Noel Kempff Mercado National Park:
An Imperiled Park Succeeds
Among the many national parks in Latin America that have benefited from the Conservancy's Parks in Peril Program, Bolivia's Noel Kempff Mercado exemplifies the power of private conservation action at the international level. From 1990 to 1994, Bolivian partner organization Fundacíon Amigos de la Naturaleza (FAN) used Parks in Peril funds to equip and train park rangers, who eliminated illegal logging and dramatically reduced poaching. FAN then achieved a first in Latin America by acquiring the park's last private inholding (25,000 acres) as a base of operations.
The Conservancy stepped in again in 1995, negotiating a debt-for-nature swap to finance management of the park for another four years, and the next year joined FAN, the Bolivian government and three private investors in launching the 30-year Climate Action Project. Designed to help stem global warming through forest conservation, the project provides $9.5 million over 10 years to protect existing forests, regenerate cut areas and measure how much carbon would have been lost had the forest been logged. In 1998 the project added 2.2 million acres to Noel Kempff and retired several logging concessions inside the park's borders. The park, now 3.8 million acres, claims grasslands, rain forest and dry tropical forest; its luminary species include jaguars, giant otters, maned wolves, river dolphins and eight species of macaws.
Oscar Scherer Park:
Aiding State Bond Initiatives
"As the first acquisition funded by Florida's Preservation 2000 program, the Oscar Scherer Park addition kicked off what is a 20-year, $6 billion effort to save the life of natural Florida," says State Director Bob Bendick. In 1999 the Conservancy helped the state Department of Natural Resources and Sarasota County acquire 914 acres for the Oscar Scherer State Park. Now totaling 1,384 acres, the park hosts a population of threatened Florida scrub-jays. The Florida model has prompted the Conservancy to support other state bond initiatives, most recently in California, which passed a measure dedicating $4.1 billion to conservation without raising taxes.
Palau Islands:
Building Local Capacity
In biological terms, the Republic of Palau, a reef-encircled gathering of 340 islands in the Micronesian region of the Pacific Ocean, is among the richest countries in the world. For more than 2,000 years, its lands and marine resources have been owned and controlled by the local people, but as the world encroached, local people needed new ways to cope. "Knowing this," says Chuck Cook, former director of the Conservancy's Micronesia Program, "we had to build a capacity among the villagers and village chiefs, the true resource owners." The Conservancy helped develop the nation's first civic group, the Palau Conservation Society (PCS), in 1994.
"Creating a group like PCS that could work with the actual owners of the natural resources, which the Palauan government had great difficulty accomplishing, has proven highly successful here," Cook says. "It is a community-based conservation model that is spreading to other islands of the Pacific and beyond."
Gray Ranch:
Catalyst for Intact Landscapes
The Conservancy's purchase of Gray Ranch in 1990 remains the largest single private conservation acquisition in the United States: 502 square miles of sweeping grasslands, almost an entire mountain range and an abundance of rare species. In 1994 the nonprofit Animas Foundation took ownership of the New Mexico ranch (the Conservancy holds a conservation easement) to preserve the area's natural and cultural values. The Gray Ranch success story sparked an even more extraordinary venture-conservation of a million-acre wedge of land in Arizona and New Mexico along the Mexican border. A trinity of partners spearheads the Campaign for the Malpai Borderlands: the Animas Foundation, the Conservancy and the Malpai Borderlands Group. Also a nonprofit, the Malpai Borderlands Group is grassroots and rancher-driven, dedicated to maintaining and restoring the healthy, unfragmented landscapes of the borderlands. It has already secured seven conservation easements in the region.
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Yunnan Great Rivers
© Dennis Cox/Chinastock
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Yunnan Great Rivers Initiative:
A Bold First Step in China
In June 1998, late Conservancy President John Sawhill traveled to Kunming to formalize an unprecedented partnership with the Yunnan Provincial Government. The goal: to protect the remarkable biodiversity of China's farthest frontier, an area the size of West Virginia. The Conservancy will provide assistance in three key areas: strategic guidance, technical expertise and tapping international funding.
Here, where four of Asia's great rivers almost merge, are isolating mountains whose slopes support some of China's last primary forests and their fabled denizens-the snow leopard and clouded leopard, lesser panda, Yunnan golden monkey and 10 percent of the world's bird species. Yunnan also contains China's greatest cultural diversity, with 25 of the nation's 56 ethnic minorities.
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Gray Ranch
© Harold E. Malde
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St. John River:
Setting Sights Higher
Heralded as the largest tract of land secured for conservation in the Northeast, the Conservancy's 185,000-acre St. John River purchase is as big as Maine's famed Baxter State Park, and it controls about a quarter of the best public river left in the nation. Maine chapter Executive Director Kent Wommack says, "You can canoe the river up there for 10 days and not see a single public road, permanent residence, gas station-not even streetlights."
In fall 1998, the Conservancy thought it had lost its opportunity to protect the 40-mile stretch of the remote upper St. John. Then, says Wommack, "I received a phone call saying, 'The deal's on again, but your possible partner in the purchase [the one with most of the money] is out of the picture, and you have six weeks to come up with $35.1 million.' " The largest amount the Conservancy had previously spent on a single project was $18 million.
Wommack went to Conservancy President John Sawhill to request a loan from the revolving fund. "Can you imagine," Wommack says, "asking John to make a decision within a week's time to lend $35 million to a chapter that had raised no more than $5 million over five years in its last capital campaign?" But Sawhill said yes, and Wommack agreed to repay $15 million of the loan in five years. Six weeks later, at closing time, the Maine chapter had already raised $10 million and only two years later, it has raised $34 million. Wommack notes, "There are huge lessons here about what is possible if you set your sights high enough."
Palmyra Atoll:
Buying a Tropical Paradise
Last November, at a cost of $37 million, the Conservancy closed its deal to purchase Palmyra Atoll, a ring of 52 Pacific islets a thousand miles south of Hawaii. Owned and cared for by the Fullard-Leo family for nearly 80 years, the 680-acre atoll is surrounded by nearly 15,000 acres of untouched coral reefs. It supports a rare Pisonia rain forest and an estimated million nesting seabirds. Its diverse bounty includes huge land-walking coconut crabs and the planet's second-largest colony of red-footed boobies.
"The Conservancy announced it would commit $1 billion through its Campaign for Conservation to protect critical natural areas in the United States and abroad," said late President John Sawhill in May 2000. "The acquisition of Palmyra is an early down payment on that commitment."
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