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The Fynbos habitat of South Africa is home to many endangered and rare plant species. Some of these plant species are found only in the Fynbos, a small, coastal habitat patch native to southern South Africa.

These endemic species do not include the Port Jackson Willow.

The Port Jackson Willow (Acacia saligna) is native to Australia. But, in the past 200 years, it has spread to South Africa through human agriculture and gardening. And the tree species has been thriving — spreading across the country and out of control. The trees are displacing native vegetation and destroying ecosystems all over the African Cape — including the rare Fynbos.

So what is one to do when alien trees are destroying your ecosystem?

You burn them.

One of Rainforest Trust’s partners in South Africa, the South African Tortoise Conservation Trust, cleared the Port Jackson Willow from the Geometric Tortoise Preserve they created along with Rainforest Trust. Once the trees were cut and uprooted, they were ready for burning.

But, as we’ve seen time and time again, solving one conservation problem often opens the door to solve another one at the same time.

The Geometric Tortoise Preserve has some of the last remaining habitat for the Critically Endangered Geometric Tortoise (Psammobates geometricus). And fires are a natural part of many ecosystems. But if an uncontrolled fire were to consume the preserve, it may make the land uninhabitable for the tortoises or even kill the tortoises who live there.

Seeing as the preserve is likely home to 50 percent of the entire population of the species, a destructive fire would be, eh, less than ideal.

One of the best protections from spreading forest fires is also one of the simplest — the fire break. By lowering the vegetation around the border of a protected area, we can reduce the organic matter available for a fire to consume. Made simple: less dry grass means a lower likelihood of a fire spreading into the preserve. But the threat of fire remains possible — strong, dry winds can push a raging wildfire over a firebreak. That’s why these firebreaks also serve as access roads, allowing fire-fighting equipment to move around the preserve in case a fire does spread inside.

To create the fire break around the Geometric Tortoise Preserve, our partner could have spent hours weed-whacking. Or, they could use a bunch of wood from an invasive species already lying around that needed burning anyway.

Guess which option they chose?

That’s right, they piled the Port Jackson Willow wood around the border of the preserve and lit it on fire. With careful management, this created a solid fire break. In addition, Port Jackson Willows are easy fodder for a spreading wildfire, so their removal reduces the likelihood of a fire spreading further inside the preserve. [Insert the conservation-appropriate equivalent of “two birds, one stone.”]

Invasive species management and avoiding the threat of wildfire (not to mention much of conservation) can feel Sisyphean. But with solutions such as this, sometimes we get the mountain to roll the boulder for us.

Rainforest Trust is proud to announce that Chief Executive Officer Dr. Paul Salaman has been chosen as one of eight recipients – out of over 500 prospective candidates – for the Mulago Foundation’s 2018 Henry Arnhold Fellowship. The fellowship is part of the foundation’s mission to support high-impact organizations in doing what they do best. Becoming a fellow is a lifetime appointment and includes a financial award to the organization and leadership training retreats and mentorship in the first few years.

The Henry Arnhold Fellowship program first started in 2016 to honor the philanthropic work of its namesake, who took over Mulago in 1993 after the passing of his brother Rainer. This fellowship program focuses on Henry Arnhold’s conservation efforts. Eight social entrepreneurs in conservation are hand-picked each year to join. The fellows are then equipped with tools they need to (1) design high-impact scalable models for better, faster conservation outcomes; and, (2) build their organizations to deliver them at scale.

“It is such an honor to be awarded the prestigious Henry Arnhold Fellowship, and last week’s retreat was a great introduction to the support and mentorship I can continue to expect from the highly experienced team at the Mulago Foundation, as well as other fellowship members,”

said Dr. Salaman. “On a personal note, learning about Mr. Arnhold brought up fond memories of my own grandfather, who shares a similar history of persecution in Germany and then entering the second world war for the Allies. This just made me all the more proud to be a Henry Arnhold Fellow and represent Rainforest Trust.”

Henry Arnhold escaped Nazi-occupied Germany to start a new life with his family in the United States, upon which he participated in the family banking business. His philanthropic work has expanded over the years with considerable support for non-profit organizations.

In our first installment of this series, we explained that the protection of rainforests and the regrowth that is able to take place because of this security is more cost-efficient than any other currently available method for pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

“The protection of millions of acres of degraded rainforest and their subsequent natural regrowth would result in massive absorption of carbon as the trees grow,” said Rainforest Trust CEO Dr. Paul Salaman. “The reality is that stopping rainforest destruction can immediately and cost-effectively buy us a crucially needed breathing space to allow us time to transition away from the use of fossil fuels.”

