Where we work
Biodiversity, challenges, and opportunities in southeastern Peru
The Alliance for a Sustainable Amazon works to conserve biodiversity and other natural resources in southeastern Peru, where the towering Andes Mountains meet the steamy lowland Amazon rainforest. This is a land of superlatives—dramatic landscapes, unmatched biodiversity, and incredible cultural richness all come together here to form one of the most unique places on Earth. Unfortunately, this natural and cultural wealth is threatened by some of the world’s most urgent environmental challenges. Scroll down to learn more about southeastern Peru, what makes the region so exceptional, and what we’re doing to protect it for future generations.
Southeastern Peru & its biodiversity
Southeastern Peru is dominated by the sprawling department of Madre de Dios, which is commonly called the country’s biodiversity capital. That’s saying quite a lot—situated at the juxtaposition of the Andes and the Amazon and straddling the equator, Peru is one of the world’s few “megadiverse” countries, thus making Madre de Dios one of the most biodiverse places anywhere on the planet. Just one hectare of rainforest at our research and education center Finca Las Piedras, for instance, contains more tree species than the entire Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most biodiverse protected area in the United States. The region is also a hotspot for butterfly diversity: working along a 65 km stretch of a single road leading from the Andean highlands near Cusco to the lowlands of Manu National Park, Peruvian entomologists have identified more than 2,500 species; compare this to about 900 butterflies in all of North America. This pattern repeats itself in nearly every other group of organisms that have been evaluated by scientists.
In addition to holding world records for biodiversity, southeastern Peru is also home to relatively healthy populations of charismatic wildlife species that are rare or declining elsewhere in the Amazon basin. Giant river otters, for instance, which have disappeared from large parts of their former Amazonian range, can easily be observed in many of the region’s rivers and oxbow lakes. Parrots and several species of brightly-colored macaws flock in the hundreds to “collpas”, where they feed on salt-rich clay from exposed river banks. Jaguars too are regularly seen resting on riverside beaches—with as many as 6,000 individuals found in Madre de Dios alone, the region is a stronghold for this top predator and symbol of the Amazon.
Why does biodiversity matter?
Apart from their intrinsic value, Amazonian plant and animal species interact to form a massive and highly complex ecosystem. That ecosystem, in turn, provides key benefits to humans—ecosystem services—that we rely on to live healthy, productive lives. The many billions of trees that comprise the rainforest, for example, filter air and produce much of the oxygen we breathe. They also transpire so much water in the process of photosynthesis that as much as half the rain that falls in some parts of the Amazon is the product of the rainforest itself. When species are lost—that is to say, when biodiversity declines—the natural cycles and food webs that underly these ecosystem services are disrupted. At local scales, biodiversity loss might mean in practical terms that streams that provide water for irrigating crops dry up. At larger scales, massive deforestation could lead to the collapse of a huge portion of the Amazon and its transition to a degraded, low-diversity savannah-like ecosystem. Sadly, there is mounting evidence that the Amazon is indeed approaching such a “tipping point”. If that happens, there will be cascading chain of impacts that affects not only those that live in and rely directly on the rainforest, but on the entire global climate and biosphere.
Conservation challenges
Across the Amazon—as in most of the world’s major tropical forests—the unsustainable extraction of natural resources and conversion of forest to agricultural use are the leading causes of biodiversity loss. In many ways, this situation has its roots in centuries-old patterns of exploitation; today, a major driver is the construction of roads through pristine areas by governments that are eager to develop their economies.
The Interoceanic Highway and the agricultural frontier in Madre de Dios
This highway was completed in 2011 with the goal of connecting Brazil’s industries and ports on the Atlantic with Peruvian ports on the Pacific. While many of the economic benefits touted by the project’s proponents have failed to materialize—the Interocianic Highway hasn’t yet led to the promised boom in trade between these two countries—a litany of negative environmental impacts has played out. An explosion of informal gold mining precipitated by increased access to the rainforest has devastated large parts of Madre de Dios and created a public health crisis due to miners’ extensive use of mercury to bind tiny gold fragments held in alluvial sediments. In addition, the improved access facilitated by the highway has led to land speculation and the conversion of large tracts of forest to export-centered agriculture. While these two activities are perhaps the most visible, the highway’s completion has had other widespread and negative impacts as well: extensive selective logging, illegal hunting of wildlife, and an annual fire season that consumes an ever-increasing number of hectares. Finally, many of these impacts—human-caused fires especially—are made constantly worse by the accelerating effects of global climate change.
How we're solving the problem
Clearly, the challenges facing the Amazon rainforest and its biodiversity in southeastern Peru are great. However, in this region we have a great advantage—despite the human activities mentioned above, more than half of the land in Madre de Dios has been committed by the Peruvian government to conservation. Furthermore, outside of national parks and other formal reserves, another large portion of the land is zoned for sustainable use. In particular, the state has designated more than one million hectares as concessions for the sustainable extraction of Brazil nuts from natural forest. This activity, which provides important income for many of the region’s families while leaving the rainforest mostly intact, is a rare win-win for both people and nature. Our work is centered in this part of the region, what we call the “Brazil Nut Corridor”. Our goal is to strengthen the management of the working Brazil nut forest to ensure that it continues to provide economic benefits for local communities, a home for the thousands of plant and animal species that also call it home, and a bridge between the region’s crucial protected areas—in other words, a biological corridor. By focusing on this critical choke point, we maximize the impact of our work toward keeping the Amazon functioning as it has for millions of years and ensure it will continue to provide myriad benefits to people both here and far away.
The context in which biodiversity loss has occurred or is currently occurring is important, as this determines the interventions that are likely to succeed and do so in a way that is just and beneficial to local communities. With this in mind, we’ve developed a three-pronged strategy to address the conservation challenges facing the Brazil Nut Corridor in Madre de Dios. First, given the huge gaps that exist in our knowledge of biodiversity in this region—we don’t even know what species occur here and we know even less about their threat status—we conduct basic biological research. Second, we take direct action to reverse deforestation and forest degradation by working with our local communities to keep wild what’s already wild and to rewild what’s been lost. And third, we provide quality environmental education to some of the region’s most underserved rural communities, to ensure that future leaders are empowered to manage biodiversity and other natural resources sustainably and thus maintain our gains long into the future.
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