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 ManagementIn 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 ConservationThrough 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 ProgramForest 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 AlternativesWe 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.
Water
Water is a universal necessity of life. Increasingly polluted and diminishing fresh water supplies threaten health and food security and stifle economic growth. 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.
Through its watershed and coastal management programs, EcoLogic works with its partners and local communities to foster stewardship of water resources. This ensures that clean water remains available and coastal resources are managed sustainably.
EcoLogic strengthens community stewardship of water through:
- protection of water sources
- watershed management
- organization of community leadership to manage water supplies
Read about EcoLogic's current projects fostering water stewardship:
Take the Water Quiz
On average, a person living in the United States uses 80 - 100 gallons of water a day. Millions of people living in poor, rural areas of the world rely on less than 5 gallons and women have to travel up to 3.7 miles daily to gather water for their families. Think you could live on 5 gallons a day?
Forests
Only half of the original forest cover remains in Central America. From 1990-2005 alone, the region's cover declined by 19% - the largest percentage loss in Latin America - driven primarily by the expansion of agriculture and cattle ranching. Often, deforestation is fueled by subsistence needs of the poor as well as environmentally unsustainable commercial expansion.
Through its forest management programs, EcoLogic works with its partners and local communities to foster stewardship of tropical forests. These projects conserve and restore the forests on which local communities depend and help protect the planet's rich diversity of living things.
EcoLogic strengthens stewardship of tropical forests through:
- Reforestation of degraded lands
- Forest guards who patrol and protect forests
- Protected area management
- Fuel-efficient wood-burning stoves
- Agroforestry
Read about EcoLogic's current projects building forest stewardship:
- Totonicapán, Guatemala
- Huehuetenango, Guatemala
- Sarstun, Guatemala
- Pico Bonito National Park, Honduras
- Atlántida, Honduras
Take the Carbon Quiz
All trees are naturally a great carbon sink, meaning they trap carbon found in the atmosphere in their leaves, branches, trunks, and roots. Every day trees are actively sequestering carbon and curbing the effects of climate change!
Fuel-Efficient Wood-Burning Stoves
"The stove changes life greatly," Don Diego says. "In the first place, we no longer eat on the ground; the stove serves as a table. Food is more hygienic, less dangerous for the children. No longer is there smoke in the house. And the important thing is that with the stove we use little firewood... Before we cut down one tree every month, now we cut one tree every two and a half months."
Don Diego García is the head of a household with 6 adults and 8 children in the town of Tiak'tak in the mountains of northwestern Guatemala. His family previously used an open-pit fire to cook their food, the standard method for the rural poor. Not only does this type of cooking create high levels of smoke in the home-exposing women and children in particular to the harmful chemicals that are released-but because the heat is not contained, it also requires large amounts of firewood to achieve and maintain temperatures high enough for cooking food.
With EcoLogic's support, the Garcias installed a fuel-efficient wood-burning stove in their home. The fuel-efficient wood-burning stoves use up to 60% less firewood, resulting in a drastic reduction in the number of trees cut down for fuel. The stoves also eliminate harmful smoke from the home, reducing the incidence of respiratory illness, especially in women and children.
Community members engaged in forest and water stewardship activities receive priority when stoves are introduced to a village. In exchange for receiving a stove, each family commits to either protection or reforestation of nearby forests or adopting agroforestry, which restores trees to the landscape.
Stoves are currently being constructed in the following EcoLogic projects:
- Totonicapán, Guatemala
- Huehuetenango, Guatemala
- Sarstun, Guatemala
- Olanchito, Honduras
- Atlántida, Honduras
Agroforestry
Agroforestry is a method of agriculture that integrates trees and shrubs with crops like corn, beans, and coffee. By taking advantage of the natural benefits of trees, small-scale farmers can use agroforestry to produce more using less land, easing their burden while improving their lands.
Though tropical forests are often destroyed for agriculture, EcoLogic is helping small farmers to reap the rewards forests offer by reintroducing trees onto their lands. By integrating trees into agricultural lands, small-scale farmers can:
- reduce erosion
- provide a source of organic fertilizer
- maintain a healthy climate for crops
- create habitat for local pollinators and wildlife
Moreover, the natural benefits of trees reduce the time and labor required of farmers, freeing them to spend more time with their families and their communities. Ultimately, these farmers are producing food in an environmentally-friendly way that, by increasing yields, reduces the need to clear more forests for agricultural lands.
In many projects, EcoLogic is using a fast-growing native tree species known locally as guama (Inga edulis). Grown alongside corn and beans, this tree provides a wealth of benefits:
The branches of the guama tree can be trimmed and the wood used for firewood, reducing the pressure on nearby forests.
As leaves fall and decompose, they provide organic material to replace nutrients and enrich the soil. The leaves also serve as mulch, suppressing the growth of weeds.
Trees shade the soil, cooling it and helping it to retain more moisture.
The roots of guama help with nitrogen fixation, converting atmospheric nitrogen into a form that can be used by plants.
Current EcoLogic projects that utilize agroforestry:
CarbonPlus Program
EcoLogic’s CarbonPlus program is engaged in the forest carbon field at multiple levels ranging from policy to implementation.
The CarbonPlus program's ultimate goal is to implement forest carbon projects on-the-ground in Central America and Mexico. We will provide both financial support and technical services to local community organizations who share this goal. We refuse carbon credit ownership from projects in order to maximize revenues for local communities.
Although CarbonPlus is focused on project development, we also recognize our responsibility to develop the emergent forest carbon field. We are involved with both capacity building to create forest carbon community leaders and engaged in standards development to ensure that emerging standards are scientifically justified and locally viable.
Policy Development: CarbonPlus staff assist with preventing deforestation, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), Improved Forest Managment (IFM), Reforestation (A/R), and Carbon projects. Please see our advisory services page for a list of services we provide to project proponents.
Capacity Building: CarbonPlus led a field trip on carbon monitoring at Bosques Pico Bonito, Honduras for over 60 community leaders and local NGO staff in August, 2010. CarbonPlus also conducted a forest monitoring workshop for its own field staff in Guatemala in October, 2010.
Standards Development: CarbonPlus staff actively participate in the development of both Climate Action Reserve (CAR) Mexico and international Plan Vivo forestry protocols as members of the technical committees for these standards.
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