As we continue to deforest our tropical habitats at unsustainable rates, there will remain a need to actively restore high-risk and heavy impacted areas so they recover to a certain level of biodiversity as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, humans will never be able to do as good of a job recreating habitats as Earth’s natural processes. To create and sustain a rainforest for hundreds of years, the right conditions must exist, and they are almost all interdependent. For example, plants require certain temperatures and precipitation levels to thrive, and yet the local climate is very much dependent on the flora and the amount of oxygen and water vapor they release during photosynthesis (for more information, read our third and fourth installments in this series).

Plants are also highly dependent upon varying types of seed dispersal vectors, including many wildlife species that are native to forested habitats. There is also an interconnection among natural life cycles, nutrient levels in soils provided from decaying matter, plant absorption rates and thousands of species that shape their environments. These are just a few in a very long list.

Active restoration does have its place as an emergency measure, but cannot replicate this complex and delicate web. This is exactly why, when time permits, natural regeneration is the better option.

According to new research released in November 2017, “Natural regeneration surpasses active restoration in achieving tropical forest restoration success for all three biodiversity groups (plants, birds, and invertebrates) and five measures of vegetation structure (cover, density, litter, biomass, and height) tested.”

The report, “Ecological restoration success is higher for natural regeneration than for active restoration in tropical forests,” analyzed 133 studies across the tropics, finding that natural regeneration has up to a 56 percent higher restoration success rate for the above data sets when compared to active restoration.

But what’s even more effective than natural regeneration? Protecting the original forested landscape.

Rainforest Trust focuses its conservation efforts on purchasing and protecting intact tropical forests as the most sustainable and efficient way to protect our entire planet. It has safeguarded over 18 million acres in its 30-year history, with plans to more than double this to 50 million acres by 2020 through the SAVES Challenge.

When Rainforest Trust supports the protection of a threatened landscape, it does so for an average of just $2 per acre. When compared to purchasing an acre of deforested land that is likely privately owned and in agricultural use (meaning the cost is significantly greater with an average of $500 per acre), plus estimated restoration costs of $1,500 an acre, saving an acre of healthy rainforest is the better option.

“Basically, [active] restoration is a highly inefficient use of conservation money compared to securing and protecting areas recently cleared or at risk of clearance! Not only is saving existing forested areas at risk more efficient for the limited financial resources we have, but it is better for climate protection,”

Dr. Salaman said.

The amount of carbon dioxide equivalent safeguarded by preventing the deforestation and degradation of just one acre of rainforest is equal to the emissions of 40 cars in the U.S. Deforestation is currently estimated to be responsible for approximately 15 percent of the world’s total carbon emissions, about as much as the entire global transportation sector.

“While restoration can play an integral role in sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, we must first halt the carbon emissions coming from deforestation,” Dr. Salaman said.

If you would like to help in this mission to conserve rainforests and halt deforestation emissions, please visit the Conservation Action Fund, where donations directly support Rainforest Trust’s most urgent projects.

Here at Rainforest Trust we are preparing to celebrate Earth Day, and as a lead-up we would like to highlight a supporter who, inspired by this day, has been involved in protecting the rainforest in many ways. Cindy Starr can trace her love for the environment all the way back to the very first Earth Day at the University of Michigan in 1970. It was there that she heard a speech by a leader in the field of ecology that moved her to one day take action.

Fast forward to 2009, and still inspired by her first Earth Day all those years ago, Cindy set out to find an environmental nonprofit to support.

“I was first introduced to Rainforest Trust by a friend, but back then it was relatively small and called World Land Trust US,” she said. “Though small, I continued my support as I felt [the organization] had an immediate impact on climate, species diversity, preservation of land for indigenous peoples and the employment of local residents as patrols… It was essentially a home run nonprofit that covered all the bases.”

Since then Cindy has focused her philanthropy through the lens of “think globally, act locally” but tweaked it to fit her own personal style, as she both supports organizations in her hometown of Cincinnati as well as globally focused nonprofits like Rainforest Trust.

Through Rainforest Trust, Cindy has been able to reach her goal by acting locally through groups like her employer sanctioned “Green Team” and her own personal philanthropy to address the global issues of habitat loss and climate change.

