The Amazon is the largest tropical rainforest and perhaps the most well-known region in the world, but decades of deforestation have left it under serious threat. By supporting our new appeal: Protecting the Ecuadorian Amazon, you can help communities safeguard their land in the Orellana province of Northeast Ecuador.
This Autumn, we need your help to raise £1.3 million to enable our partner Nature and Culture in Ecuador to establish a new Provincial Protected Area in Orellana. With your generous support, NCE will bring local governments and Indigenous communities together over the next four years to protect an estimated 747,000 hectares of vital forest – that’s an area significantly larger than the county of Devon.
By supporting this appeal, your donations will:
- Support Nature and Culture in Ecuador with the logistical work required to create the Provincial Protected Area, including planning and land designation.
- Fund the consultation process between Orellana’s Indigenous Nationalities and representatives from Orellana’s provincial government.
- Enable Nature and Culture in Ecuador to organise community workshops, host provincial meetings, training, and conduct biodiversity surveys.
- Provide employment for four full-time Nature and Culture in Ecuador staff, once the Provincial Protected Area is designated, to build community capacity and initial management plans for the area.
You can greatly increase your impact by donating during Big Match Fortnight, where all public donations to the appeal will be doubled using a ‘matchpot’ of pledges from some of our generous supporters. Donate between 2 and 16 October to see your donation matched to double its value.
With vast swathes of intact forest, the Orellana province is incredibly diverse. Here, 14 different ecosystems – including Amazonian Bamboo Forest and Flooded Grasslands – are home to an array of threatened and charismatic wildlife. In the skies, Harpy Eagles and Military Macaws soar above the trees, while White-bellied Spider Monkeys swing among the canopies, and elusive Amazon River Dolphins and Giant Otters roam the depths of the Amazon’s famous rivers. Alongside this stunning wildlife, Indigenous communities call these forests home, having lived in harmony with the land they inhabit for thousands of years.
Now, as the threats of agriculture and illegal mining grow, we need your help to preserve this remarkable place.
Many incredible species are expected to be present in the Orellana Provincial Protected Area, including the Giant Otter, which can reach six feet in length. Credit: Shutterstock/Ondrej Prosicky
The next step for the Amazonian Platform
The proposed protected area in Orellana is already incredibly vast, but it will also form an integral part in an even larger project: Nature and Culture in Ecuador’s Amazon Platform for Forest, Climate, and Human Wellbeing.
This ambitious initiative aims to unite conservation across six provinces in Ecuador, working in collaboration with governments and Indigenous communities to preserve a staggering total of 5.5 million hectares of forest across the entire Ecuadorian Amazon.
Having already established protected areas in three southern provinces, this expansion into Orellana will extend the Amazonian Platform northwards, connecting existing protected areas in the south with the forests of the north.
The new Orellana protected area will connect with existing protected areas and the Amazonian Platform as it extends northwards.
As described by Nature and Culture in Ecuador’s Nora Sánchez Luzardo, “this project will work into a wider role of making a change for the future, and putting plans in place that will have a big impact in the long-term fight against the climate crisis.”
Communities at the heart of conservation
The Amazon has a long history of human settlement, with dozens of Indigenous Nationalities that have cared for the forests for millennia. Over this time, Indigenous people have co-existed with wildlife and amassed a huge wealth of ancestral knowledge about their land.
For these Indigenous communities, the forest is not only their house, but their home. Here, they find everything they need to survive – it’s their pharmacy, their local market, it’s key to their livelihoods and their ancestral forms of sustainable farming.
Yolanda Santi, a member of the Kichwa El Eden community and the ASOPAME women’s association, in her community’s 1-hectare chakra farm. Credit: Sebastián Benalcazar/Nature and Culture International
In Orellana, Nature and Culture in Ecuador will be working closely with the Kichwa and Waorani Indigenous Nationalities, who will not only be beneficiaries of this incredible project but active partners in its development.
Through extensive consultations, they will play a key role in determining the boundaries of the protected area and its ongoing management, ensuring it aligns with their values and incorporates their needs and knowledge.
Jaime Toro, Coordinator of the Amazonian office at Nature and Culture in Ecuador, says the project is “an exercise of collaboration, of co-governance, and of trust, to make conservation decisions together.”
By supporting our appeal, you can become part of this collaboration.
There are few roads in Orellana, most travel between communities is done by river, flanked by the lush forests of the Amazon. Credit: Sebastián Benalcazar/Nature and Culture International
Together we can safeguard Orellana for the communities that call it home, the threatened species that depend upon it and the diverse habitats that make it so remarkable.
Donate today to help Indigenous communities protect the forests in which they live.
