What We Do
EcoLogic works with communities to foster sustainable livelihoods and protect biodiversity. We aim to conserve unique landscapes in Central America and Mexico by putting rural communities in charge of managing local natural resources. By working with local partners we are helping communities become better environmental stewards of their land.
Our Five Areas of Focus:
- Water Resource Management
- Forest Conservation
- CarbonPlus Program
- Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES)
- Sustainable Livelihood Alternatives
Water Resource Management
In Central America, only 21% of the freshwater available in 1950 remains today. This decline is due to extensive deforestation and a lack of economic incentives for sustainable land use. We work with community led water committees to protect their water sources through watershed management.
Forest Conservation
Through reforestation, Protected Areas (PA) management plans, the installation of fuel efficient wood stoves, the establishment of agroforestry plots that reduce carbon emissions and increase crop yields, the training of "forest guardians" and park rangers, and more we aim to turn the tide on deforestation.
CarbonPlus Program
Forest loss and degradation are major contributors to global climate change and constitute the second largest source of anthropogenic CO2 emissions after fossil fuel combustion. By using carbon profits as incentives for communities to decrease pressure on forests, the program simultaneously conserves biodiversity and important ecosystems, increases forest carbon stocks, and strengthens rural communities.
Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES)
A voluntary transaction where the provider of an environmental service is compensated by a buyer for continuously securing the provision of that service. In other words, the buyer compensates the provider for protecting the environment and ensuring that an ecosystem service will continue to exist.
Sustainable Livelihood Alternatives
We understand that lack of alternatives is a major reason the rural poor degrade natural resources. EcoLogic works to promote sustainable agriculture, non-timber forest products and community enterprise. We are working to provide these alternative opportunities that improve individual and community well-being.
Why Plant Trees?
Or perhaps the more relevant question for our readers: Why help EcoLogic support and encourage remote villages and communities to plant trees?
Don Diego García lives in the village of Tiak’tak, one of several communities established around a 37,500 acre forest in northwestern Guatemala. The forest is part of a half-million acre stretch that EcoLogic’s partner, the Northern Border Municipalities Alliance (MFN), hopes to establish as the Maya Chuj Biosphere Reserve. A few years ago, Don Diego volunteered for EcoLogic -sponsored training to become a “guardabosque” or forest guardian, because, as EcoLogic field technician Daniel Herrera reports, “Don Diego sees the forest disappearing and says we can’t let that happen or we will disappear, too.”
 Don Diego tends to the thousand Alder seedlings he created by cloning. |
In 2010 EcoLogic helped the community of Tiak’tak set up a nursery to produce tree seedlings, including Andean Alder trees (Alnus acuminata), a fast-growing species that works particularly well at higher altitudes as a companion tree to food crops. This practice, known as agroforestry, combines planting of particular tree and food species to provide multiple benefits including increased crop yields, reduced pesticide and fertilizer use, and a more biologically diverse ecosystem. In this way, the communities of the MFN have started to plant alder trees to ring the bare mountains, combat soil erosion when the rains come, and eventually seed the recovery of the mountainsides. And corn, beans and other crops are interspersed among the trees, benefiting from their leaf litter that enriches the soil, retains moisture, and suppresses weeds.
But this past year the Alder seeds collected for the Tiak’tak nursery were of inferior quality and many did not sprout. In an EcoLogic workshop Don Diego had learned how to create plants from cuttings or “clones,” and he decided to use this new technique to try to remedy the situation. He began from cuttings he took from established young alder trees, and in just four months he had amassed more than a thousand viable young seedlings. And he figured out how to do this without artificial hormone treatments or other agrochemicals which can be costly and dangerous. Don Diego has begun showing his “neighbors” – those next door and those several villages away – how to do the same. As EcoLogic field technician Antonio Chipel relates, “Don Diego is eager to share what he has learned, and we are working with him to incorporate his approach into future workshops for the guardabosques.”
This is a key facet of what EcoLogic does: We learn from our partners and collaborators, as they do from us, and we look for ways to spread the lessons we have learned together to other villages, communities, provinces and countries. It is through this collaboration that we transform the activities of individuals into an expanding mosaic of complementary effort and impact.
So whether planting trees for agroforestry, to provide a renewable source of fuel wood, or to expand a wildlife corridor or protect a running river, we try to always see the big picture, and act recognizing that it is many cumulative actions and behaviors – both human and non – that create the landscape we live in. To put it another way: we do our best to see the forest for the trees, but we also know the trees are an integral part. To restore the forests will take nature, new practices and behaviors, but it will also take the many hands of our allies, friends, collaborators, and community members who plant trees.
Won’t you help us plant those trees?
EcoLogic is a not-for-profit environmental organization that empowers rural and indigenous peoples to restore and protect tropical ecosystems. We help communities identify and put in place a variety of strategies to increase their economic self-sufficiency, environmental health, and adaptability in response to climate change in ways that also encourage the long-term survival of the biodiversity around them.