Climatelinks Photo Gallery

This young man from the Indigenous community of Junín Pablo in the region of Ucayali, Peru, makes his way home after a day's work in the forest. Over 450,000 families in the Peruvian Amazon depend on forests for their livelihoods. Many of these communities are seeing their forests lost to illegal logging and the expansion of smallholder farming. As these activities degrade forests and threaten forest biodiversity, they also release carbon from the nearly 7 billion metric tons stored in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest. USAID Pro-Bosques works to advance sustainable forest management by strengthening forest sector governance; promoting the legal timber harvest and increasing forest sector competitiveness, as well as empowering Indigenous communities, like Junín Pablo, through sustainable forest practices that can improve their livelihoods.

In 2019, Equal Exchange's local cooperative partners participated in a peer exchange in Peru to learn about organic fertilizer production as part of USAID's Cooperative Development Program. By choosing to produce organic fertilizer, the cooperatives plan to reduce greenhouse gases emitted by synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. Through USAID's Cooperative Development Program (CDP) which sits in the E3 Office of Local Sustainability*, Equal Exchange works to build the capacity of the small-scale farmers they source from across Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, and Peru by working to reduce barriers throughout the supply chain. Limited access to capital, lack of cooperative governance, unstable market prices, climate change and gender inequity, are some of the challenges these farmers plan to overcome with CDP support. Equal Exchange is a U.S. worker-owned company headquartered in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Equal Exchange sells a number of organic, fair trade products to specialty markets across North America and Europe. * Once the Bureau for Democracy, Development and Innovation (DDI) is established, the CDP will sit in the Local, Faith and Transformative Partnerships (LFT) Hub. ---- Location and date the photo was taken: Peru, 2019 Who is depicted in the photo: Cooperative members from Guatemala, Peru, Paraguay What activity is depicted in the photo: A cooperative-to-cooperative exchange to learn about producing organic fertilizer. How the activity addresses climate change: Organic fertilizer emits less greenhouses gases than synthetic options. Name of the relevant program receiving USAID support (via Global Climate Change or other funds): Cooperative Development Program Names of partner organizations involved in the program: For this story, Equal Exchange. Other implementing partners include Land O'Lakes Venture37, NCBA CLUSA, Genex, Frontier Co-op, World Council of Credit Unions, NRECA International, Global Communities, HealthPartners, and the U.S. Overseas Cooperative Development Council (OCDC).

This common sighting in the rivers of the Peruvian Amazon portrays a "buoyer," a person whose job consists of untying the logs that have floated to the bank of the river-like buoys from the forest concessions, a journey that usually takes over 24 hours. Nearly 40% of the Amazonian population in Peru rely economically on the timber value chain-including over 250,000 families, mostly of indigenous descent- which presents a unique opportunity to draw increased attention to the challenges and opportunities the forest sector faces nationwide. The Pro-Bosques Activity aims to capitalize on timber harvesting by promoting sustainable forest management in Peru, strengthening forest governance with innovative forest control and monitoring tools, while promoting private sector engagement and indigenous participation in forest value chains.

USAID Peru

Joy after the rain Contagious joy. After finishing my Botany class with my students, I saw these very cheerful children racing after the rain. At this age and among children there are no gaps.

Lake with Surrounding Forest UCAYALI, PERU - MARCH 2010. A mountain lake in Sierra del Divisor or "land of the brave".

The amuna is part of a traditional water conservation system that captures and channels rainwater during the rainy season to recharge aquifers, increasing the availability of water during the dry season. The ecosystem-based adaptation/green infrastructure project in Peru is restoring these structures, some of which are 1,500 years old.

As part of the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance, Practical Action is supporting and educating community brigades who can support the key topic of flood resilience and helping communities become more resilient before, during and after flooding. Here, two community brigade members are at a safe evacuation route sign in the Rimac valley near Lima, Peru.