Amazon Conservation Association

The Amazon Conservation Association collaborates with indigenous communities in the Amazon headwaters region of Peru to simultaneously improve their quality of life while preserving the tremendous biodiversity of forests in the Andes-Amazon region.  

In the highlands community of Pilco Grande in Peru’s Cuzco region, Amazon Conservation has created a community conservation fund that provides protection to a community-owned forest reserve by preventing illegal logging and forest fires and assistance for the community’s social and economic development priorities. Residents of the Pilco Grande community chose to spend economic development funds on improving family food security by purchasing small livestock (guinea pigs and chickens) for each family and hiring a teacher so that the community’s children can learn to use computers.

Pilco Grande’s Bosque de Pumataki (“forest where the puma sings”) reserve protects threatened montane forest in the buffer zone of Peru’s world-famous Manu National Park. Working with Amazon Conservation has changed many community members’ perspective on their forests; Baltazar Quispe, a 41-year old community resident who now receives employment as a park guard from the fund cites his children, Alicia (11), Sonia (9), and Sergio (7), as his inspiration for this work, saying, “the forest, trees and plants give us life! We take on the big challenge of caring for them because of our children.”

Amazon Conservation has also worked with residents of the Pilco Grande community to form and train a volunteer fire fighting brigade to prevent forest fires, the major cause of deforestation in this region. Additionally, Amazon Conservation’s project has installed two community tree nurseries that have produced over 21,000 trees which, with residents' assistance, have been planted across the community’s territory.

Amazon Conservation currently protects over 4.5 million acres of Amazonian rainforest in Peru and Bolivia through conservation concessions, Brazil nut concessions, community reserves, and research stations. Using cutting-edge science and innovative conservation tools, Amazon Conservation is creating models for others to follow.  We established the world’s first conservation concession, manage some of the best research stations in the tropics, and are leading the charge to find mechanisms such as payments for environmental services to make forest conservation financially sustainable.

Help Amazon Conservation finance our ongoing work in Pilco Grande and similar communities to improve quality of life while conserving the region’s rich biodiversity!  

 

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