“We started recycling and energy conservation projects at our various office locations, and we began our Earth Week collection of dollars and loose change in our lunch rooms in 2009,” she said. “I recommended Rainforest Trust to the Green Team because I knew that our gift, which would be relatively small, would purchase at least a few acres… Rainforest Trust offered [us] the most bang for the buck.”

Cindy is committed to saving rainforest and protecting the planet, and she finds different ways to work this commitment into her life and the lives of those around her. Besides making regular contributions and encouraging others at her office to do the same, Cindy has included Rainforest Trust in her will. And in 2016, when her daughter was married, she shared her passion with guests.

[crb_slider][crb_slide image=”https://www.rainforesttrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/CindyStarr1.jpg” credits=”Wedding favor cards detailing donation to protect Red Panda Community Forest Reserve.” title=”” text=””][/crb_slider]

“The wedding was very eco-minded… It was held in a botanical garden, and the food was vegetarian,” Cindy said. “Because guests depart wedding receptions with their own gift nowadays, my daughter and I wanted the gift to be something that wouldn’t end up in a wastebasket, so we purchased ten acres of Red Panda Forest Reserve habitat in Nepal for every guest.”

All told, through her various channels of giving, Cindy has protected over 1,500 acres of rainforest that not only save species but also support local communities and protect our one and only planet. So this Earth Day, take a page out of the Cindy Starr playbook and get involved so that we can ensure that in another 30 years there will be an Earth left to celebrate!

Thanks to support from Douglas Wilson, this Rainforest Trust-site provides protection for highly threatened birds, empowers a local community and prevents logging that would have decimated a vital rainforest habitat.

For centuries, the small village of San Jose de Uchupiamonas, nestled in the Sadiri Mountain of Bolivia, sat isolated in the vast rainforest, surrounded by one of the most mega biodiverse protected areas on the planet. The rainforest supports over 400 bird species, including the Vulnerable Military Macaw. Groups of Vulnerable White-lipped Peccaries are frequently seen in the area, as are Jaguars and Pumas. The jungle breathes life with the symphony of owls, tanagers, tyrannulets, macaws and many others, making it a paradise for bird watchers.

In the late 1990s, the Bolivian government created a 60-mile road through this lush rainforest habitat of Sadiri to the village. Early on in its existence, the road through the rainforest and foothill forest of the mountain put enormous pressure on the delicate forest ecosystem and spurred a rise in the unsustainable logging of the area’s large and valuable Mahogany trees.

In an effort to avert this crisis, Rainforest Trust partnered with the Bolivian organization Pueblo Nuevo to investigate options with the community. The area’s spectacular natural beauty and abundance of biodiversity led the groups to determine that ecotourism was a feasible long-term strategy for conservation in this region.

In 2008, the Uchupiamonas community conceived an idea for Sadiri Lodge to create a touristic sanctuary, with the aim to save the forest and prevent proposed logging projects. The name Sadiri is a derivation from the word S’adiri, which means in the local indigenous language Tacana “the old resting place,” making reference to its location at 2,953 feet, just at the boundary between the Andean highlands and the Amazonian flatlands.

Rainforest Trust’s partner began the tourism development project, and in 2010 the indigenous village of San Jose de Uchupiamonas voted overwhelmingly in favor of a final plan to protect a wide swath of the forest they control by creating a Tourist Refuge (a strict protected area). Rainforest Trust’s partner completed Sadiri Lodge in 2013 and saved over 62,000 acres of rainforest from logging.

Since its establishment, guests and bird watchers have been flocking to Sadiri Lodge from all corners of the world. Some of the most popular wildlife to observe are six different species of macaws, including colorful Blue-and-yellow Macaws, rare Scarlet Macaws and noisy Military Macaws. Visitors can see nine owl species, such as the majestic Rufescent Screech-owl, Subtropical Pygmy-owl and Amazonian Pygmy-owl. There is also a rich variety of endemic birds such as the Rufous-crested Coquette, Yungas Tyrannulet and Emerald Toucanet.

Rainforest Trust President and avid bird watcher, Dr. Robert S. Ridgely, had the privilege of visiting Sadiri Lodge and explained, “If you are fortunate enough to have found your way to Sadiri, it´s safe to say you are in for a fabulous time in some of the most beautiful and pristine lower foothill forest anywhere. The place abounds with birds, from minuscule coquettes to huge and noisy macaws…If you are not a birder, you may become one!…They have created the mecca, and all for the benefit of the indigenous San Jose de Uchupiamonas Community.”

To learn how to support areas that are vital for threatened species and communities, please visit the Conservation Action Fund.