Amazon Fund. Activity Report 2012

Summary

To make its activities transparent, the Amazon Fund publishes the online version of its reports on the internet. In addition to serving as instruments to render accounts, reports record and disseminate the Amazon Fund’s efforts and results to society. so far, the activity reports for 2009, 2010 and 2011 have been published.

This is the fourth activity report published by the Amazon Fund since it was created in 2008. Over these years, the Fund has allocated a substantial amount of non-reimbursable financial resources to the Amazon Region. A total of R$ 440 million was approved and earmarked for 36 projects that have impacted over 300 municipalities in the Amazon Biome. Up to the end of 2012, some 24 projects received financial resources to the tune of R$ 142 million to implement efforts aimed at developing sustainable production activities, environmental and land-title regularization, besides registering rural properties, recovering degraded and permanent protection areas, consolidating and maintaining protected areas, strengthening institutions, physically and operationally structuring governmental agencies engaged in environmental management, as well as expanding know-how to better use the biodiversity in the region. 

To develop sustainable production activities, support was approved for partner institutions to launch calls-to-submission to select projects. Besides this, the Amazon Fund launched its first and direct call-to-submission, seeking to offer support for lumber and non-lumber forest management, aquaculture, fishing arrangements, as well as agro-ecological and agro-forestry systems. With these initiatives, the scale of support for small projects was expanded, enabling access to traditional communities, indigenous people and settlements, as well as family farmers, and public deemed priorities for the Fund. 

The Amazon Fund also approved the first structuring project presented by the federal government through the Brazilian Forestry Service (SFB), in the amount of R$ 65 million. This project will carry out the forest inventory of Brazil’s Amazon, with extensive research of information related to forest resources, carbon stocks and how populations in the region use the land. It will, therefore, present a broad spectrum of results, while the teams out in the field will cover the entire region of the biome. 

Another effort that warrants mention is the expanded support to combat forest fires and unauthorized burn-offs, with the approval of projects for state firefighters in Acre, Tocantins, Rondônia and Pará. Together with the Mato Grosso project, approved in 2011, more than R$ 60 million has been earmarked for these efforts. 

For more palpable transformation in the development model in the region, which fosters improved standards of living for inhabitants, it is necessary to more intensely develop chains of knowledge and innovation. For this reason, five new projects were provided support for technological and scientific development. 

Finally, the Fund’s international efforts were put underway, with the analysis of a project proposed by the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (OTCA), which covers seven other countries in South America that share the Amazon Biome with Brazil. This project is aimed at systematic monitoring of the biome’s forest coverage. At the time this report was being published, the final approval was being given for the financial support requested by the OTCA, in the amount of R$ 23 million.

The year 2012 was an important milestone in sustainable development on the planet, with the United Nations’ Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio+20, in June. In the seminar “The Amazon Fund: Building its History”, participants of the Conference had the opportunity to hear reports from those that actually carried out eight of the projects supported by the Fund, including results and experiences in implementation.

In the near future, we will be taking action so the Amazon Fund can reach a new level in operations, concentrating efforts so as to develop structuring projects and expand the reach of operations by means of calls-to-submission to select projects, promoted, mainly, by partner institutions, both from the private sector or the government. 

The Amazon Fund is on its way to becoming more and more associated with an innovative agenda for sustainable development that has been adapted to the Amazon Region, decisively contributing to improve standards of living and the preservation, recovery and rational use of natural resources.