Groups pool funds to protect more of Amazon rain forest

5/21/2014

Brazil and a host of governmental and private partners agreed to create a $215 million fund to expand protected areas of the Amazon rain forest by more than 34,000 square miles and to help pay for its management for the next 25 years, the partners announced Wednesday.

The accord continued a 12-year program that has already designated 15 percent of the rain forest — 200,000 square miles, or an area four times the size of New York state — as conservation acreage. The agreement would protect additional land in an area about the size of Indiana.

The money, provided by the World Wildlife Fund, the German government, the Inter-American Development Bank, philanthropies and others, is intended to help finance conservation efforts until Brazil’s government shoulders the entire cost by about 2040.

Brazil created the conservation effort, called the Amazon Region Protected Areas Program, in 2002; roughly half of the country is covered by rain forest.