$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.
$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.
$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.
$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.
$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.
$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.
$2,500 to ĺĘsupport mapping and physical demarcation of boundaries for Majé Cordillera in Panama to obtain collective land title recognition of 20,000 acres of rainforest territory for an Embera community to help protect rainforests from loggers that have been extracting cocobolo trees for export to high-paying markets in Asia.
$1,500 to support a delegation of Indigenous leaders from Bolivia’s National Park and Indigenous Territory Isiboro Secure (TIPNIS) to attend 6th Pan Amazon Social Forum, taking place in Bolivia. Communities from the TIPNIS region have been fighting a major road that would threaten their territory and the Forum provides an ideal platform for threatened communities from throughout the region to strategize and strengthen their collective territorial defense and forest protection efforts.
$5,000 to support work with 5 villages in Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia to strengthen community management systems and values and help secure control and protection for over 40,000 acres of customarily-owned “village forest” through holding a series of meetings to reach collective decisions to develop and implement 35 year management plans that consider ecological, economic and social dimensions and provide for sustainable sources of income that reflect local cultural values.
$1,000 to help this women-led organization that has been achieving impressive results on a shoestring budget drastically enhance its capacity and efficiency through the purchase of a laptop and printer to be used to support its community training and capacity building efforts to promote tree planting and rainforest protection in rural Uganda.
