Monday 2 August 2010.
For over ten years ProAves has been carrying out measures for conservation and environmental education in the town of Roncesvalles, Tolima with the support of Loro Parque Fundación, however, this year the Organization RARE Conservation has joined us to work on the development of the Campaign Pride or Campaña del Orgullo that inspires people to take pride in the natural resources that make their communities unique and take action to protect them.
Currently institutional partnerships are being established to develop actions aimed at the conservation of ecosystems that offer valuable environmental goods and services to meet local demands and regular global climate cycles regular.
Such is the case of the agreement reached with RARE to generate environmental awareness and actions to promote conservation of the moorlands and woodland habitat of the yellow-eared parrot, through the Pride Campaign and the establishment of reciprocal agreements for water.
This time, the town of Roncesvalles is the specific scenario in which RARE will guide efforts to promote sustainable production systems and conservation of forests at the source and in the upper basin of the Cucuana, in addition to the settlements that make up the downstream basin of the same river.
Human pressures such as the expansion of livestock and the agricultural frontier, logging, overgrazing and unsustainable production techniques; have become the main causes of deterioration of ecosystems in the town of Roncesvalles.
The high mountain ecosystems in the municipality supply hydrological environmental services including the water supply for human consumption, irrigation, power generation, climate regulation and biodiversity conservation. The values that these ecosystem services acquire have not been measured in economic terms and their deterioration has generated the need to recognize its finitude, in order to make decisions that promote the conservation and sustainable use, in order to increase their offer.
Town center and environmental education activities in Roncesvalles, Tolima.
The alliance RARE – ProAves, seeks to promote cultural values of environmental responsibility, as well as to plan the future of ecosystems to improve the quality of life of the population, guaranteeing the supply of environmental services and protecting the habitat of endangered species like the Yellow-eared Parrot.
We are convinced that it is through environmental education that the way we think and act towards ecosystems can be transformed. Therefore, through the implementation of the Pride Campaign we will support education to promote the establishment of reciprocal agreements related to the water of the Cucuana River basin, where the inhabitants of the upper basin will receive incentives for conservation as a voluntary result of institutions and people of the lower basin as the fulfillment of environmental goods produced by these ecosystems.
To date, the staff of the Foundation is implementing the first phase of this process, the “Participatory planning”, in which we expect to find out the current state of the ecosystems and the most appropriate way to implement the campaign. Starting next year, we will implement the first phase of the project that we hope will be as successful as its has been so far.