Peru’s National Fund for the Protection of Natural Areas, or Profonanpe, has set up a forest conservation and management program in Peru’s northern coastal department of Piura with the financial support of the German government.
Piura’s regional government will invest more than $1 million toward the conservation of the region’s forests, Natural Resources and Environment manager Augusto Zegarra Peralta told daily Peru.21.
Piura is characterized by large areas of productive, floristically homogeneous forest classified as mangroves, closed dry forest, dry savanna forest and scrub. The conservation program will pay particular attention to the region’s Ñapique and Ramón wetlands, as well as the forests located in the communities of Ignacio Távara and Alto Piura.
About half of Peru is forested, but the FAO estimates that Peru loses somewhere between 224,000 and 300,000 hectares of forest per year.
Deforestation is mainly caused by subsistence agriculture, but it is also increasingly due to development activities, especially logging, commercial agriculture, mining, gas and oil operations, and road construction.
