Greenhouse Gases - REDD Solutions

One of the things I like most about working at EcoLogic and in the international conservation field is the daily learning. Of course, sometimes it feels like a fire hose is full-force spraying me with way more ideas than I can possibly absorb, but I love it.

Of all the topics that make my head spin, forest carbon ranks as one of the most challenging to understand. And using the potential of forests to capture and store carbon as a response to climate change is almost as tough a topic. It’s not just because the literature is chock full of jargon and language that few normal mortals use to communicate (ex ante, anthropogenic, jurisdictional nesting …).

So where to begin? EcoLogic develops forest carbon projects– which take advantage of the fact that standing forests and new forest growth absorb carbon dioxide, then lock up the carbon via photosynthesis. And you thought you would never need to care about photosynthesis after cramming for a high school biology exam!

La Cojolita Mountain Range in Chiapas, Mexico.

First, climate change brought on by global carbon emissions is a big deal and constant changing of land ownership is a huge part of the problem, but also a potential solution for sustainable, effective change.

It’s not just about energy and automobiles spewing those nasty gases anymore. It’s also about recognizing that good old nature can play a significant role in solving the problem and that we are part of nature.
One of the biggest solutions proposed has been – REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation). So that’s where the second reason for EcoLogic’s involvement comes in. We believe REDD, which seeks to pay local people to keep forests standing – in other words not cut down trees and release the carbon from them – can achieve conservation on a landscape scale, farther than the eye can see across a sea of green!


We believe that it is vital to ensure local people can make informed decisions and understand what the heck it is they’re getting into and have their rights respected if they enter into contractual agreements to profit from the benefits of conserving their forests. Especially because the international climate policy “architecture” makes it necessary to interact with powerful state and federal governments that play a practical role in monitoring across large landscapes and national territories.

So the basic deal is that people who own or live near and care for a forest get money for agreeing not to cut stuff down, or trash the area under the forest canopy, because this keeps a ton of global warming-causing crud out of the atmosphere.

Bryan Foster, EcoLogic's CarbonPlus Director in the rainforest.

The money to pay them comes from a variety of sources such as international aid (sometimes ponying up aid money or agreeing to swap debt for nature initiatives) and markets like the one in California under its pioneering California Global Warming Solutions Act (AB-32). In the latter case, the dinero comes from a cap and trade compliance market, where companies reduce their smokestack (and other) emissions by becoming more efficient down to a certain point and then buy credits that others have to spare because of their emissions reductions or absorption awesomeness. California just happens to have gotten involved on the international scene, connecting Chiapas, Mexico, and Acre, Brazil to its AB-32 marketplace.

Sounds simple enough, right? Not exactly if it’s done right. EcoLogic works to help make it more accessible, but even our CarbonPlus director is on a steady diet of discovery and learning as he goes about his day-to-day (which today, has him deep in the jungle in Mexico, but more on that later).

To do REDD right and make it easier for local communities, we need to be legit. You can plant a tree or prevent the cutting of a forest and claim less greenhouse gases are reaching the atmosphere. Your claim would be basically true, but to be REDD certified, you have to meet three key stipulations. 1) You have to make sure the trees you protect are ones that would have been lost otherwise, in other words the trees actually need to be under threat of being cut down, and this new carbon credits incentive structure is keeping them from being cut down; 2) that there isn’t “leakage,” meaning people aren’t just moving their deforestation habits outside of the credited REDD project area; and 3) that there’s a reasonable assurance of permanence, in other words, the forest will stay standing for a long time after the official project has ended.

Xaté palm, which is frequently extracted from the rainforests to sell internationally.

Thankfully, groups like the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) and the Commission on Environmental Cooperation (CEC, a tri-national commission between Canada, the US, and Mexico) are into what we do. We’ve helped folks in Honduras gain VCS validation, and we’re working in Chiapas, Mexico with three Mayan communities to conserve a biodiverse jewel, the Lacandón Jungle.

So that’s our carbon work in a nutshell. Intense – I know!

