An interview with the largest private sponsor of rainforest protection: the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
Rhett Butler, mongabay.com
December 11, 2006
Monday, Brazil created the world's largest rainforest protected area in the northern Amazon. Covering more than 15 million hectares (57,915 square miles) -- or an area larger than England -- the network of seven new protected reserves has been met with praise by environmental groups. Instrumental in the development of the conservation project has been an organization that most people wouldn't associate with rainforest conservation but certainly should: the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Established by Gordon Moore, founder of Intel, and his wife, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is today the largest private donor to Amazon conservation and research, doling out more than $200 million to projects in the region since 2001 (more than $358 million if you include the neighboring Andes region). The sum may represent a quarter of all money spent in the Amazon basin by non-governmental groups, according to a November 19th article in San Francisco Chronicle Magazine.
The Foundation says its primary objective is to achieve "the effective management of 370 million hectares of forested landscapes" which it says are needed to maintain the climatologic function of the Amazon Basin and protect the region's biodiversity distributed across eight major ecoregions and 13 major watersheds in order to preserve the region's long-term ecological viability. The 370 million hectares represents 45 percent of the region's 815 million hectares of rainforest and is considered a threshold below which the Amazon rainforest ecosystem may tip towards a radically different landscape dominated by dry savanna. The shift would have a dramatic impact on the region's plant and animal life....
