Andes Amazon (Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Suriname)

Photo credit: Ronald Catpo, Conservación Amazónica – ACCA

In 2022, the Wyss Foundation provided a $11,500,000 grant to the Andes Amazon Fund to work with governments, local communities, and other stakeholders to permanently protect threatened and important intact forests in the Andes and Amazon Region of South America. This funding will sustain support for more than twenty local organizations, such as Nature and Culture International, Sociedad Peruana de Derecho Ambiental, Conservación Amazónica, Amazon Conservation Team, Natura Bolivia, and Fundación para la Conservación y el Desarrollo Sostenible to create new protected areas and improve their management throughout Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, and Ecuador.

Since helping to launch the Andes Amazon Fund in 2014, the Wyss Foundation’s support for the project has contributed to the permanent protection of more than 26.4 million acres in Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, and Ecuador through the declaration of sixty-five new permanently protected areas and Indigenous reserves. The Amazon region and lands along the eastern flank of the Andes Mountains are the most valuable area in the world for biodiversity conservation. The rain and cloud forests in the Amazon and the Andes Mountains’ eastern flank support habitat for one-third of the planet’s species of flora and fauna, generate almost a quarter of Earth’s freshwater, and provide a global sink for carbon that is critical to regulating the planet’s climatic cycles. Establishment of well-managed protected areas has been shown to be the most important single step we can take to reduce deforestation and safeguard the biodiversity of these irreplaceable ecosystems.

Over the next five years, the Andes Amazon Fund aims to help local communities safeguard an additional 20 million acres of high-biodiversity ecosystems through the declaration and sustainable management of new protected areas in the region.