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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

Brazil Establishes World's Largest Rainforest Reserve

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Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises

http://forests.org/

11/12/97

OVERVIEW, SOURCE & COMMENTARY by EE

Brazil has established the Amana Sustainable Development Reserve,

which together with two other protected areas in the Central Amazon

Basin, comprise over 22,000 square miles of unbroken habitat. The

approach of protecting large-scale eco-regions and their constituent

species and processes is laudable. The question is whether the

rhetoric of local people's participation in the area's conservation

can actually be realized. Or whether this becomes another "paper

park," unable to address local people's reasonable development

aspirations, and in so doing, becomes slowly degraded. This item

comes from ENN. Somehow this item slipped through the cracks, but I

am sending it belatedly.

g.b.

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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:

Title: Brazil Establishes World's Largest Rainforest Reserve

Source: Environmental News Network

Status: Copyrighted, contact source for permission to reprint

Date: October 30, 1997

The Government of the Brazilian State of Amazonas has created a new

reserve in the Amazon, thus establishing the world's largest

contiguous block of protected rainforest, the Wildlife Conservation

Society, headquartered at the Bronx Zoo, announced this week.

Called the Amana Sustainable Development Reserve, it is the third of a

network of protected areas in the Central Amazon Basin that together,

comprise over 22,000 square miles of unbroken habitat -- an area

larger than Costa Rica.

The reserve will be managed under a legal category in Brazil created

in 1996 at the adjacent Mamiraua Reserve, which permits residence in

protected areas and encourages local participation in their

conservation. The Amana region is known for its spectacular and

untouched biodiversity including endangered Amazonian manatees, black

caiman, river dolphins, anacondas, jaguars, black uakari monkeys,

harpy eagles, and a wealth of plants and aquatic life.

Dr. Jose Marcio Ayres, senior conservation zoologist with the Wildlife

Conservation Society, designed and wrote the reserve's management

scheme.

"The creation of the Amana Reserve is one of the most important

measures taken in the Brazilian Amazon in the past decade. It

establishes a new vision in conservation in the region, where

rainforest corridors will protect not only species but entire

evolutionary and ecological processes. It also preserves the unique

biodiversity of the Amazon's black and white river systems. In

addition, this solidifies the formation of the Central Amazonian

Corridor that will protect Amazonian flooded and dryland forests,"

said Ayres.

For more information, contact Stephen Sautner, Wildlife Conservation

Society.

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