February - March 2003

New & Notable on www.eco-index.org: Land Management, Community Involvement

Project name: Iracambi Atlantic Rainforest Sustainable Development Program

Managing organizations, project location: Iracambi Recursos Naturais, Ltda.; Sociedade de Amigos de Iracambi, Minas Gerais, Brazil

Project director: Robin Le Breton, Binka Le Breton

Synopsis: Iracambi looks for ways to make forest conservation more attractive than its destruction, to make conservation profitable for the local community, enabling residents to live from and with the forest. Our goal is to combine biodiversity conservation with sustainable land management, and to discover and implement better ways of managing both forested and deforested lands.

Annual budget and donors: $30,000 from Partners of the Americas; British Embassy Small Grants Fund

Lessons learned: "Maybe we're foolish and haven't learned anything, but we don't think there is anything we would do differently if we were to start again. Sure, we took some wrong turns, but we learned from them. By far our biggest headache and time waster is government bureaucracy: it always takes months for the simplest thing to be approved and requires endless patience. General lessons, which everyone will tell you: Everything takes twice as long as you think it will; you can never invest too much time in building up local support; build partnerships."

Contact:

Fazenda Iracambi; Rosário da Limeira
368878-00 Minas Gerais, Brasil
tel: +55-32/ 3721-1436
iracambi@iracambi.com

Read the complete project profile on the Eco-Index:
www.eco-index.org/search/393.html

Read the project profile in Portuguese:
www.eco-index.org/search/393p.html