Mind the gap: volunteering for Rainforest Concern

Written by: Trina Wallace

Eve Hailey of Rainforest Concern talks about one exciting way to fill your gap year.

If you're planning the trip of a lifetime in your gap year or a summer vacation, it is worth including a significant stretch of volunteer work to enhance your experience in a country and provide you with some valuable personal development. The environmental charity Rainforest Concern offers a range of volunteering opportunities.

Tell us about Rainforest Concern

Rainforest Concern was established as a registered charity in 1993 to protect the world's tropical rainforests and the incredible biodiversity they contain, together with the indigenous people who still depend on them for their survival. We have projects throughout the world, including Ecuador, Costa Rica, Panama, Chile, Sri Lanka and Brazil, as well as a project we are assisting in Zambia.

Rainforest Concern purchase and manage threatened rainforest on behalf of local communities and organisations. We focus on areas with a diverse range of plants and animals which need protection from logging and unsustainable agriculture (such as palm oil plantations and cattle ranching). Fragmentation of the rainforest has detrimental consequences for both wildlife and people. By establishing various sustainable community development projects around the world, Rainforest Concern is preserving wildlife and providing a future for local communities, helping them develop sources of sustainable income.

Ecuador has one of the world's highest rates of deforestation. This area is suffering particularly from unsustainable slash and burn agriculture. The Choco region consists of a band of rainforest extending from southern Panama, through Columbia into northwest Ecuador. It's an area containing the most diverse rainforests on the planet.

To preserve a significant stretch of this rainforest in Ecuador, Rainforest Concern have managed to buy sufficient land to connect two of the largest rainforest reserves providing wildlife corridors and preventing palm oil plantations. In total, this involved 46 purchases and more than 12,000 hectares, referred to as the “northern phase”. The current goal is to connect the “southern phase” of the Choco-Andean corridor to a further rainforest reserve.

What opportunities are available?

We have two conservation projects and sustainable development projects in Ecuador, and a turtle conservation programme in Panama. The first of these projects in Ecuador is in a place called Yachana. This is set deep in the Amazon rainforests bordering the Napo River, with a 3,500 acres rainforest reserve purchased by Rainforest Concern to stop logging, unsustainable agriculture and cattle ranching.

Sustainable development projects at this location include a coffee and cacao nursery, the production of fairly traded “jungle chocolate”, reforestation, a health clinic with a motorised dugout used as a river ambulance for isolated communities, and the construction and maintenance of forest trails.

The Santa Lucia Community Lodge in the Choco Bio region of northwest Ecuador is set amid spectacular cloud forest scenery and the dramatic Andes peaks. This area has the world's highest diversity of plants (more than 2,000 species) and 45 mammals, including the puma and endangered spectacled bear. More than 80% of the reserve is pristine virgin forest. Projects include coffee grown in the shade of the rainforest canopy, organic gardening, reforestation with native species, and developing ecotourism and education.

Rainforest Concern is also involved in the protection of the endangered giant leatherback turtles in Costa Rica and Panama. They particularly need volunteers for sites in Panama.

"Rainforest Experience" talks - find out more...

To help find out more about volunteer opportunities and the rainforest, the Co-operative Bank is sponsoring a series of "Rainforest Experience" talks. These are being conducted by Eve Hailey, an Environmental Studies graduate, who in her gap year after university worked on an Orang-utan Health Project in Sumatra, Indonesia.

As Project co-ordinator and research assistant, she gained a unique experience and deeper understanding of indigenous people, orang-utans and the natural remedies of the rainforest.

The Orang-utan Health Project investigates how orang-utans treat various illnesses using specific medicinal plants. Increasing information on medicinal plants aids orang-utan and human health while developing conservation of the endangered orang-utan and its rainforest home. By learning from people and animals living in the rainforest, we are discovering valuable medicines that may revolutionise treatments for cancers and HIV/AIDS.

Eve's rainforest experience provides an excellent insight into the rainforest itself, incorporating a diverse collection of images and information. Many of the photographs are derived from Rainforest Concern's projects in Central and South America. If you are interested in arranging a talk at your university contact Eve at evehailey5@yahoo.co.uk.

As well as finding out about volunteering opportunities overseas, the talks also provide an insight into indigenous peoples, their ideas and way of life, and go in to the vital role that rainforests play in climate regulation for the local and global community. These precious ecosystems are being destroyed faster than ever and they are in desperate need for conservation.

• Rainforest Concern
  www.rainforestconcern.org

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