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201421May16:30

Pro­tect­ing the Ama­zon for Life

Infor­ma­tion
pub­lished 21 May 2014 | mod­i­fied 21 May 2014
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The largest trop­i­cal for­est con­ser­va­tion project in his­tory is good news for the Ama­zon and the planet

Blue-and-yellow-macawIn a his­toric move, the Brazil­ian gov­ern­ment, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and part­ners today announced the cre­ation of a $215 mil­lion fund to ensure long-​term pro­tec­tion of the world’s largest net­work of pro­tected areas — 60 mil­lion hectares of the Brazil­ian Ama­zon rainforest.

The inno­v­a­tive plan for sus­tain­able fund­ing of the Ama­zon Region Pro­tected Areas Pro­gram (ARPA), which com­prises 15 per­cent of the Brazil­ian Ama­zon, was a key dri­ver in this land­mark moment and sets a prece­dent for large-​scale bio­di­ver­sity conservation.

In 2011, after a decade of tra­di­tional fundrais­ing to sup­port ARPA’s long-​term costs, WWF teamed up with the Gov­ern­ment of Brazil; Brazil­ian Bio­di­ver­sity Fund, a pri­vate non-​profit organ­i­sa­tion that designs and man­ages finan­cial mech­a­nisms for bio­di­ver­sity con­ser­va­tion; Larry Lin­den, a for­mer part­ner at Gold­man Sachs, who founded the Lin­den Trust for Con­ser­va­tion (LTC); and the Gor­don and Betty Moore Foun­da­tion, to lead the cre­ation of the long-​term financ­ing plan for ARPA.

The fund is unique in that it con­sists of money from a vari­ety of pub­lic and pri­vate part­ners, includ­ing the Gov­ern­ment of Ger­many, the Inter-​American Devel­op­ment Bank, Global Envi­ron­ment Facil­ity and WWF. The fund also pro­vides the first-​ever oppor­tu­nity to prop­erly man­age and mon­i­tor a large-​scale pro­tected areas system.

ARPA cur­rently encom­passes 51 mil­lion hectares of richly bio­di­verse rain­for­est — the size of one and a half Cal­i­for­nias. Some of the new fund­ing will be used to incor­po­rate an addi­tional 9 mil­lion hectares of rain­for­est in the com­ing years.

“The explo­sion in demand for nat­ural resources has made our parks and world her­itage sites vul­ner­a­ble,” said Carter Roberts, pres­i­dent and CEO of World Wildlife Fund (WWF). “So we con­vened lead­ing finan­cial thinkers and phil­an­thropic part­ners to cre­ate a plan for a first-​of-​its-​kind bridge fund to ensure ARPA’s inspir­ing suc­cess story can be told forever.”

WWF’s Carter Roberts on per­ma­nently pro­tect­ing the Amazon:

In 2002, Brazil cre­ated the ARPA pro­gram to con­tinue its com­mit­ment made in 1998 to pro­tect at least 10 per­cent of the Brazil­ian Ama­zon in response to grow­ing con­cerns about the future of trop­i­cal rainforests.

“The Brazil­ian rain­for­est is at the heart of our coun­try,” said Maria Cecilia Wey de Brito, CEO of WWF in Brazil. “It is what defines us. The Brazil­ian government’s lead­er­ship in help­ing to cre­ate and main­tain this fund pro­vides us with more con­fi­dence than ever that we can slow the arc of defor­esta­tion in our rain­for­est and cre­ate a model for large-​scale con­ser­va­tion worldwide.”

The $215 mil­lion in fund­ing will be dis­bursed slowly, start­ing high until it reaches zero, allow­ing the gov­ern­ment of Brazil to steadily increase its inter­nal fund­ing and assume full respon­si­bil­ity for fund­ing in per­pe­tu­ity by the time the bridge fund is depleted approx­i­mately 25 years from now.



(Source: WWF press release, 21.05.2014)


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