Rogers launches campaign to alleviate poverty to conserve rainforests
Amy Rogers has launched a crowdfunding campaign to support Forest for a Living, which seeks to pilot the first cost-efficient solution to deforestation and farmer exploitation in the tropics. The initiative was the direct result of the Switzer Foundation's Leadership Grant support for three years of her work with the Pinchot Institute for Conservation in Ecuador.
From the initiative's campaign website:
We think that incentive programs should focus on empowering forest communities as self-sustaining entrepreneurs rather than on the payments themselves, and that all tangible steps toward that goal should be explicitly tied to conservation promises. This approach closes the loopholes that are causing so many incentive programs to fail right now.
She started planning the initiative in 2008 as one of two different approaches to the conservation-poverty dilemma in the Ecuadorian Chocò. The initiative has morphed into a very collaborative effort amongst a suite of institutions, including 1998 Switzer Fellow Josh Donlan's Advanced Conservation Strategies, the Pinchot Institute for Conservation, local Fundacion Equilibrio Azul, and the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
