Protect an Acre Grants

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Jambi Network of Peat Communities

$5,000 to support strengthening community capacity in Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia to protect peatland ecosystems from the expansion of pulp and paper and palm oil plantations through participatory mapping of community claims and forest cover status to determine how that intersects with where current concessions are located and which companies have the licenses, as well as developing trusted relationships with community leaders, raising awareness generally regarding legal rights and the impacts of plantations, and formulating plans of action towards a process of achieving negotiated resolutions.

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Yayasan Citra Mandiri Mentawai

$2,500 to support organizing a series of workshops in villages throughout the Mentawai Islands off the coast of West Sumatra, Indonesia with the aim of building awareness of the negative impacts of palm oil and promoting with the District government office green and community based economic options, such as agroforestry methods based on local knowledge. In addition to the importance of local people’s rights to land, local customs, culture and food security that would be supported by these efforts, the Mentawai Islands have particular ecological importance because they have been separated from the mainland for more than half a million years and the long geographic isolation has resulted in numerous endemic mammal species, including four primates.

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Foundation for Uganda Women Development

$1,500 to support expanding an existing successful agroforestry and tree planting project in Uganda through establishing two additional tree nurseries supported by rainwater harvesting tanks, which will seed one additional model farm where methods such as alley cropping, live fencing, woodlots and beekeeping will be demonstrated for, and maintained by, project participants.

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Link-AR Borneo

$3,000 to support a project in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, working with villages and training a grassroots team to build a community-based monitoring system to track the implementation of Asia Pulp and Paper’s Forest Conservation Policy commitments and gather evidence to be used to hold the company accountable.

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Save Sarawak’s Rivers Network (SAVE Rivers)

$500 to support the SAVE Rivers network’s efforts to raise awareness in Sarawak, Malaysia about the risks of building 12 proposed mega-dams on the traditional lands of Indigenous peoples, which would forcibly displace tens of thousands of people and also flood more than 500,000 acres of rainforest.

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Mother Nature

$3,000 to support a movement of environmental activists, Buddhist monks, and remote communities fighting to stop the proposed Cheay Areng dam in the Areng Valley of southwest Cambodia that would flood 50,000 acres of rainforest and displace thousands.

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Pueblo Originario Kichwa de Sarayaku (Tayjasaruta)

$1,500 to support an award-winning Sarayaku filmmaker producing a 10 minute advocacy video, including covering costs for travel to remote Indigenous communities to shoot footage and record testimonials, to demonstrate the unified stance of resistance to oil across all of the 7 Indigenous nationalities in the Ecuadorian Amazon potentially impacted by the XI Oil Round auction.

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Federation of the Achuar Nationality of Peru

$4,5000 to support the relocation of an Achuar community to a new location at the heart of their ancestral territory in the Peruvian rainforest near where oil company Talisman Energy planned to begin production drilling as a means of trying to keep their territory free from new oil exploitation. Also supported an inter-ethnic congress to discuss the threat posed by Talisman and form a common position to defend ancestral Indigenous territory. Talisman subsequently announced in September that it would cease all oil exploration activities in the Peruvian Amazon.

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Yayasan Wahana Bumi Hijau (WBH)

$4,500 to support field work, mapping and research to produce a study and short video to provide a detailed understanding of suppliers, potential impacts on forests, and local peoples’ perspectives related to a major new pulp mill that would be one of the world’s largest requiring an estimated 1.5 million acres of forest to feed its operations, planned for South Sumatra, Indonesia.

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Maya Leaders Alliance

$2,500 to support Maya Leaders Alliance, an organization that has helped secure major land rights victories in recent years and is now defending that progress and challenging a potential oil drilling project through a major 2 month grassroots mobilization incorporating 38 Maya communities consisting 21,000 people living within a region covering 500,000 acres of forested frontier in southern Belize. MLA is informing communities about plans for oil drilling and gathering leaders to re-articulate a collective position in favor of safeguarding land rights and the environment.