Photo by CORBIDI, courtesy of Conservación Amazónica – ACCA

Among the soaring mountains of the Andean Amazon live the Japu indigenous community of Peru. Part of the Quechua-speaking Q’eros ethnicity, they are considered to be the last direct descendants of the Incas. Their nearly 85,000-acre territory ranges between 500-5,000 meters above sea level, spanning across Andean highlands and Amazonian foothills. Because of the vast altitudinal gradient, it is home to unique ecological biomes, endemic and endangered species, and bofedales — wetlands in the highlands that store water from melting glaciers or rivers. Due to the effects of climate change, however, the snow-capped mountains the Japu live nearby are melting faster than ever. For example, seventy years ago the nearby Apu Mama Rosa mountaintop was covered in snow, but now only a little remains.

Bofedales are key for the community’s resilience against climate change, as they are not only regarded as reservoirs of water but also for carbon, which is stored in the form of peat 4,000 meters above sea level in the high elevations of the Andes. In fact, bofedales can store as much as 300-700 tons of carbon per hectare, compared to an average of 150 tons of carbon per hectare stored in the Amazon rainforest. However, these incredibly important areas are also at risk of deterioration due to overgrazing of locally raised animals, high animal density, and poor management. Thus, our current project in Peru aims to restore and improve the management of highland wetland areas in this unique region.

Saving the Bofedales

The work to restore these key areas began in 2016 and 2017, with a first phase of studies that obtained a biological baseline on the community’s bofedales. We investigated different aspects of the community through socio-economic evaluations, and the wetlands with agrostological, hydrochemical and plant ecology evaluations. This helped us develop a management plan that would improve both the community and the lands’ situation.

From 2019 to 2021, we have been in the process of restoring and revegetating 32 acres, with the current goal to recover six wetlands throughout the community. We are also promoting the wetlands’ value among the inhabitants of Japu, so local community members fully appreciate their ecological benefits and commit to taking care of them. Local authorities and community members are responsible for their monitoring and recovery, as they can easily observe the capture and growth of the species in the specified plots and thus will be able to replicate the activity. All actions to be done during the execution of this project are coordinated in the Communal Assemblies, which involve the full participation of the community.

Together, we have advanced to phases II and III of the management plan, which include valuation and practice of traditional knowledge, revegetation of native species, fencing of vulnerable areas, creation of water redistribution channels, and internships in the Japu wetlands with members of the Cusco Glaciology Platform. So far, we have created water redistribution channels and constructed small dams to reduce water speed so it can distribute itself more effectively among the wetlands. In total, there are 13 wetlands identified for restoration, 6 of which we consider priority for restoration between Phase II and Phase III.

After a year and a half of the fencing and revegetation intervention, the results began to materialize. Community members, excited at the success, were motivated to replicate the process in other wetlands in need of restoration, and requested these activities to continue. According to the agrostologist, who is a specialist in the study of pastures, in October of this year it will be possible to graze the alpacas and continue with the gradual recovery before reaching the optimum level. Meanwhile, the community members await the moment when the alpacas can graze again in the restored wetlands and continue with their management.

This community exemplifies how the preservation of cultural values and traditional knowledge can directly translate into effective ecosystem conservation through community-based natural resource management.

We thank Acción Andina, New England Biolabs Foundation and U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service for supporting us with the financing of our conservation projects in the Japu Community.

 The Amazonian forests of northern Bolivia are home to acres upon acres of Brazil nut trees that support a myriad of animal and plant species, as well as local communities, such as San Antonio within the national Manuripi Amazon Wildlife Reserve. Like many in the Bolivian Amazon, the members of the San Antonio community work to sustainably harvest forest products to support their livelihoods. 

On September 12, our sister organization on the ground Conservación Amazónica-ACEAA, delivered equipment that will make sustainable harvesting for the community members of San Antonio easier, including a tractor and seed-dispersing equipment, with an approximate investment of 380,000 bolivianos (55,000 USD), together with our funder WWF Bolivia and our partner Bolivian National Service of Protected Areas (SERNAP in Spanish). The delivery of this equipment to support productive harvesting will help bolster the local economy and improve the quality of life for Amazonian communities, as well as encourage protection of the forest. 

“This is a longing that we have always had. Now we have the challenge of organizing ourselves in the best way to use these tools for the benefit of everyone, always maintaining the health of our forests,” said Ronald Montes Beyuma, President of the Community of San Antonio during the delivery ceremony. The San Antonio community is the first in the region to have this equipment, which supports the extraction and removal of Brazil nuts and improves transport practices in collection and storage. We will also support training processes for the use and management of these tools. 

