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| Questions or Comments? | Visit the Global Conservation Fund Web Site |
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| June 2010 |
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| in this issue: |
About Us
The Global Conservation Fund (GCF) finances the creation, expansion and long-term management of protected areas.
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 Update from the GCF Team
In Focus: Where We Work
Facts & Figures: Protected Areas
New Protected Areas in Threatened Atlantic Forest
Efraín Samochuallpa Solis: Working to Help the People of his Homeland and Their Forests
Funds Support Preserving Gulf of California |
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Update from the GCF Team
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 | The Global Conservation Fund (GCF) has had a busy 2010 thus far. As Conservation International’s focus on valuing nature’s services has increased, GCF finds itself at the forefront of using policy and market forces to help facilitate the delivery of critical ecosystem services — such as the provision of food and water and the regulation of climate.
- In Central America, GCF is working with projects in Mexico and Costa Rica to facilitate local stakeholder participation in payment for ecosystem services (PES) programs. For example, in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, Rainforest2Reef and Amigos de Calakmul have recently secured environmental service payments from a national program administered by Mexico’s National Forestry Commission for the Pustunich ejido (communal lands), totaling $75,000 per year for the next five years. This funding will allow the community to undertake a number of critical management activities, including surveillance, monitoring, fire prevention and posting signage. These funds provide a concrete financial incentive for ejido members to ensure the integrity of these forests.
- In Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula, GCF is supporting Conservation International (CI) and local partner CEDARENA to engage private landowners to enter into long-term agreements for environmental service payments, administered by FONAFIFO, Costa Rica’s National Forestry Fund. With technical and financial support from GCF, FONAFIFO is establishing a trust that will provide permanent financing for PES payments to landowners who enter their properties in the program. The fund will also support the costs of monitoring the properties for standing forest cover.
- In the last remaining patches of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, a GCF-sponsored project is investigating the use of payment for ecosystem services to support the costs of managing protected areas. CI-Brazil, along with the Conservation Strategy Fund and other partners, has been analyzing ways to protect one of the most important water supplies for Rio de Janeiro, while simultaneously preserving one of the largest forest remnants of the high-biodiversity Atlantic Forest. With funding from a GCF Learning Network Grant, CI-Brazil partnered with the Rio de Janeiro State government to design and build support for a system that would use a negligible charge to downstream water users to cover the costs of protecting these important forests.
This year GCF plans to invest even greater time and resources working with partners to develop these PES approaches. These mechanisms can provide stakeholders with a true lasting alternative to activities that cause environmental degradation, making nature conservation an economically sustainable choice.
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Wishing you all the best,
The
Global Conservation Fund
Team
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announcement
CFA Launches Web Site
GCF, as a member of the Conservation Finance Alliance (CFA), is happy to announce the launch of the CFA Web site www.conservationfinance.org. Please take a look and learn more about CFA’s important work in promoting sustainable financing for conservation. | |
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facts & figures
Protected Areas
| Protected areas created: |
63 |
| Protected areas expanded: |
6 |
| Total hectares in these areas: |
79.8 million |
Number of countries
where these areas are found: |
25 |
| Learn more. | | |
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Brazil
New Protected Areas in Threatened Atlantic Forest
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On June 11, Brazil's president signed a decree creating four new protected areas and expanding two other national parks in the Central Biodiversity Corridor in the Atlantic Forest biodiversity hotspot. The declaration increases the area under protection by 66,618 hectares in total.
The new protected areas are: Boa Nova National Park (12,065 hectares), Wildlife Refuges of Boa Nova (15,024 hectares), Serra das Lontras National Park (11,336 hectares) and Cariri National Park (19,264 hectares). In addition, the Pau-Brasil National Park was expanded by 7,381 hectares (now covering 18,934 hectares) and the Descobrimento National Park was expanded by 1,548 hectares (now covering 22,693 hectares).
CI-Brazil and local partners had a crucial role in the creation of these areas, with support from GCF and the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF).
