Cool Earth

For every trip you take with Jacada, you are preserving the equivalent of an acre of our precious rainforest. This is because we reinvest a portion of funds generated from each trip to support Cool Earth’s community-focused conservation initiatives. Cool Earth focuses on protecting the rainforest by putting people first. Partnering with rainforest communities on the frontline of deforestation, Cool Earth works to ensure that local people earn more from keeping the rainforest standing than they would from clearing it.

By helping to create sustainable livelihoods in rainforest communities, Cool Earth enables local people to benefit from the rainforest. Ultimately, this means communities are able to protect their local area of rainforest rather than sell the land to loggers. Cool Earth only works with villages who approach them; the villages then decide how funds are spent and are in control of driving the partnership. 

As Cool Earth works directly with communities, their projects grow organically when neighbouring villages ask to come on board. Local partners report the progress they are seeing in their community directly to Cool Earth, so the charity can measure the impact they are having without involving an intermediary. So far, Cool Earth has helped to protect over  900,000 acres of rainforest, lock in a total of 230 million tonnes of CO2 and empower 118 villages. With an Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning (MEL) team looking at everything from satellite data to household surveys, Cool Earth is ensuring that it’s as effective as possible.

At Jacada, we’re supporting the Asháninka community, located across Peru’s Ene Valley. It is one of the biggest coca-growing areas in Peru, exploiting the areas and routes influenced by the Shining Path’s presence in the area during the 1980s and 1990s. The area is known to have high childhood malnutrition and poverty rates.

One of the largest indigenous groups in South America, Asháninka territory is found in the forests of the Central Amazon region of Peru and in the State of Acre, Brazil. Find out more about how Cool Earth’s work is helping the Asháninka people here.

Rainforest communities whose forest is under threat are understandably vulnerable to exploitation, manipulation and abuse by outsider interests. Cool Earth is unique in their approach, always ensuring that they put the community in control of every stage of partnership development. Five golden rules underpin Cool Earth’s commitment to protecting the rights of communities. Developed in line with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, they are as follows:

• Cool Earth does not approach communities but instead, capacity and funding is provided for people in the rainforest who wish to seek assistance in their efforts to protect the rainforest 
• Any meetings are conducted for all to attend in the community, in the most open, explanatory and inclusive way possible
• All community partners are able to cease agreements at any time and must renew their consent to work with Cool Earth on at least an annual basis
• Cool Earth allows communities to decide what to spend allocated funds on, provided that the spending relates to one of the following six categories: poverty, health, education, micro-credit, sustainable incomes and conservation training
• Cool Earth will never hold land rights and will always protect the indigenous communities in establishing their own rights over the forest