What do you think about our carbon work and the REDD project in Mexico?

- David Kramer, Senior Program Officer for EcoLogic
David researches and authors EcoLogic's proposals and reports to institutional funders. He also helps coordinate staff and partners in EcoLogic's participatory project design and evaluation.

Connecting the Dots

Do you remember the childhood game of connect the dots? I used to play it all the time when I was a kid. There was something satisfying about drawing a line from one dot to the next to create a picture. Now, I love helping my 2-year old son do the same. The realization dawning on his face when that picture forms is priceless! It is a simple game and in the end, reveals so much. But why am I talking about a children’s game?

What does that have to do with EcoLogic?

Simply put what EcoLogic does is not that simple. It is complex. So in 2011 we started the campaign Connect the Dots in an effort to explain how building a fuel-efficient stove in Guatemala should matter to a lawyer in Boston, or why a composting latrine in Panama should be important to a student in San Francisco.

The message: we are all truly connected.

Last year I met Don Vicente Canales on his farm in northern Honduras. He spoke about
his recent successes incorporating agroforestry techniques into his farm land and how the
technical support provided by EcoLogic has helped.

Whether you are a farmer in remote village in Guatemala or a lobster fisherman off the shores of Cape Cod, water is the source of life— we are all connected. We all share the Earth – and we should all work as hard as we can to protect it. Our approach is holistic and the tools we use are diverse.

On the same trip as meeting Don Vincent Canales I met up with some local girls who took the hike up the hills to see their community water tank.

This campaign is about drawing lines from the tools we use to help illustrate the connections, not only between each EcoLogic project but between you, me, the villages we support, and the rest of the world.

EcoLogic wants all people in Central America and Mexico to have the motivation and the ability to protect the environment and provide for themselves in sustainable ways, so that they can improve their well-being and quality of life.

Doña Ovina Hurtado, a Community Leader in Punta Alegre smiling with her
 friend during a recent trip to the Gulf of San Miguel in Panama.

We hope that our efforts to Connect the Dots between the people and places where we work will hit home for you. So, stay tuned for our messaging about Connect the Dots. We would like you to read our words and imagine the picture that forms by connecting all the dots. And remember, you are an important "dot" that helps complete the picture.

- Gina Rindfleisch, Program Officer for EcoLogic
Gina manages EcoLogic's fundraising activities targeting individual donations. Prior to joining EcoLogic she served for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nicaragua working in environmental education and holds a BA in environmental studies from Long Island University. 

Don’t call it a comeback…

Spring has sprung, flowers are blooming, and EcoLogic is blogging. This feels right.

Even though EcoBlogic has been on hiatus since July – EcoLogic certainly hasn’t.With ongoing projects from Mexico to Panama and regional staff working with hundreds of communities with reforestation projects and water source protection, we have plenty to show you.

For instance, did you all know what an inga seed looks like?

Inga, or guama in Spanish, is a plant used in agroforestry. Agroforesty is a method of farming that mixes small trees and shrubs in among crops. Why would you want to do that, you ask? Well, good question. Agroforestry farming takes advantage of the natural benefits of trees and shrubs, such as reducing soil erosion because of their root system, shading crops with their leaves, and then, when the leaves fall and decompose, acting as a natural fertilizer for the soil.

Now, the beauty of using inga is that its native to the areas where we work and when farmers use it in their fields they can, overtime, double their crop yield!

How about fuel-efficient stoves? Have you seen them in action?

This is a stove we built in Honduras and - since we use local, readily available materials - it is made from adobe. For rural communities in Honduras, families typically use open-pit fires, like you would for camping. This method is inefficient and dangerous. The fuel-efficient stoves we build are up to 60% more efficient, so that means less wood has to be collected and fewer trees are removed from the forest.

So that’s why we have created EcoBlogic – to give you a closer look at our work and perhaps see it in a different light. Also, we also want to hear from you - your questions, your comments. Tell us what you think, what you want to know more about, who you want to hear from. We welcome all comments!