“The importance of promoting the integral management of Amazonian forests and supporting the production of Amazonian fruits are activities that keep forests standing in time to improve the quality of life for local communities,” said Marcos Terán, the Executive Director of our sister organization Conservación Amazónica-ACEAA.

This equipment will benefit 22 families that each own plots of 1,200 acres, whose objectives are the conservation of this area and the promotion of the use of wild resources. Sustainable harvesting of products such as Brazil nuts promotes the preservation of forests, as it generates income for local communities without resulting in the deforestation that products such as timber would cause. Additionally, Brazil nuts can only survive in healthy forests, not in aggressive monocultures, making protecting these forests essential to their harvest. 

This collaboration is part of the project “Alliances and Multiactor Platforms: Sustainable economic management of natural reserves in Bolivia, empowering local and indigenous communities” with financing from BMZ Germany.

Our Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project team has been using our fires app throughout the season to provide real-time updates about the fires raging across the Amazon. In Bolivia, we registered around 145 fires in the country to date, of which more than 100 are considered major fires.These are distributed mostly in the departments of Beni and Santa Cruz, with some in La Paz and Chuquisaca, burning mostly in grassland areas, followed by forest areas. The most affected places are the Chiquitano forest and the Chaco.

Acreage of Burned Areas

In the Beni there are currently more than 1.7 million acres (700,000 hectares) of forests impacted due to the fires, corresponding mainly to grassland areas. According to data from colleagues in the department of Santa Cruz, more than 338,000 acres (137,000 hectares) have been impacted since the end of July. This number will have increased considerably since then, due to the peak fire season being in August. As the fire season lasts through November, we will update with more information as the season progresses.

Fires Last from Days to Weeks

Fires can last from one day to multiple weeks depending on the type of land cover where they are burning. For example, the fires in the department of Beni, where the majority have been, usually burn for one or two days in the savanna areas. In Santa Cruz the fires are more intense, sometimes lasting weeks. Most of the fires now are burning agricultural areas, but there are already several protected areas impacted, already exceeding thousands of acres. These fires are concentrated in the transitional sector of the Pantanal savannas and Chiquitanos forests.

Fires in the Chacho dry forest this month

Effect on Animals

The negative effects on fauna and plant species is evident especially in protected areas. Cloudy skies from fire smoke affect animal populations, as Amazonian species breathe in smoky air that was carried beyond the burned area by the wind. Rehabilitation of animals as always will be difficult in the affected regions, especially where they have experienced a longer fire season. In our next evaluation, we will likely see the severity be more intense than what we are observing at the moment.

Support Fires Response Efforts in Bolivia

Currently, we are aiding fire response efforts on the ground in Bolivia, as many municipalities are underfunded and in some areas do not even have access to water. Click here to protect forests and animals from the impacts of these fires and support our fire response efforts.

We’ve passed a grave milestone this fire season in the Amazon. Last week, the Director of our deforestation and fires monitoring initiative, MAAP, Matt Finer, announced that over 1,500 major fires across the Amazon have been detected via our real-time fire monitoring app.

The vast majority of the blazes are not the result of forest fires tearing through tracts of land as a regular part of the seasonal cycle. The climate of the Amazon is quite unlike areas of California or Australia, where dried plants and dead trees can become the unlucky targets of a violent lightning strike and erupt in flames. Instead, the relative humidity of the rainforest makes it so it doesn’t easily catch fire, even during the dry season. It is actually very rare for forests to burn by themselves, and the delicate ecosystems of the Amazon are unequipped to manage seasonal fires.

Thus, instead of forest fires, what we’re seeing is that the major fires we’ve detected in the region are caused by humans on deforested land, and follow a specific pattern of clearing forest and burning it months or a year later.

Deforestation Leads to Fires

Ranchers and farmers clear forest in early months of the year and leave behind the remains of the cut trees or use them for timber. Then the plot is set on fire, giving this process its name “slash-and-burn”. The burned remains become a layer of nutrients feeding the soil, and the recently deforested area is ready for agricultural activity or cattle ranching. Farmers may also burn recently deforested lands in order to quickly eliminate excess vegetation. 

This human-caused deforestation-to-fires pattern is what we’ve primarily seen in the Brazilian Amazon using our fire tracker app combined with Planet satellite imagery. Our multi-country Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project team can pinpoint major fires in real time, gather its coordinates, and look at a timelapse of the area over several months. With this method, we can discover exactly when the area was deforested and when people set the fires. 

