Pico Bonito Forests LLC, Honduras

Nursery for Carbon Offset project/S.Paul

Pico Bonito Forests is a separate entity founded in 2006 by EcoLogic and its long-term partner in Honduras, the Pico Bonito National Park Foundation. This mission-driven, for-profit venture will plant two million native tropical hardwood trees to capture carbon dioxide and some of the trees will also be harvested using sustainable logging techniques.

The carbon credits resulting from these activities will then be offered through the World Bank's BioCarbon Fund to participating countries seeking to meet their carbon emissions reduction targets. Proceeds from the sale of carbon credits and timber will finance the project and support other EcoLogic initiatives in the region. EcoLogic's methodology is the fourth of eight approved approaches to receive certification under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol and serves as an important model for the world.

Project operations are located within the buffer zone of Pico Bonito National Park. The park encompasses a total of 265,000 picturesque acres of protected forestland near the north coast of Honduras and the Caribbean coastal town of La Ceiba. It is the third largest national park in the country and boasts one of the highest concentrations of biodiversity in the region.

Pico Bonito National Park is also home to 24,000 people from 82 communities that live in and around the park. These communities face the challenges of extreme poverty common in rural Honduras. Their daily struggles include water scarcity, lack of economic opportunities, substandard health care, and food insecurity.

The Problem

At a worldwide level, global warming threatens to alter the climate and poses potentially devastating effects to humans and the natural world. In response, international mechanisms such as the Kyoto Protocol are calling on nations to reduce their emissions, businesses are rethinking processes and facility operations to reduce energy consumption and waste, and individuals are rethinking overall consumption patterns (energy, transportation, food). Only by addressing the problem of carbon emissions at all levels can we hope to arrive at a working solution. Through its carbon offset work in Pico Bonito Forests, EcoLogic is engaged in providing a part of the solution to global warming.

At the local level, Pico Bonito National Park is facing destruction of its precious resources, loss of biodiversity, and degraded watersheds. Agricultural expansion is posing increased dangers for local inhabitants due to loss of forest and forest fires. Denuded land leaves the watersheds vulnerable to pollution and erosion, making it ever more challenging for families to find clean water. Pico Bonito Forests addresses the needs of the communities by establishing sustainable and financially successful reforestation and agroforestry programs and by creating jobs through commercial forestry practices and carbon sequestration.

A Part of the Solution

Reforestation is an important way to offset carbon emissions, since trees absorb carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. According to the Stern Review, approximately 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions result from land use change - namely deforestation.

Working toward solving the global warming crisis through forestry-based carbon offsetting measures will produce numerous social and environmental benefits for the underprivileged communities in the region. These benefits include restoring and expanding natural habitat, creating jobs, increasing agricultural income, and providing the necessary training required for locals to become effective environmental stewards. We seek to establish Pico Bonito Forests as a replicable model so that similar projects can be reproduced throughout the world.

For further reading on this project, visit

BioCarbon Fund's Pico Bonito Project Description or

The Angel Investor in Ecosystem Marketplace.

For more information on the Pico Bonito Forests LLC project or investing in EcoLogic's carbon offset work, e-mail us at carbon@ecologic.org.