Panama Latrine Team

Mangrove forests in the Gulf of San Miguel, Panama.

In December of 2008, I began working for EcoLogic in Panama’s Gulf of San Miguel where 16% of Panama’s mangroves can be found; the area is rich in biodiversity and has an impressive scenic beauty. In the coastal zone, there are many established fishing communities, which depend on these mangroves and their wildlife populations to exist. Right now, EcoLogic is working in five of these communities: Río Congo, Punta Alegre, Puento Lara, La Puntita, and Arretí.

Part of our work involves coordinating community consultations where we hear from the local people about their lives and circumstances. Based on these consultations, we help them prioritize their concerns and jointly devise solutions to address their primary challenges. In the Gulf of San Miguel main concerns include access to clean drinking water and the effects diminishing fish stock in the mangroves are having on their livelihoods.  This is why our focus in Panama is centered on water, environmental cleanup, and strengthening community-based organizations devoted to the sustainable management of natural resources.



Community members building a composting latrine.

In Puerto Lara and Punta Alegre, we are developing a plan for watershed management and outlining steps to strengthen local water councils. In Puerto Lara, we are also establishing a tree nursery which will have the capacity to produce 10,000 seedlings a year for enriching and repopulating the nearby microwatershed. In Río Congo, we are building composting latrines which will reduce runoff and contamination of the mangroves. In Punta Alegre, all of the community stakeholders are coming together to identify a location where they can build a water aqueduct to provide safe, reliable drinking water to the community. The community has existed for more than 100 years without reliable access to clean drinking water.

In these two and a half years I’ve worked in Darién, I’ve been a part of these communities and their daily lives, and witnessed their joys and their sorrows. Their commitment to our collaborative projects and their desire to succeed is quite obvious because of all the effort and energy they put into all of the projects we’ve undertaken. I was honored that recently, in a community meeting in Punta Alegre, when all the various project partners were present, the water council president, Isidoro Zúñiga, specifically mentioned EcoLogic while thanking everyone for their interest and support. EcoLogic is having a significant and positive impact on the quality of peoples' lives in this area, and I feel proud to be a part of this important work we are doing.



- Yaira Allois Pino, Program Officer for Panama
Yaira is from Santiago de Veraguas, Panama. She works on EcoLogic's projects with our partner organizations in that country. 

Eco-Family in the Field

The entire Eco-Family spent a week together in sunny --, no wait rainy -- no wait- sunny again Honduras at the end of June for EcoLogic’s biennial retreat. We bonded, we learned, and we exchanged ideas. But this was no kumbaya-fest. Our daily meetings consisted of intense sessions on strategic planning, science-based impact assessments, and theories of change. It was intense, it was real, and it was done EcoLogic-style. There is really too much to tell, so I’ll just highlight my favorite moments.

After arriving absurdly late to a quiet hotel in San Pedro Sula, I was ready for bed. Three hours later I find myself in a minibus driving to our projects in the region of Atlántida to see our work in agroforestry, fuel-efficient stoves, watershed management, and tree nurseries. Let me tell you about two of the project sites we visited, which we are implementing with our local partner, the Alliance of Municipalities of Central Atlántida, otherwise known as MAMUCA.

Fuel efficient stoves; hey what can I say? I love these things. We saw several stoves and heard from three different women who own and use them. I was extremely impressed with the maintenance of all the stoves we saw. I asked at one point, “Are these new?” I thought at MOST they might be a few weeks old but nay, I was told that all of the stoves we saw were a year or older. The women have to sand the stoves down every couple of days to keep them in tip top shape. And boy do they shine – I never knew adobe could sparkle. The women form groups of eight and together THEY make a stove for each person in the group. They are trained on how to construct, care for, and use them. The stoves use less fuel-wood, are more sanitary and keep the smoke out of the home. We all know the benefits of a smokeless house but it was NEVER as apparent as when I walked into one of the homes, stove to the right and a teeny tiny infant asleep in an itty bitty hammock not even 3 feet away. The babe was swinging lightly in the breeze and thankfully its little lungs were breathing clean air. It made me feel really good to see the positive difference we are making.

