Forests4Water Brazil: Community Climate Action

Happy New Year to all our wonderful donors and friends across the world! 

And may 2022 bring us health, happiness and many new adventures!

And as we sit here in the rainy rainforest, and plan for 2022, we hope you will forgive us if we start with a few reflections and updates on where we have come together, and the amazing things that your support has enabled us to do in 2021.

We´ve expanded our forestry team, which now consists of Luiz, Alfredo, Deivid and Fran as well as eight other members of the local community who lend a hand when required - which is nearly all the time! 

We're completing our 2021 goal of planting 20,000 beautiful rainforest trees.

We're expanded the capacity in our forest nursery and are already propagating seedlings for the 2022 planting season - with a goal of planting 35,000 trees. 

And the backroom boys and girls have been hard at work maintaining our website, improving data collection for our Geographical Information System, working in communications and fundraising, cataloging our medicinal plants, running education courses, and coordinating our wonderful volunteers who come from far and near to help us fulfill our mission of Saving Forests and Changing Lives. 

Thank you, dear donors, from the bottom of our hearts. None of this would have happened without you.  

And we can't wait to see what we can do together in 2022!  

Have a wonderful New Year, and please look after yourselves, 

with rainforest love from

the Iracambi team  

Dear wonderful donors!

Before we go any further we want to share with you a message that popped into our mailbox five minutes ago. It’s from one of our new donors, and it really brought a smile to our faces. Here´s what he says.

“Rainforests are hugely important to our global climate, and their protection comes from the people that live amongst them. Increasing ownership, knowledge and awareness of their importance amongst future generations is going to be key to driving the regional & global policy change that will protect them at scale.”

Yess! Right on. We couldn´t agree more. And every aspect of our forestry program emphasizes the importance of  protecting the rainforest. Especially when we are working with community members and young apprentices. 

So here’s a quick update from the field. Yes, it’s raining and yes we are planting just as fast as we can. But we also wanted to take a moment to update you on progress in the nursery, because we are really happy about how things are shaping up.

Of course, nursery work never ends – and that’s just the way we like it. But we have hit some milestones… First we have completed our Seed House. As you can see it’s a low-tech operation, using bamboo for the walls. It’s a place for storing seeds and working with seed preparation. Already two different team members have expressed an interest in living there - but we had to explain that it’s designed for seeds, not for people!

The other building project involves a barn – a shelter for nursery equipment, vehicles, organic fertilizer, and the like. Just what we needed. And incidentally, no one has yet demanded to live in it. Something to do with having no walls, perhaps?! Plus we have totally reorganized the toolshed. (Check the photo.)

We've also expanded the area used for hardening off the seedlings before they are planted out. And we’ve included our medicinal plants education area in the nursery compound.  So we’re going to start 2022 in really good shape – which is just as well since we´ll be completing the planting of the 20,000 seedlings for 2021, AND we´ll be planting another 35, 000.

So this comes with lots of love and appreciation, and please take care of yourselves!

Luiz, Alfredo, Deivid and the Iracambi forestry team