Ecuador trip

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Guest post from Chris Meyer, writing from Ecuador

Deforested land in Arimae's reserve to be replantedDeforested land in Arimae's reserve to be replantedFellow co-founder Andrew Wulf and I visited a Guarani indigenous village outside of Tena while on vacation/work. While there were numerous similarities between Panama and Ecuador in relation to conservation, economic opportunities, problems with land, and resource management, there were also many differences.

I arranged to stay with the brother of the President of the regional Guarani organization. He lives in his own little "compound" consisting of a couple of houses where his various children now live with their children. In total, about 15 people lived in the compound (10 under the age of 13). Along the river they had cleared about three hectares (7.5 acres) to plant corn (mostly for animals), papaya, cacao, yucca, plantains, bananas, and other fruiting trees indigenous to the area.

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Update from Panama

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Operations Director Damion Croston visited Panama in early May. Here he presents a couple of the more important items from the trip.

Small Fire in Plantation

In April we experienced a small fire in one of our plantations in Nuevo Paraiso. A local partner from whom we lease land was clearing an adjacent parcel to plant crops when the fire made its way past the fire break onto our plantation. Thanks to the vigilance and quick actions of worker Jose Rodriguez damage was kept to a minimum. An investigation is currently being conducted to assess total loss and to find ways to prevent another such incident. Sponsors can rest assured that the fire will not affect the value of their holdings, and PE assumes ownership of total losses associated with the incident.

UNDP Project

Last Fall we helped our local partners in Arimae obtain funding from the UNDP-GEF Small Grants Programme to conduct an economically and environmentally beneficial forestry project. We have continued to facilitate the project by providing technical assistance. The community has made significant progress since last year and will plant some of the products from the nursery they built as part of the project next month. In the future the nursery will be used to plant native species saplings which will be sold to Planting Empowerment for use in our own plantations. We will continue to provide our local community partners with assistance and economic opportunities whenever possible.

REDD update from Bonn

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Guest post from Chris Meyer, writing from Bonn

I was in Bonn last week for the first of two weeks of post-Copenhagen climate change negotiations. As I wrote in a blog post for the Environmental Defense Fund, indigenous rights language in the negotiating text - specifically the REDD+ section - is significant.

I wrote in that post:

Most promising in this is that the two-year-old brackets around the text – text is [bracketed] when it is controversial and does not have unanimous support from countries – have been removed.  This is a big victory for indigenous leaders, as it indicates strong support for indigenous peoples' rights.

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Snapshot 2015

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We started Planting Empowerment because we recognized an opportunity for rainforest communities to profit sustainably from their natural resources. The business model was formed around some basic tenets:

  • To slow deforestation, forest dwellers need an incentive not to deforest
  • Land tenure is paramount in addressing deforestation
  • Rainforest dwellers can earn more from their undervalued parcels of land through sustainable forestry
  • Forestry projects would be funded by environmentally and socially-minded investors

Since Planting Empowerment formed in late 2006, we have signed four land-lease partnerships with local Panamanians, planted 22,000 trees over 50 acres and raised $140,000 in forest investments from over 100 investors to finance these operations.

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Is REDD too centralized?

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A recent article on the BBC website decried the treatment of local populations in the development of REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) projects.

Although the author gets some facts incorrect - claiming, for example the "+" in REDD+ represents what are more widely known as co-benefits rather than enhanced forest carbon stocks as noted in the LCA text (i.e. sequestering carbon, or afforestation) - he does do a service in pointing out potential problems with REDD.

The gist of the author's argument is that REDD will centralize decision-making over forest resources within government and prevent community managment. Panama is a good example of the decentralization process because it has been slowly recognizing indigenous peoples' rights over their land.

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