The argoforestry parcel we visited was also pretty impressive. With 40,000 seeds in the ground, the year-old trees (cue music) stood majestically along the hill-side. The trees are there to improve crop yield (here it’s corn), prevent erosion, and decrease the work of the farmers all while attracting wildlife, preventing disease and diminishing the need to encroach upon the surrounding forest. Don Faustino, owner of the land, was enthusiastic about the results and the benefits of guama. The full benefits will not be seen for another 2 years -- but, so far, so good and Don Faustino is happy to tell others about his success so they can replicate this work.

Oh, and we had an all-staff soccer game. There is not a lot to say about this except it was DEADLY (in a good way). It was fun, it was a time for bonding, and the temperature was freaking HOT. My team made it to the finals (yaay) but alas, the elusive EcoLogic world cup escaped my team’s grasp.

Let me just end this with an enormous shout out to EcoLogic field staff and tecnicos who work on a day to day basis directly with the people and places we strive to support on the ground. In getting to know the regional staff better I was awed by their passion and dedication. Their expertise is astounding and I’m so proud to be working with them.


- Gina Rindfleisch, Program Officer for EcoLogic
Gina manages EcoLogic's fundraising activities targeting individual donations. Prior to joining EcoLogic she served for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nicaragua working in environmental education and holds a BA in environmental studies from Long Island University. 

Long Way 'Round


Greetings from Livingston, Guatemala. I’m out here this week visiting our project with APROSARSTUN, our partner in the region. I don’t think I’ve talked much about this project since being in Guatemala. It’s way out here on Guatemala’s Caribbean coast. This part of Guatemala is really different from the central highlands, where Xela and Totonicapán are located. The area is crazy humid, and the main mode of transportation is boat and canoe. Livingston is a somewhat popular tourist destination, but outside of the tourist center, the rural communities are very remote, very small, and quite underserved. For example, the President of APROSARSTUN is from a village of 15 families. Jose Domingo, EcoLogic’s project técnico is from a community of 35 families, and Samuel, a community promoter recently hired on the project, is from a village of 12 families. Each of these communities are accessible only by boat up small creeks, followed by some walking through the jungle. And each of these communities are part of our project. More than any other EcoLogic project I’ve seen, this one is reaching people way WAY off the beaten path. To me, it’s really cool and really inspiring.

So enough background. This week, I did so many things that each deserve their own post. Thirty-three stoves in Barra Sarstún -- a fishing village on the edge of the Sarstún River-- are being constructed. Francisco, José Domingo, Martín (President of APROSARSTUN,) and I were there to watch/help the first one get built. It was awesome watching the process from the very first brick. I’ve seen so many that are completed and always wondered what it took to build one. As a rule, stove recipients for each EcoLogic project are chosen based on their participation in the project and must help build their stove. In practice, this looks different from project to project. In Barra Sarstún, recipients are members of the Barra Sarstún Fisherfolk Committee, which is the group we work with to develop sustainable fishing practices in the region. The fishermen involved in the committee understand the need to conserve and care for the environment which provides them with their livelihoods (fish!), and are therefore excited to participate in projects which help advance conservation. The stove we watched get built was being installed in a home of a committee member, Don Fabian Vega, who was actually not around to help and got another committee member, Jose Antonio, to cover his labor for him. So Jose Antonio, who is getting his stove in a couple of days, helped our two stove gurus with the construction.

Here’s what you need to build a fuel-efficient stove: cinder blocks, bricks, cement, sand, water, clay/mud (filler in the base of the stove), shovel, machete, trowel, aluminum chimney, and about four hours. And you need to know what you’re doing which is why we hire two men that have built many of our stoves. Oh, I also met some families that really like their stoves and I got to eat some awesome flour tortillas cooked on one. This was the first time I had flour tortillas in Guatemala. They were insanely good. Oh, I also ate a delicious fried fish caught by a member of the fisherfolk committee. Pretty cool. After these 33 stoves are completed, every members of the association will have a fuel-efficient stove in their home.

