Word: forested
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...areas can be low, which means there are few potential buyers. The Nature Conservancy bought the rights to 1.6 million acres adjoining Bolivia's Noel Kempff Mercado National Park in 1998 for $1 an acre--doubling the park's size. In 2000 Conservation International leased 200,000 acres of forest in southeastern Guyana for a $20,000 up-front fee and annual payments of 15[cents] an acre. Even where loggers cannot be bought out, the damage they do can be reduced. In the Congo the Wildlife Conservation Society has persuaded the German firm CIB to feed its workers beef...
...also introduce humans into remote, fragile ecosystems where they would not otherwise go. Some of the better-run ecotourist ventures have mastered low-impact tours, using income from the visitors to keep certain areas pristine. Programme for Belize, a nonprofit group, has bought 260,000 acres of forest in northwestern Belize--about 4% of the country's total land area--that had been destined for logging. Half of the area is now a reserve, surrounded by a buffer zone in which forestry and tourism are permitted. Ecotourism covers some 60% of the reserve's management costs. Saba Marine Park...
...June the U.S., working with three environmental groups, canceled $5.5 million of Peru's foreign debt. In exchange, Peru will extend protection to 27.5 million acres of tropical rain forest containing pink river dolphins, jaguars, scarlet macaws and giant water lilies. Nongovernment groups will monitor the protected areas to make sure the regulations are enforced. "It's a public-private partnership in the best sense of the word," says Stuart Irvin, an attorney with Covington & Burling in Washington who gave pro bono legal advice on this deal and similar swaps. "Everyone comes out a winner...
CARBON CREDIT OFFSETS Under the Kyoto treaty to combat global warming, Western Europe and Japan must reduce carbon emissions below 1990 levels. (The U.S. has refused to ratify the treaty.) One way to reach the target involves paying poorer countries to keep their land under forests, which absorb carbon from the atmosphere. For example, Japan could pay Peru not to log rain forest. The amount of carbon absorbed by those trees would then be counted as a credit on Japan's carbon-emission balance sheet. "This would reverse a trend in human history," says Irvin. "Suddenly land is more valuable...
PHILANTHROPY Private purchases of wilderness areas received at least a temporary boost with the surging stock markets of the 1990s and the billionaires they created. One of the most spectacular deals was the 750,000-acre acquisition of temperate rain forest in southern Chile by Doug Tompkins, who has headed the North Face and Esprit clothing companies. Tompkins spent some $15 million to acquire Pumalin Park, which stretches from the Chilean coast to Argentina. He is now buying land on the coast of Patagonia in southern Argentina to establish a reserve there. Other big private purchasers include Alan Weeden...