Nature solutions for Community development

The Corcovado Foundation's Environmental education program started in 2003 in the Osa Peninsula to create awareness about the natural heritage that surrounded these remote communities. Soon enough, we realized that we were missing two main components providing socioeconomic opportunities and empowering individuals, so they would be aware of the importance of its nature and actively take steps to protect it. 

We are promoting environmental citizenship, a generation of responsible pro-environmental behavior individuals who act and participate in society as agents of change.   

We also started promoting skills and activities that will open their minds to becoming entrepreneurs and community leaders. This short video shows some testimonies of those kids that started with us 18 years later and today are local leaders: 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6ZbEsujKhY&t=47s

Since 2003, we have worked with thousands of children both in school and in afternoon groups as extracurricular activities in which they learn about nature and what they can do to protect the environment and reduce their impact. 

In 2020,  amid the COVID Pandemic, we also decided to reach their parents. We needed to provide options to communities to generate food security under the economic crisis produced by the pandemic. Families had lost their jobs or their source of income. They became desperate and started logging, poaching, and hunting. Some of them started going back to agriculture. 

[1]Costa Rica is also one of the biggest consumers of agrochemicals in the world, a terrible practice that we needed to deconstruct to help families produce their food. So, we started dedicating efforts to promote

Regenerative agriculture to provide food security, reduce the use of agrochemicals and find a more holistic approach to agriculture.  Today, 50 families receive enough training and support to implement their own projects. Some of them in their farms, some of them in the back yards more than 200 people benefit from more variety of vegetables and fruits, planted in harmony with nature. 

They are reducing their use of agrochemicals to zero, they don't burn or cut forests to find fertile soil, and they are helping to reduce agriculture's carbon footprint.  

Two of the most satisfying outcomes of this project are 1) 95% of the participants are women 2) Their children are actively engaged and love seeing how the plants grow, and they can help feed their families. This is a new generation of regenerative farmers in the make. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0q-zlnw8PA

 According to the IPPC Report from 2019, we cannot make our climate goals without stopping deforestation and better managing agriculture." ... "land use is responsible for twenty-three percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions"  

To meet the challenges of this decade and do our part, we are promoting environmental education in action. Children in schools will learn about climate change, ecosystem restoration, and regenerative agriculture. They will participate in tree reforestations (including wetlands and mangroves) and plant their organic gardens in their schools. In addition, they will learn about vermicompost, how to use rainforest microorganisms to produce better yields, how to reduce erosion during the harsh rainy seasons and avoid evaporation during the dry seasons, making them more resilient to climate change.  

These kids will also learn the value of trees and forests to protect their water sources and reduce the risk of mudslides. 

 All these will give a better quality of life to our communities and help capture carbon emissions. Maybe it is not much, but we are doing our part. As Antoine de Saint Exupéry, As for the future, it is not a question of foreseeing it, but of making it possible.

[1]   FAO, Junio 2011 https://www.fao.org/in-action/agronoticias/detail/es/c/508248