Our Impact
The impact we’re making
Our work isn’t just making people’s lives better — it’s restoring biodiversity and helping to reduce the effects of climate change.
Find out how you can donate now to help us continue this vital work
The community
Loreto and Ucayali are two different regions of the Peruvian Amazon suffering many of the same issues — limited education, a scarce access to capital, and a significant dependence on small-scale agriculture and ranching vulnerable to crisis. As the soils are leached of nutrients, the environment becomes degraded and more rainforest is required to be cut down in order to grow crops. It is a vicious cycle of poverty and environmental degradation, meaning farmers and their families live ‘hand to mouth’ with no savings. Many young people are forced to leave the rainforest in search of work in distant cities of coastal Peru, or they remain and deforest new areas of the rainforest to eek out a living. The situation feels increasingly bleak for the families.
But Plant Your Future offers renewed hope. Introducing the agroforestry systems we have developed ensures farmers are able to create a sustainable income from growing short and long term produce.
Biodiversity
The Peruvian Amazon is one of the most biodiverse regions in the world — renowned for its abundance of rare animal, bird and plant life, it is designated as High Conservation Value Forest for its high levels of endemic and rare fauna and flora.
Our Loreto project area falls within two ecoregions as described by the WWF — the Napo Moist Forest and Amazon River and Flooded Forests. These areas are home to critically endangered species such as the Iquitos Gnatcatcher (Polioptila clementsi), black-faced spider monkey (Ateles chamek), Peruvian woolly monkey (Lagothrix cana), and the Giant Brazilian Otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). And in just one hectare of the Napo Moist Forest, more than 310 different tree species have been found to exist.
Our work is helping to restore degraded land to the rainforest — increasing forest cover, expanding habitat for these rare species and promoting eco-systems connectivity by creating wildlife corridors between rainforest areas and national parks.
Climate Change and Carbon Offsets
When trees grow they take carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air and store it in their trunk and branches. But when they’re cut down and burnt, this releases the stored CO2 back into the atmosphere. When those aren’t replaced, greenhouse gases continue to build up, causing numerous problems for the world’s climate.
By reforesting degraded lands in our project, we’re helping to counteract the harmful effects of the deforestation that has already occurred there — such as intense heat and irregular weather patterns that affect growing times. We are measuring our trees so we know just how much CO2 they contain. By quantifying the carbon stored in trees we hope to generate additional revenue for the farmers and project by selling carbon offsets. Our project has been validated by the Rainforest Alliance against the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Standard and the Verified Carbon Standard. If you’re interested in buying carbon offsets from the project we’d love to hear from you.
Get in touch