Las Piedras Amazon Center (LPAC)

Madres de Dios, Peru

Peru’s southeastern Amazonian department of Madre de Dios represents one of the last wild places left in the Amazon Basin. The region’s deepest forests are home to uncontacted indigenous groups living in voluntary isolation. The rich wildlife of the forests includes a range of threatened and endangered species, including mahogany trees, short-eared dogs, and giant anteaters. The Madre de Dios region is Peru’s official “capital of biodiversity,” but without active conservation efforts, this precious ecosystem is quickly being degraded by a combination of gold mining, logging, and agricultural expansion.

Since 2013, WildFF has been working with our Peruvian nonprofit partner, ARCAmazon, to establish a conservation and sustainable development corridor on the Las Piedras River, the last wild and unprotected river left in Madre de Dios. The area of protected rainforest under the protection of WildFF and ARCAmazon is almost 16,000 acres, which in addition to the surrounding conserved areas, acts as a geographic buffer zone to the homeland of uncontacted people and Peru’s largest protected area, Alto Púrus National Park.

Ecotourism

The flagship initiative of WildFF in the Las Piedras watershed is to support the purchase and management of LPAC, an 11,000-acre ecotourism concession. Since its establishment in 2015, LPAC has been a critical wildlife refuge and global center for environmental education and research. All profits are invested back into conservation initiatives, such as forest ranger programs, research and community development.

In addition, ARCAmazon has developed a world-class education center, the Amazon Academy, to engage local and foreign students through field-based rainforest education programs. The goal of Amazon Academy is to document ongoing fieldwork and develop a video series on the importance of protecting the Amazon.

CAPACITY BUILDING AND EDUCATION

The ideals of young people can inspire great opportunities for conservation. Yet, local youth networks may be limited in developing areas, which can hinder success. Back in 2014, WildFF piloted a 5-year youth leadership program with the goal of building the entrepreneurial capacity of local leaders. By the end of the pilot, over 50 Peruvian leaders had attended workshops in the Amazon rainforest. These “Innovadores” continue to build their network on the ground, and many of them have either started their own sustainable business or work in the sustainability sector.

WildFF has also supported an environmental education initiative for school-aged children—piloted by two of our own Future Leaders! School-aged children from native communities along the Las Piedras River were invited to partake in classroom and field activities to learn about their ecosystems, biodiversity, stream ecology, and camera trapping. WildFF strongly believes that education ensures the long-term success of protecting intact forests for current and future generations.

Future Leaders Program

In 2018, WildFF completed its fifth and final Future Leaders summit in the Madre de Dios region of Peru. Our Future Leaders Program was application-based and aimed at establishing and inspiring youth leaders between the ages of 18 and 30 with the objective of developing their entrepreneurial capacity.

Our goal was to bring local leaders together in the Amazon rainforest, provide them with environmental training, and help grow their personal and professional networks. This was our way of giving them the tools they needed to support the sustainable development of the Madre de Dios region where they lived.

The Future Leaders program was based on the recognition that many threatened biological and cultural hotspots could be better protected if the economic needs of local people were addressed. The program in Madre de Dios enabled WildFF to catalyze change through empowering and building a network of youth leaders who were eager to improve their communities and protect their forested landscapes but lacked the necessary resources and connections.

By the end of the Future Leaders Program (“Innova Madre de Dios” in Spanish), WildFF and its educational collaborators conducted over 200 hours of experiential learning and more than 50 Peruvian leaders had attended the Innova Summits in the Amazon rainforest of Madre de Dios. These “Innovadores,” 72% of who are female, continue to build their networks with 50% of them working in the sustainability and natural resource management sector, including, many who have started their own sustainable businesses.

Native Seeds Project

Northern Uganda

From 2015 to 2021, WildFF worked to conserve and restore the forests of northern Uganda through the Native Seeds Project, a collaboration with the Wise Women Uganda (Mon Ma Ryek), a community-based organization of women healers in Gulu, Uganda.

The traditional women healers’ knowledge served as a catalyst for our local forest conservation and restoration project. The goal was to help the indigenous communities recover their culture and livelihoods after decades of civil war and widespread forest loss. We aimed to bring back native tree cover, which would enable the northern Ugandan communities to be more resilient in the face of climate change.

The Native Seeds Program Gulu empowered local women to play a central role in building a movement of sustainable farmers. WildFF funded literacy classes that helped the Wise Women to have a greater say in their community’s decision-making processes and in training sessions with the farmers. The women of the community also contributed to a WildFF-supported VSLA, a community savings program, which enabled them to save together and take microloans as needed.

During this exclusively grassroots-oriented project, WildFF and the Wise Women planted more than 130,000 native trees of 20 local varieties. We also provided the local community with the tools and expertise they need to implement landscape-scale restoration, including working with more than 130 farmers to plant trees on their land and conducting numerous climate resilience workshops in each of the 10 communities.

The Native Seeds Project is now a well-established program with paid staff, a seven-acre nursery and agroforest demonstration site, two native tree nurseries, and multiple year-round programs that bring education, income-generating activities, and tree planting activities that have reached 30 villages in Gulu District.

REFORESTING SOUTH SUDANESE REFUGEE SETTLEMENTS

Palorinya, Uganda

The advent of rising sea levels, superstorms, and other extreme natural disasters will see a rise in climate change refugees over the coming decades. Sudden, high-density refugee settlements can leave an undeniable ecological scar because the basic need for food, shelter, and energy oblige refugees to rely on nearby forest and water resources.

Palorinya in northern Uganda is the second-largest refugee camp in Uganda, home to more than 100,000 South Sudanese refugees. In dryland areas like Palorinya, further loss of trees in dry forests leads to desertification, increased drought, and decreased food security due to irreversible soil loss and productivity. After a successful small-scale pilot, which demonstrated how community tree planting and tree care training can increase food security, WildFF has begun a landscape-scale research initiative to understand how to protect and restore forests in and around refugee settlements.

Reforestation