Over at SeedMagazine.com, there's a great discussion of the need to align economic incentives and biological imperatives. Problems could be averted if species had a value that was neither zero nor infinity, and if there were incentives for people to engage in environmental stewardship before a species becomes endangered. ... We can also use market mechanisms to transfer the actual value of environmental assets to stakeholders in a local community....
La Prensa has published a piece on our sea kayak training program (in Spanish), designed to promote eco-tourism in San Juan del Sur and Ostional. The goal of this program is to train young people to become eco-tourism guides, taking advantage of their region's natural beauty (and the kayaks we've furnished with the help of USAID) to launch their own micro-businesses and educate people about the mangroves and coastal ecosystems...
We're pleased to see that a small tourism business is offering a special package for our harbor clean up! For $20, guests will be provided transportation between Managua and San Juan del Sur, where they'll be served lunch and be able to participate in the clean up activities. This is just the indicator of success we love to see! A for-profit business is recognizing the value of our conservation work,...
We're getting ready for our first-ever harbor clean up in San Juan del Sur. Along with the usual coastline clean-up crews, we'll be working with teams of boaters and divers to pull up, haul away, and inventory inorganic waste on the bottom of the bay (presumably mostly abandoned nets and traps). Wokring with the Municipality of San Juan del Sur, the Reef Foundation, and San Juan del Sur CANTUR, we'll...
Julie Martinez, our environmental education instructor, has been working with elementary school kids in the Rivas province of Nicaragua. The kids are learning about the ecology of tropical dry forests, and starting to address environmental problems in their own community.
We are pleased to partner with Flora and Fauna International on a public awareness campaign to discourage the consumption of sea turtle eggs. We are surveying restaurants and market vendors, and asking them to commit to stop selling turtle eggs. We also visit schools to promote sea turtle protection.
We've officially launched our sea turtle program in the Rivas province, and La Prensa picked it up to share the story with the rest of Nicaragua. The campaign, designed to protect critically endangered sea turtles who nest on the beaches of Nicaragua, include environmental education, water conservation, eco-tourism, and local development. It also includes a sea turtle incentive payment program described by country director Liza González: Es un programa de...
Over at the Cantur San Juan del Sur blog, they're helping us gear up for Earth Day, by advertising our first ever Earth Day Forum. We'll be in San Juan del Sur, "a small place on this wonderful planet Earth, endowed with exceptional and endless beauty" April 22nd and 23rd, making it Nicaragua's Earth Day headquarters. The goal of the event is to celebrate the natural beauty of the region...
Our parrot video is now available in English!
Please watch our video addressing the issue of poaching parrots in Nicaragua. Once abundant in tropical forests, the Yellow-naped parrot (Lora Nuca Amarillo in Spanish) is increasingly rare in Nicaragua, where habitat destruction and poaching have reduced its numbers rapidly. Poachers are often young rural farmers who climb over 15 meters into trees or chop down trees to take parrot chicks out of their nests. Yellow-naped parrots only have one...
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