Background to agro-carbon initiative

International cooperation

Remote tribal communities lack the financial resources but are often surrounded by the earth's most forested area – they are in the ideal position to utilize carbon offset funding for carbon sequestration and sustainable forest management.

Climate change is a serious problem we share with the rest of the planet.  The Amazon is one of the world's largest stores of carbon, the tree mass of the rainforest increasingly providing a planet sized sink for emissions over the last 60 years.  If this store is released, climate change will accelerate much faster than present predictions and the Amazon forest may well turn into desert, much like human activity created the Sahara desert out of what was once a massive North African forest.  This is the last thing anyone wants to see happen.

This project takes offsetting one step further by redirecting money straight back to the same Ashaninka communities that welcome eco-tourist visitors to help them conserve the forest and their own sustainable lifestyle within it. 

Given the present outlook on global warming, and the threat posed to all of us by climate change, we really need to be planting many more of them right now, to have any hope of balancing emission and absorption in the future.  But, perhaps the most important thing to understand is that we plant trees for ourselves and to help people and the biosphere in the future.

Mitigation of CO2 emissions offer something practical and tangible to do now.  In a few year's time people will be saying – why on earth didn't we plant more trees and change to clean and renewable energy much earlier.

Ecotribal's move into tree planting on an agro-forestry basis is very timely and complements the Ashaninka drive for sustainability. In 2002 illegal loggers arrived in many of the Ashaninka communities. Located inland from the main river these villages were in one of the few remaining untouched rainforests in the Peruvian Amazon. The loggers, looking to do deals on selected mahogany extraction with community chiefs, rarely offered more than 20p a cubic foot. Furthermore, the logging was indiscriminate and it was the first time that colonists had been allowed into their territory since terrorists had been ejected in the early 1990's.

It was at this point that Ecotribal started working closely with the Ashaninka in developing sustainable alternatives. Together we are developing eco-cultural tourism projects as well as craft goods, chocolate, coffee, rainforest medicines and other sustainable agro-forestry products, some for export. Ecotribal has also been introducing renewable energy (mainly solar PV for radio communications, lighting, education and laptops) into Ashaninka communities.

By the end of 2005, illegal logging was stopped in the region where Ecotribal have concentrated their efforts.  

Diring August and September 2007, the Ashaninka established two initial tree planting sites in abandoned and overgrown gardens belonging to the annexes of the Cutivireni community. The lead organiser on behalf of the Ashaninka - Jaime Pena - is also President of a new Ashaninka Association of Chocolate Producers (which is aiming for organic status)

Plant a tree with Jaime and the Ashaninka www.treeflights.com