The Amazonas Sustainable Foundation and the hotel chain Marriott International together in the preservation of the Amazon rain forest
FAS has signed a partnership with the hotel chain Marriott International with the objective of avoiding deforestation in the Juma Sustainable Development Reserve
Source: 1
(16/10/2008 / )
Yesterday, October 16th , and today 17th , in the Amazonas Opera House, in Manaus, and in the Juma Sustainable Development Reserve, in the municipality of Novo Aripuanã, respectively, the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation (FAS) and the hotel chain Marriott International start one of the most daring social and environmental partnerships in the Amazon. The American hotel chain choose FAS as a partner to invest, initially, $ 2 million dollars which will be distributed in a period of four years for infrastructure works for the benefit of the local resident. Facilities will be built, including new schools, students’ dormitory, teachers’ house, advanced monitoring posts – which will be used as a base for the officers of the Insititute of Enviroenment Protection of the State of Amazonas (IPAAM), FAS’ bases, among other facilities which will allow approximately two thousand people who reside in the reserve of 589.612 hectares have a better life without deforestation.
In the centenary Amazonas Opera House a celebration will take palce among organized civil society, FAS executives, local government authorities, and Marriott’s executives. The following day, in the community of Boa Frente, in the Madeira River basin, the ceremony of inauguration of the Samuel Benchimol Conservation and Sustainable Development Unit will be held. Among the main facilities of the Unit stands up the J.W. Marriott School, built with the assistance of local manpower and using certified timber from forest management areas. Another two similar units will be built in other communities in the Juma Reserve. From the start, the concern regarding the health of the locals is clearly expressed by the delivery of three ambulance boats, means of transportation most suitable for the displacement of patients in the rivers of the region.
Fighting the greenhouse effect though the reduction of gas emissions into the atmosphere is one of the main objectives of FAS and of the Marriott International, both of which became allies in order to keep the forest standing in the Juma Reserve. In the basis of that action stands the culture of avoided deforestation, one of the main assumptions that FAS and the Government of the State of Amazonas both support.
Forest allowance
In the foundation of that partnership is the Forest Allowance, a social and environment compensation mechanism conceived of by FAS as the first of a series of procedures aimed at the inhabitants of the Deep Amazon who live in the state conservation units (there are 34 of them in total, representing 16,4 million hectares). The goal is to assure those populations a minimum wage as a means to strengthen the non deforestation. Now the monthly payment is R$ 50,00 a family. The money is deposited in the mother’s account. Up to the end of the year 4.000 families will be receiving the allowance. In total, 24 thousand people will be assisted, in 13 conservation units in 2008. There is also the Forest Allowance Income, aimed at strengthening the local productive chain; the Forest Allowance Association, which organizes the residents into associations; and the Forest Allowance Social, which focuses its activities on the fields of health, education, transportation and communications.
Those initiatives together, plus the measures taken by the State, will turn the units of conservation into world vanguard in terms of preservation of rivers, of fauna, of flora and of the culture of the traditional populations of the Amazon forest.
Carbonneutralization
The hotel chain Marriott, with 500 beds worldwide, with daily occupation of 400 of them, will offer to its guests the possibility of contributing, voluntarily, with U$1 in order to give even more resources to the Juma Reserve. That procedure will enable the guests to offset the carbon gases emissions related to their consumption of electricity power, air conditioning, refrigerator gas, among other types of consumption, during their stay at the hotels of the chain Marriott. That kind of partnership, in which the forest is preserved through a business initiative, will be a model for other conservation units in the Amazonas so they also could profit from their “green resources” in a world scale. The partnership with Marriott International is one of a series, which will change the way of preserving the largest humid tropical forest of the planet.
