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This common sighting in the rivers of the Peruvian Amazon portrays a "buoyer," a person whose job consists of untying timber that has floated to the banks of the river. The timber is on a downstream journey that takes over 24 hours. Nearly 40% of the Amazonian population in Peru relies economically on the timber value chain, including over 250,000 families, mostly of indigenous descent.

• 05/08/2020
• Climatelinks

The Congo Basin of Central Africa hosts the second largest tropical forest in the world. The forests of the Congo Basin provide a range of environmental services to local forest-dependent communities, the surrounding region, and globally through climate regulation and carbon sequestration. Fostering the sustainable use of this vast, critical resource is imperative and requires a better understanding of existing forest resources, including changes in forest and land cover.

• 04/22/2020
• Eva McNamara, Olivia Freeman

USAID/Peru’s Amazonia Verde project aims to conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services in priority areas of the Peruvian Amazon and to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and land use change. To achieve these goals, an inter-office design team at the USAID/Peru Mission spent two years designing an integrated project that supports biodiversity conservation, combats illegal logging and deforestation, addresses negative impacts of extractive industries, strengthens Indigenous people’s rights and resources, and supports Peru’s international commitment to reduce GHG emissions

• 04/14/2020
• USAID Biodiversity Integration Case Studies

Indonesia is considered a “mega-diverse” country and is home to unique ecosystems and species, including orangutans, tigers, rhinoceros, elephants, and birds of paradise. The country has a high rate of endemism and contains important terrestrial ecosystems, such as mangroves, lowland forests, peatland, swamp forests, and montane forests.

• 04/03/2020
•  James Halperin,  Reed Merrill

Since 2012, the USAID Vietnam Forests and Deltas program (VFD) has been helping the Government of Vietnam develop and operationalize a national Payment for Forest Environmental Services (PFES) program that has already directed over USD $500 million to forest owners as financial compensation for maintaining forest cover. For example, Vietnam’s hydroelectric power plants now reward upstream forest owners whose trees keep soil in place, avoiding the sediment buildup that drives up operating costs.

• 03/19/2020
• Lauren Keller

The recent forest fires in Brazil and Bolivia showed once more that traditional approaches to sustainable development and nature conservation are not sufficient to reduce carbon emissions from land use and stop the ongoing destruction of natural resources.

• 01/07/2020
• Ruben Coppus

South America may be sitting, unaware, on a pile of climate gold, ammunition in efforts to forestall global warming. New maps of tropical and subtropical peatlands suggest these carbon-rich wetlands are more widespread in South America than on any other continent, with significant deposits in the Andean mountains.

• 11/25/2019
• CIFOR