The Walt Disney Company is to invest $7 million this year in forest conservation programs, $1 million of which will be given to the Alto Mayo Protection Forest in the department of San Martin, in northern Peru.
The Alto Mayo project, covering a virgin forest area of 300,000 hectares (1158 sq. miles), is managed by Conservation International, CI, with local communities and a series of local organizations, including the Peruvian Environmental Law Society, SPDA, the Andean Ecosystems Association, the Ministry of the Environment and the national parks service, Sernanp.
The object of CI’s project is to not only prevent carbon emissions, but secure vital watersheds and habitat for a wide-variety of plants and animals, many of them threatened or endangered. The Alto Mayo forest area includes the Andean spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus) and the yellow-tailed woolly monkey (Oreonax flavicauda).
The conservation program also provides long-term economic benefits for local communities by supporting a range of activities, including building clinics to provide basic medical care; ensuring the provision of water supplies to local communities; and, guiding the disbursement of future revenues or local people involved in community conservation.
Earlier this year, the Walt Disney company announced its agreement with Conservation International to provide $4 million to develop large-scale Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) forest carbon demonstrations in both Peru and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, DRC, the single largest corporate commitment to date in activities that reduce emissions from deforestation.
CI has been urging its corporate partners for years to invest in forest conservation as a climate solution because tropical deforestation is responsible for nearly 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions—more than all the world’s cars, trucks, planes, and ships combined.
Other projects included this year in the Disney company’s program are two community reserves in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the habitat of the endangered gorilla (Gorilla gorilla graueri) and okapi (Okapia johnstoni), and through the Nature Conservancy two projects in the U.S. – a pilot reforestation project in the Lower Mississippi Valley, and a redwood forest management program in Northern California.