This methodology also works the other way around, where our researchers can predict where major fires will occur based on an area’s deforestation patterns. Last year, when we first relaunched our fires app, our team was able to successfully predict where the first major fire in the Amazon was going to be.

Human-Caused Fires on Deforested Land Escape to Healthy Forest

With slash-and-burn agriculture, it is a perpetual concern that fires set on deforested lands will grow uncontainable and escape to the healthy forest around it. This fire season, we’ve already seen some agricultural fires in Brazil overwhelm the surrounding forest, causing actual forest fires. Though the Brazilian government has instituted a fire ban to try to mitigate the damage done to untouched forest, we have identified hundreds of illegal fires that have burned forests. 

These types of fires can be especially severe because they crawl along the forest floor eating up debris and ground cover, and are obscured by the tree canopy. When undetected and unaddressed, these blazes can destroy the thin-barked tree species in the Amazon, as these trees aren’t adapted to handle fires the same way some in the U.S. have evolved to do.

What’s to Be Done?

Our MAAP team is tracking the Amazon fires daily with our app and satellite imagery to keep everyone informed on what’s happening on the ground. Not only do we make this information available to the public, but we also provide policy briefs to governments of Amazonian countries so they can take action to combat fires. Additionally, we provide fire management workshops in key communities in the Bolivian Amazon to train local people on how to prevent and combat forest fires, as well as provide them with the equipment to do so. 

Because clearing forests for agricultural purposes or timber is a major driver of fires, a core aspect of our work is building a fire-free, forest-based economy that promotes protecting standing forests for their long-term economic benefits instead of aggressively clearing them for short-term gains. We partner with local communities in Peru and Bolivia to harvest sustainable forest products, such as açaí berries and Brazil nuts, that require healthy forests for them to grow.

Interested in supporting fire prevention and response efforts in the Amazon?

Click here to see how you can make a difference.

© Pavel Martiarena, Conservación Amazónica – ACCA

Ernesto Velarde Valladares, a specialist in ecobusiness at our sister organization, Conservación Amazónica – ACCA, has recently joined the Board of Directors of the Regional Executive Committee of Exporters of Madre de Dios (CERX) for 2021-2023 as Vice President. Elected by members of the committee, including public and private institutions that promote exports in the region, his new work as part of the Board works to create procedures that implement projects and activities around foreign trade. The Board will also be in charge of ensuring the continuation and execution of the various activities planned in the Regional Strategic Plan of Exports.

As Ernesto Velarde makes clear, the regional exports committee ends up being a space for dialogue and technical discussion that contributes to planning all actions in the region aimed at foreign trade.

“We participate in all these spaces from the ecobusiness perspective. We have led all the commercial connections in other technical areas (cocoa, copoazú, chestnut, aquaculture) with both national and export approaches…Let us remember that as Conservación Amazónica – ACCA, we are supporting the entire value chain of each product, since we see various aspects of production base, including processing, linking of actors, commercial and market issues.”

Ernesto Velarde was also the Manager of the Cusco Regional Executive Committee for Export – Committee of Regional Exporters in Cusco between 2008 and 2011, where he acquired extensive experience in the dynamics of the committee at the national level. He has also been part of the Peruvian Department for Business and Tourism and their Commission for Promotion of Exports and Tourism (PromPerú) to promote the biotrade business model at the national level.

In this way, our sister organization Conservación Amazónica – ACCA works to continually strengthen this important space for technical discussion aimed at generating the development of exportable products in the Madre de Dios region.

When Ana Carola Vaca Salazar started her journey to becoming the first female Secretary for the Environment in the Bolivian department of Beni, she wasn’t even allowed to go to school for her dream job. She wanted to be a park ranger in the Amazon, but she recalls that at the time in Bolivia, “I had to go to university to study as a ‘ranger technician’, because women were not allowed to be park rangers.” 

After she began working in the field in 1996, she found her peers had low confidence in her ability, as a woman, to fulfill certain ranger duties, such as dealing with an illegal actor committing unauthorized deforestation or initiating legal processes. Ana Carola spent five years as the sole woman on the team, working to convince people that she, and women in general, could do the same duties as anyone else. “I had to prove that I was better than any other teammate, so that they could accept that I can achieve things too…women had to be better than men at work so that we were accepted equally.” With her perseverance, she became the first female park ranger in the country.

Years later, she now boasts 25 years working in Bolivia’s National System of Protected Areas and is the department of Beni’s Secretary for the Environment. “My work is one thing that I’m very proud of,” she says. “And I think that my time as a park ranger has been the best thing that has happened in my life.”

