Acción Andina: Scaling Up Community Mountain Forest Restoration for High Impact Water Protection

Acción Andina is currently in its fourth year of implementation, with projects across 15 landscapes in five countries. We seek measured growth that allows for quality control and to earn the trust and confidence of communities that we will show up every year to help.

The story of Acción Andina begins with ECOAN, a visionary conservation nonprofit led by Constantino Aucca Chuta, which for over twenty years has been partnering with indigenous communities to provide long-term restoration and protection of native Polylepis forests in the high Andes of Peru. ECOAN’s massive success inspired the co-founding of Acción Andina by ECOAN and GFG in 2018, launching an initiative to realize effective, collaborative forest ecosystem restoration and protection program across the high Andes (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela). The attending long-term benefits of this initiative include increased water security, biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration, enhanced livelihoods, and support and protection of cultural and spiritual values.

The forests targeted by Acción Andina bring water to everything below them. They are the headwaters of streams that become Amazonian rivers. They create wetlands below that are some of the highest carbon sinks in nature. They are reliable, critical water resources for life from people in local communities to major cities and they are home for endangered species. No other habitat is proportionally more important for all that it influences below, yet the conservation of these forests has been largely overlooked.

Acción Andina’s main long-term (25-year) goals are to: Protect 500,000 hectares of remaining native polylepis forests on public and private lands across the Andes; Restore an additional 500,000 hectares of native forests, mainly polylepis, using multiple integrated landscapes management and restoration tools; Build local, effective and long-term conservation and restoration leadership capacities.

In 2019 Acción Andina was recognized by the UN as a nature-based solution to reverse climate change, and is promoted within the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and the World Economic Forum as an inspiring flagship case of successful climate action.

Acción Andina is currently in its fourth year of implementation. We seek measured growth that allows for quality control and to earn the trust and confidence of communities that we will show up every year to help.

Project Impact

Acción Andina was conceived, planned, and is being implemented to address the major obstacles to impactful, enduring forest conservation. Native high Andean forests are a high global priority to protect and restore for their outstanding contributions to water, biodiversity, carbon, and local community livelihoods. Andean-wide conservation and restoration of this forest system is within reach with sustained effort. We know where to work including the most important standing forests to protect. Local communities are motivated to enter into long-term agreements to grow and restore native forests, motivated largely by water concerns. Land near existing forests is available to restore forests on a large scale. Two decades of on-the-ground conservation science and project development by experienced in-country conservation leaders has resulted in a wealth of practical knowledge and a base from which to grow projects.

Local ownership (communal, public, and private) is the foundation of Acción Andina forest protection and reforestation. The local mountain communities where we work are diverse in their makeup, but are mostly small and poor. Many are direct descendants of indigenous communities dating back to the Incan empire, as well as other indigenous groups such as Aymara. Others are communities of gauchos and cattle ranchers. What they all have in common is a motivation to engage in forest conservation to protect their water resources. All of the communities have limited resources to achieve this goal, making partnering with Acción Andina powerful.

Project Timeline

Acción Andina is a long-term initiative, with the conservation season measured in 15 month cycles, from January through March. The initiative is currently in the 2021/22 conservation season. The 2022/23 conservation season will begin in January 2022. In each 15 month cycle, activities include seed collection, nursery building and construction, plant production, reforestation campaigns, and monitoring of previous years’ plantings.