2011: Conservation Year in Review

2011: Conservation Year in Review

CSF has now helped to conserve more than 20 million acres of flourishing ecosystems. That's a big jump from our past reckonings and due largely to the role our Brazilian team has played in slowing badly planned roads and supporting investment in protected areas and indigenous lands. CSF's success centers on reinforcing the efforts of countless local advocates, park managers and scientists on the front lines of conservation and development decisions, giving them a solid economic rationale and strategy for conservation in the face of looming threats.

In 2011, CSF trained close to 300 conservation professionals in 7 courses and 4 workshops. That brings our total number of graduates to over 1,500 from 80 countries. This year we held our very first HydroCalculator workshops, in Colombia, Brazil and Bolivia. We partnered with the Woods Institute for Environment at Stanford University, Alianza Andes Tropicales (AAT), Fauna and Flora International, the Cristalino Ecolodge, the German Agency for International Cooperation (GiZ) and many other collaborators to offer trainings. We conducted our first business plan training in Brazilian states of Amazonas and Rondônia with our colleagues at the International Institute for Education in Brazil. We also held our first REDD opportunity cost training in partnership with UN Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL).

In addition to trainings, this year CSF supported the efforts of the Suruí and Parintintin indigenous peoples in Brazil to develop sustainable tourism businesses while protecting more than one million acres of intact rainforest they call home. We released a new Roads Filter tool in August that assesses the environmental, economic, and social impacts of South American rainforest roads. In 2011 we showed that producers of Bolivian wild chocolate can comfortably charge a premium for their product, saving that country's remaining rainforest in the meantime. Our analysis and advice to Brazil's national park system continues to strengthen the long-term economic viability of protected areas covering millions of acres across the country.

In 2012 CSF will launch our first comprehensive training and analysis programs in Africa and in Western Pacific island nations. We will establish a Conservation Economics Institute to ramp up training, as well as a global program on economic incentives for conservation, which will pull together CSF's many efforts to change the the underlying economics to favor long-term conservation.

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