to national and international markets. Specifically, the project seeks to:

• Improve land management and planning capacity on nearly 260,000 acres of communally-owned and managed forest lands;
• Create ecologically and culturally sustainable methods to engage forest-dependent indigenous communities in the cash economy through aquaculture with native Amazonian fish species, ecotourism, agroforestry and the harvest of non-timber forest products;
• Build technical, organizational, and governance capacity in and among communities to successfully manage indigenous enterprises; and
• Link indigenous enterprises to cash markets in ways that are compatible with cultural traditions.

The project will be implemented by ACCA (ACA’s Peruvian sister organization) and our partners in seven indigenous communities, including five lowland communities with about 250 families who currently cooperate to harvest and sell Brazil nuts, and the Haramba Queros Wachiperi indigenous community, with which we created the nation’s first indigenous-run conservation concession and where we continue to provide management support. The project will also partner with the Santa Rosa de Huacaria indigenous community that neighbors ACCA’s Villa Carmen Biological Station property. These partnerships will have a significant impact not only on improving livelihoods but on strengthening indigenous governance of natural resources. (Photo by Trond Larsen)

On a Sunday morning hike this February, ACA Science Director Dr. Adrian Tejedor and others had the privilege of an exciting wildlife encounter at ACA’s Villa Carmen Biological Station. Located in the Manu Biosphere Reserve, the station hosts a wide variety of habitats and is esteemed for its diverse flora and fauna – including big cats! 

Today five of us – Nicole, Timo, Simeon, Erick, and I – went to retrieve camera trap cards, GPS a new trail, and look for fruits and gingers. Barely a kilometer from the house, along the western ridge, we came face to face with a group of white-lipped peccaries. We all went dead silent and stood behind spindly trees, one per person, while the 20 to 30 peccaries in the group, most of them juveniles, circled us in a surprisingly quiet disorder. A large adult came barely a meter away from my feet. This made me a little worried, but it smelled me, rattled its teeth briefly, and sprinted away. I looked up to the trail to check for more peccaries but saw instead a big, muscular jaguar trotting nonchalantly behind a couple of peccaries that lagged behind. It was obvious that my companions had seen it, too, because our collective silence became deader still.

The jaguar kept on coming closer until it was in full view, in the middle of the wide trail, some 8 meters away from us. Amazingly, it had neither seen nor smelled us. It turned to its left and showed us a rich golden flank that shone under a shaft of soft light. Oblivious to us, it pounced, rather unenthusiastically, on a straggling peccary but missed it and veered back toward the trail precisely in our direction. We watched in awe how the big cat walked on through the brush, coming straight at us, and closing in on us, as if we had turned invisible. The tension rose steeply; the approach seemed unsustainable. Either the jaguar or we had to give way. When it was, unbelievably, only two meters from us, it froze in its tracks, looked Nicole straight in the face – Nicole saw that it had cloudy eyes, like a dog with cataracts – and puffed out of sight with an explosive backward jump. A split second later, we erupted in celebration and triumphant hugs. (Text by Adrian Tejedor, photo from camera trap located at Villa Carmen Biological Station)

With the recent transition of executive directors, this is a good opportunity to restate our mission and the strategies we employ to achieve our objectives. Our mission is to conserve the biodiversity of the Amazon. The Amazon covers an enormous area encompassing diverse habitats. This is a bold mission for a small organization like ours. How can we actually achieve conservation success?

First, let’s set the context. We work in southeastern Peru and northwestern Bolivia on the eastern slope of the Andes, arguably the most biologically diverse region on the planet. Our neighbors include indigenous communities in voluntary isolation, Bolivia’s majestic Madidi National Park, and Manu National Park – the crown jewel of Peru’s national park system. While this region contains a staggering array of biological diversity, it also faces extreme threats. The rapid increase in illegal gold mining combined with the completion of the Interoceanic Highway has wrought enormous change in a remarkably short time frame. These developments have brought a measure of economic improvement to the region, but they have also triggered environmental destruction on a breathtaking scale. Pristine forest has been turned to wasteland and mercury is being dumped into rivers in ever-increasing quantities. At the same time, Bolivia’s highlands face growing development pressures and risks from climate change.

Conserving biodiversity in the face of these threats requires a multi-pronged set of strategies. First, we work diligently to establish protected areas. In the past two years, we have finalized the establishment of conservation concessions covering 47,000 acres, and have another 340,000 acres nearing completion. We’re currently developing an ambitious plan to protect nearly 2,000,000 acres over the next few years. Once established, these areas still have to be managed and monitored, but their susceptibility to threats is reduced substantially.

Second, we work closely with communities throughout the region developing alternative methods for earning a living without using destructive practices. In the lowlands, we’re promoting sustainable Brazil nut harvesting, planting fruit trees and cacao, developing small-scale fish ponds, and fostering ecotourism. In the highlands we’re reforesting degraded lands with sustainable wood that local communities can use for building and heating their homes, and working to develop protein-rich products like tarwi (a native high-protein seed) as a sustainable food source.

Third, we use scientific analysis to underpin our strategies and solutions. We’ve measured the mercury content in numerous fish species to educate the public on health hazards. We’ve studied the impact of unmanaged livestock on cloud forest regeneration. We’ve meticulously mapped out hundreds of Brazil nut trees and other keystone species to create management plans to protect these resources and the surrounding forests. We’re testing biochar (charcoal made from fast-growing bamboo) as a natural alternative to fertilizers to improve soil fertility and thereby increase productivity for local farmers.

Our three biological stations in Peru, strategically located in the cloud forest, mid-elevation, and the Amazonian lowlands, are a key platform for achieving conservation. These stations enable us to engage local communities over a sustained timeframe and to concentrate scientific research on issues ranging from describing new species to developing a replicable biodiversity monitoring program to analyzing the effects of climate change. They also are centers where researchers, local and international students, tourists, and members of the community can collaborate and exchange ideas.

Finally, we address the threats themselves. We’re advocating for offshore-inland pipeline construction, a roadless construction technique to reduce deforestation. We’re fighting illegal logging and mining through improved governance by providing decision-makers with better information and participating in regional-level planning. We’re increasing local capacity for land management, supporting local and regional government institutions, and providing leadership to regional efforts to respond to forest fires and create conservation finance mechanisms.

All of our efforts are designed to be scaled up, so even though we’re working in a specific geography in Peru and Bolivia, our vision is to create models that can be replicated throughout the Amazon basin. This work is complex and difficult but deeply rewarding. We could not achieve our successes without your support. Thank you all for your interest and your generosity in enabling us to conserve the Amazon. 

 (Text by Jeff Woodman; photo of Jeff by Ronald Catpo; waterfall photo by Gabby Salazar)