Fires in the Amazon Savannas

Though Bolivia is not as well known as an Amazonian country, in reality, more than half of its total land area (54.2%) is covered by tropical forest. In its lowland Amazon, rainforest cover clocks in at a massive 147.3 million acres (59.6 million hectares).

The Beni savannas in the Amazon – the region where Ana Carola works – are the third largest complexes of savannas in South America and boast 5 unique habitats: savanna, treed savanna, forest islands, gallery forests and marsh wetlands. Due to seasonal rains and water melting off the Andes, the area is subject to flooding, which creates conditions responsible for the region’s signature forested islands.

But during other times of the year savannas, wetlands, and swamps can dry up, which creates a dangerous cache of flammable organic material. Additionally, the winds that blow in from the north are much more intense because the savannas are flat. “A bit of wind, a lot of fuel and a small spark–it’s explosive,” warns Ana Carola. “The organic material, the litter created in the swamps, wetlands, and the pampas is what makes fuel that’s very easy to burn, and that is the most vulnerable part.”

The burning in the Amazon has already started, and we’ve detected more than 1,000 major fires so far this fire season. While most of the blazes are in Brazil, Bolivia comes in second for the amount of major fires in Amazonian countries. Vulnerable areas that have already seen significant burns include the Beni and the Bolivian Chaco.

Ana Carola recalls an especially intense incident when someone set ablaze their own deforested land, and the resulting fire ended up destroying the surrounding forest. “We didn’t even know until dawn the next morning. The south wind began to turn and instead of continuing onto the farmer’s land, the flames blew over to the pastures of Porvenir, which are one of the few pastures of natural pampas in the Beni that we conserve. And the fire ripped through the earth relentlessly. For nearly ten days, we had to put all our effort towards fighting its onslaught, but regardless, about five thousand hectares of what were savannas and forests of mountain islands were destroyed.”

Needing Help to Close the Firefighting Gaps 

Despite the government’s efforts to equip their firefighting teams, they still lack essential supplies for their ranger corps to effectively fight fires this season, as local communities and municipalities are extremely underfunded. 

Ana Carola explains that they need a monitoring system that tracks heat sources so they can quickly determine where the fires are, but most importantly, what the fire brigades need is firefighting equipment. In some parts of the Beni region, local fire brigades don’t even have access to water for fighting fires.  

“The supplies and the firefighting equipment, that’s what is necessary. There are community brigades, there are volunteer brigades, there are volunteer forest firefighters. What is needed is the equipment and supplies to be able to fight the fires.”

See how you can help Ana Carola and the firefighters in the Beni combat the fires here.

Dear Friend of the Amazon,

If we’ve learned anything in the past year and a half, it’s that life can change quickly and we need to adapt even quicker. As you may have seen in our reports, the fire season in the Amazon has already begun in full force. It hasn’t been in the news the same way that it was in the past 2 years, but, with the high rates of deforestation in the Amazon and unprecedented droughts, it’s shaping up to be even more intense. To stop the fires from getting worse every year, we need to focus on prevention, stopping deforestation, and planning for a healthier future beyond COVID-19. Your support so far has helped us get started on that. And for that we thank you.

Amidst the many challenges, there are always things to be grateful for. Whether that be your own health or big environmental victories that you helped us achieve to protect our planet, we hope you have found gratitude this past year. 

In that spirit, we want to share that August is National Make-a-Will Month! You’ve been there for Amazon Conservation throughout our journey of growth, so we wanted to ask you to consider adding us to your will to ensure you have a long-lasting impact and legacy in the Amazon. Whether you’ve never made a will at all or need to update yours, this is a good time to think about the future of the people – and planet! – you love the most.

Start my will

If you’re just getting started, you can use FreeWill, a free, online resource that guides you through the process of creating a legally valid will in 20 minutes or less. We partnered with them to provide this service to you, but know that we do not receive anything from this partnership. We just want to give you the tools to make your will planning and charitable gifts a little easier. If you’d rather use another tool or a personal lawyer and still leave a kind gift to Amazon Conservation (at no cost to you now!), we’d be extremely appreciative. 

So this August, we invite you to prepare for the future ahead by writing or updating your will. 

P.S. When you created your plans, did you include a gift to the Amazon Conservation Association in your will? Please fill out this quick form to let us know! 