SO that’s a lot and that’s just the stove. I also visited some agroforestry parcels in some other communities. Come November these parcels will have corn planted in them in rows between the guama trees. The harvest will be in February. I’m coming back down to eat me some guama-protected corn!

While here, EcoLogic also conducted a seminar on conservation and sustainable development project design at  a local school, Ak'Tenamit, which is dedicated to educating students from indigenous families. This school, with which we often collaborate, focuses on ecotourism and rural development, and their hope is that their alumni return to their respective communities to be agents of change. It was great to help facilitate the seminar and hopefully, even if very slightly, help equip these young people with some tools that they can apply in their own communities, to the benefit of their families and neighbors.

Okay, that’s all I got. And it’s starting to rain on me and I’m fairly certain this computer is not waterproof.  Hasta Pronto!

- Chris Patterson, Program Officer for EcoLogic

Chris collaborates closely with the senior program officer by writing grant proposals and project reports, investigating potential funders, and following trends in philanthropy, conservation, and international development. Chris was a fellow for the Ford Foundation's Difficult Dialogues Project and documented his time working from EcoLogic's regional office in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala from March to June, 2011. 

'Tis the Season

It's now the rainy season here in Guatemala, and if you're a true EcoLogian, you know what the rainy season really means: Reforestation Season!


I'm writing to you from my apartment after a day of reforesting in Totonicapan, Guatemala. I'll tell you one thing: after spending a week with our field technicians in Honduras and hearing all their stories about planting trees and building fuel efficient stoves, it was really rewarding to get my hands dirty and to -- at least for a few hours -- experience the life of a "tecnico." If you remember from a previous post, EcoLogic manages 5 greenhouses (soon to be 8) in Totonicapan in the central highlands of Guatemala, where we work in partnership with the 48 Cantones to reforest watershed areas to help protect drinking water sources. The last time I blogged about this project, I had just visited the greenhouses and they were full of saplings. Well, this time around, hundreds of trees were gone! They're now planted in the forest, where they belong.

Today the EcoLogic team had the opportunity to participate in a reforestation activity in a community.  Typically, the village water committees schedule special events when a town, neighborhood or specific group commit the day to reforestation activities. Local people participate in part because a family's "payment" to the 48 Cantones for receiving water in their home is to volunteer their time to protect the area's watershed and fresh water resources. EcoLogic provides the trees and technical know-how to help make these efforts as productive and successful as possible. Today 120 young people from a local high school  -- the Escuela Noral Rural del Occidente (or ENRO) in Totonicapan -- came out to plant trees and learn about their watershed. Teachers at the school wanted the students to learn about the benefits of the forests in a hands-on manner. Of course, EcoLogic was happy to support this goal: Fernando, our field technician in Totonicapan, led the day's activities, providing a practical "how-to" session for the teachers and students, and showing them how and where to plant the arbolitos..

Fernando, a tecnico, explaing the process to students.

It was an awesome event. After a couple of hours in the forest, the students, teachers, Don Augustin (our greenhouse manager), Fernando, and I were able to plant about 1,500 saplings. There's another youth reforestation event tomorrow, as well, and Fernando is guiding that one, too. Oh yeah, and Fernando saved the GPS coordinates of the first tree that I planted so I can always know its exact latitude and longitude and come back and visit it, which I hope to do annually for the rest of my life! I named it Chris. You're surprised, right?

Okay, that's all I can manage for now. This is actually my last week working from the office in Xela. Next week I'll be visiting our project in Sarstun and after that I'll be in Honduras for our all staff retreat.

Hasta la proxima!



- Chris Patterson, Program Officer for EcoLogic

Chris collaborates closely with the senior program officer by writing grant proposals and project reports, investigating potential funders, and following trends in philanthropy, conservation, and international development. Chris was a fellow for the Ford Foundation's Difficult Dialogues Project and documented his time working from EcoLogic's regional office in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala from March to June, 2011.