Pro-Natura

location:Juruena, Brazil

summary: Charlotte di Vita's fundraising career took off in 1990, directly after she organised The First Anglo-Brazilian Conference of the Environment that was patroned by HRH The Prince of Wales. Charlotte secured a donation of $1,250,000 from the British private sector for Pro-Natura, a Brazilian-based Rainforest Preservation non-profit organisation.

This donation enabled Pro-Natura to initiate a project in Juruena, an area of Amazonian rainforest extremely vulnerable to logging and other unsustainable agricultural practices that rapidly damage the rainforest. The project examines extractivist reserve techniques, agricultural improvement schemes and land revitalisation techniques for communities settled on the margins of the rainforest in Mato Grosso. The project has created alternatives to logging and agriculturally degrading land practices in order to halt further encroachment into virgin forest by Juruena's farmers.

This expertise is now being extended to six other municipalities, covering an area of over 10 million hectares of rainforest - an area larger than the British Isles.

In Juruena, Pro-Natura established a Research Centre for Agroforestry, testing rotational land use models that could overcome the slash and burn degradation cycle that has become common place in the Amazon as a whole.

Charlotte's experiences with this project led her to understand the need to create sustainable markets for ethical trade and so sowed the seed from which Trade plus Aid grew.

For more information on Pro-Natura visit www.pronatura.org

Eight thousand years ago, large tracts of ancient forest covered almost half the earth's land. Today only one fifth of the original forests remain.

Commercial logging poses by far the greatest danger to frontier forests. More than 80% of the logging in Brazil is illegal. Pulp and paper production swallows around 4 billion trees a year.

A single acre of rainforest can contain as many different plant species as the whole of the UK (around 1,500).

source:
EIA March 2003