Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

This project avoids deforestation by creating jobs for local people, who are dependent on standing forest health. This includes field assistant work guiding visiting scientific researchers, resulting in conservation behaviour change reducing damage to valuable carbon-storing forest. 
Conservation training streamlines local people‚ knowledge of scientific resources, ecology, land use and climate change, empowering them to make more informed decisions about their land‚ future. 
Areas of scientific conservation interest will be designated encouraging researchers to visit. Mapping these will develop strategies allowing local people to benefit from using forest resources, such as traditional gardens, while protecting the most ecologically important areas.

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Conservation and the climate movement is based on scientific research emanating mainly from the global north. This research has been used to inform environmental policy and helps determine the best methods to protect tropical rainforest, which alongside the oceans supports approximately 50% of long-term sequestration of carbon, which is polluting the atmosphere. However, local indigenous people, who have lived for generations in rainforests and want to secure their future there, often do not have this most recent science readily available, despite being guardians of 36% of intact forest landscape. They protect it largely based on their traditional knowledge and their own bespoke methods of forest management, including agroforestry, soil nutrition, plot rotations and medicinal plant products. Where we are privileged to partner with them, we need to recognise and allow these local people to be in charge of planning their own conservation actions. 
However, we cannot expect local people to take on the burden of global conservation challenges without providing information and resources to complement their existing knowledge and methods. Traditional knowledge needs to be integrated with scientific knowledge to increase the success of shared conservation goals and promote them as guardians. 
In Wabumari we are focusing on training young willing and motivated people as forest guides and research assistants. Training them as future conservationists will allow young families to earn income from the visiting academic researchers, which in turn keeps the forest standing. 
Networks and contacts built with academic institutions and other conservation NGOs during this project will improve the confidence and skills of young people to the point where, moving forward, they continue this work independently of Cool Earth. 
Income from this project will extend to the wider community. Hosting researchers also secures work for farmers supplying garden goods, local cooks and those with spare rooms for lodging, usually women or older people, who are less able to be out hiking in the forest doing research. Women have already benefited by earning money from accommodating researchers in their family homes, and they are now keen to build up their own small businesses in the hospitality trade from this. In 2019, 11 people were employed as forest guides and 31 people earned incomes by putting academic researchers up in their homes. Each cook earned USD6 per day, and the guides earned USD14 per day. At these levels, income from just one week can feed an entire family for a month or send a child to school for a whole year. The impact of COVID-19 in 2020 was to reduce the level of research visits to the community, though they are expected to resume in 2021. 
By including many diverse groups of people in the project, the community members have a sense of ownership of it, which leads to a positive behavioural change regarding their land‚ conservation and a sense of pride in the natural environment surrounding them. This in turn benefits their cash needs and avoids further degradation of their forest, supporting this important nature-based solution prolonging carbon storage.

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