Dear Friend of the Amazon,

This year’s annual report holds special significance because 2020 brought on worldwide challenges of new magnitudes. At the time of writing this report in 2021, we still face these obstacles, but continue to find ways to adjust our efforts to achieve the conservation needed in the Amazon. In 2020, we had to temporarily close all of our biological stations while the COVID-19 pandemic raged and the lockdowns wreaked havoc on global and local economies, and on the lives of people whom we work closely with every day. Being a lean organization also meant that we had to seriously consider how we could weather this unprecedented global emergency.

Despite all of the challenges, we made some important strides for the Amazon this year. We helped establish four new conservation areas, provided governments and local communities with the tools and information needed to protect their natural resources, garnered data to help stop the expansion of deforestation, and even developed a new Wildlife Conservation Laboratory that will provide key data that may help prevent future pandemics. We also saw the launch of our new holistic strategy that addresses the major needs for maintaining a healthy Amazon, today and in the future: protecting wild places, empowering people, and putting science and technology to work.

2020 also marked our 20th anniversary – a proud and humbling milestone for any charitable organization, made even sweeter this year by what we’ve just been through. The pandemic has made clear the connections between the environment’s health, human health, social justice, and economic security. Our mission has never felt more urgent, and we will double down on our efforts to conserve even more of our shared planet. 

There is more to be done and we are ready to lead the work. Thank you for standing by Amazon Conservation and protecting the greatest wild forest left on Earth. Now it’s time to get back to work building the healthy, sustainable, and just Amazon we all need.

Sincerely,

John Beavers                                 Jim Brumm                                                                             

Executive Director                       Chair of the Board of Directors

Drag your mouse across the pages to flip through the annual report, or click here to view the pdf.

Click here to view in full screen.

Following 2019’s intense fire season in the Amazon that made international headlines, we recorded an even more severe year of fires in 2020, with over 5 million acres impacted.

Thanks to the support of our donors, in the months preceding the fire season we improved and relaunched our Amazon real-time fire monitoring app, hosted by Google Earth Engine. This proved to be an effective and accessible new tool to detect major fires in real-time throughout the fire season.

By combining aerosol emissions data with traditional fire alerts, we can now create comprehensive maps that identify the major fires in the Amazon on a daily basis. Through our app, we identified the first major fire of 2020 on May 28, in the Mato Grosso state in Brazil, and throughout the season documented over 2,500 major fires affecting forests mainly in Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru.

Based on our extensive analysis, we determined that, like in 2019, the majority of the burning this year took place in Brazil, in areas that had been recently deforested for agricultural and cattle-ranching purposes. In contrast, the main source of fires in the Bolivian Amazon took place in standing forests, especially in the dry forests of the Chiquitanía. The vast majority of the fires across Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru were identified to be likely human-caused and illegal, in violation of government-implemented fire management regulations and moratoriums.

Being able to produce this information in real-time – as the fires began burning – allowed us to provide the government, local communities, and the media with the precise data needed to take action on the ground. This is one of the many ways we are expanding our fire management work, in addition to furthering fire prevention efforts by promoting fire-free, sustainable development in the region.

This story was featured in our 2020 Impact Report. Click here to read about other conservation successes from 2020.

Our Los Amigos Biological Station has long been at the center of cutting-edge scientific research in the Amazon. Now we are taking that role one step further. This year, we launched a new Wildlife Conservation Laboratory there to carry out wildlife health and biodiversity monitoring using the latest technology. This laboratory will be capable of carrying out advanced wildlife tracking, conservation genomics, safe pathogen screening, and toxicology monitoring of key species in the Amazon. This targeted biodiversity monitoring will enable us to gather vital data on zoonotic diseases and transmission risks in the region, generating the information government health agencies need to protect local people – and, in our globalized world, people everywhere – from diseases that cross the human-wildlife interface.

A conservation technology “makerspace” for inventing new technologies and innovating current ones is also being created at the laboratory. This year researchers began working on a customized wildlife GPS tracking device much more lightweight, low-cost, and long-lasting than the ones currently in existence. The device takes advantage of a new long-range network of wildlife microchip reading stations, enabling scientists to track wildlife movement in a similar way that toll roads track cars through the EZ-Pass system.The data produced through this effort will be transformational for understanding how wildlife populations are adapting to climate change.

This new laboratory at Los Amigos, made possible thanks to the support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, is the first step towards a decentralized and locally based One Health laboratory network, for performing routine wildlife health assessments and in-country pathogen screening that could be replicated in rainforest countries around the world. To foster this, screening systems, protocols, and analyses will be developed to prioritize affordability and ease-of-use.

This story was featured in our 2020 Impact Report. Click here to read about other conservation successes from 2020.