After a preliminary effort to conduct a gap analysis and collect socioeconomic information throughout the region, 17 priority areas were selected for creation or expansion based on their biodiversity importance and level of threat. These studies caught the attention of the federal government, which commissioned a task force to expand the region’s network of protected areas. This task force was coordinated by Brazil’s Ministry of the Environment, in partnership with Brazil’s environmental agency, several universities, CI-Brazil, Flora Brasil and other partner organizations.
GCF has been supporting CI-Brazil and the efforts of the task force since 2005. With scarce background information for these areas, efforts were dedicated to gathering information and building the case to to take to the state and federal governments for creating and expanding priority areas. The initiative supported by GCF is currently focused on the creation of 19 new federal and state protected areas, and the expansion of three existing federal protected areas. When completed, the establishment of these new protected areas will advance conservation targets set for at least 34 threatened terrestrial vertebrate species, representing 54 percent of all endemic and threatened terrestrial vertebrate species in the Central Corridor, or 78 percent of those occurring in southern Bahia.
With the protected areas announced last week and those created in the past few years, the Southern Bahia Initiative supported by GCF has contributed to the creation of a total of 11 protected areas and the expansion of three more, altogether covering approximately 208,000 hectares.
 Learn more about our portfolio in South America.
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Peru
Efraín Samochuallpa Solis: Working to Help the People of His Homeland and Their Forests
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In the southern Peruvian Andes, not far from the mountain-cradled remains of the Incan site Machu Picchu, Efraín Samochuallpa Solis can often be found working with the residents of the Cordillera de Vilcanota region, near his birthplace, to preserve its natural resources.
He and his colleagues from Asociación Ecosistemas Andinos (ECOAN) work closely with the people of 20 farming communities and the town of Yanahuara for their Vilcanota project. Their goal: to conserve and restore the area’s forests of polylepis trees, home to Critically Endangered bird species and an important source of water and soil conservation for area residents.
They have teamed up with the American Bird Conservancy, with support from the Global Conservation Fund, to establish a network of community-managed forest reserves and develop sustainable alternatives for fuel and food for the communities. The plan also includes health and training programs and ecotourism development.
To date 2,006 families have been engaged in the project, and two communities have had their land recognized by the national government as private conservation areas. The project has also resulted in the reforestation of more than 295 hectares of land.
Read the story
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Mexico/Gulf of California
Funds Support Preserving Gulf of California
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The Gulf of California, between the Baja California Peninsula and the Sonoran desert of Mexico, has an appeal that many life forms find hard to resist. As home to the warm, white-sand beach resorts of Cabo San Lucas, it lures hoards of human visitors from far and wide. Its variety of marine and island ecosystems ranging from temperate to tropical has also drawn an abundance of other creatures, both resident and migratory.
Over time, Mexico has taken steps to ensure the vitality of this region for its many beneficiaries, and the Global Conservation Fund (GCF) has been lending a hand. Most recently, GCF provided $2 million to Fondo Mexicano para la Conservación de la Naturaleza (FMCN), a private environmental fund, for its Gulf of California Marine Fund. Half of the funding will go to support the management of the Bahía de los Ángeles, 387,956 hectares of coastal, marine and island ecosystems for which GCF also made a $1 million contribution in 2007. Bahía de los Ángeles also was the beneficiary of prior GCF funding in support of a successful effort by Mexican nonprofit Pronatura Noroeste and Conservation International to get the area designated as a biosphere reserve.
The other half of the funds go to the broader Marine Fund, an endowment founded in 2007 with seed funding from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to support the long-term management of several protected areas within the Gulf, including Bahía de los Ángeles. The other sites covered by the fund are San Lorenzo Archipelago National Park; Isla San Pedro Mártir Biosphere Reserve; Bahia de Loreto National Park; Espíritu Santo Archipelago Marine Protected Area; and Islas Marietas National Park.
Read the story
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Photo Credits: DRC forest, © CI/Photo by John Martin; Pau-Brasila, © Kevin Schafer / Minden Pictures; Efraín Samochuallpa Solis, © ECOAN; Dolphins, Photo courtesy of Fondo Mexicano para la Conservación de la Naturaleza
Header: Girl Near Tayna: © CI/Photo by Hari Balasubramanian, Valdivian Coastal Forest: © CI/Photo by Hari Balasubramanian
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