Pumalín Douglas Tompkins National Park | Photo: Antonio Vizcaíno for Rewilding Chile
New partnership will help rewild Chilean Patagonia
In this crucial decade for Ecosystem Restoration, protecting primary ecosystems and climate refuges is more urgent than ever. The partnership between Ecological Restoration Fund and Rewilding Chile will support the conservation strategy in Chilean Patagonia aiming to consolidate the Route of Parks of Chilean Patagonia as one of the largest rewilding models that are restorative to places, species, and communities while generating a nature-based economy.
The Route of Parks covers ⅓ of Chile, protects 11,8 million hectares of wilderness, connects 17 National Park, and 60 gateway communities. It presents unique opportunities for large-scale conservation as it is one of the last wild places left on Earth. Its exceptional ecological and cultural value comes from the level of endemism and biodiversity of its temperate rainforest and subantarctic forest, wetlands, ice fields, and the most extensive fjord system in the Southern Hemisphere.
It is the habitat of 52% of Chilean species present on the IUCN Red List, and encompasses 16% of the protected land in Chile, over half of the pledged 30% by 2030 under the High Ambition Coalition. It is one of the richest carbon sinks in South America, storing almost three times more carbon per hectare than the Amazon Forest, with a high degree of naturalness (52%), preserving ecological processes on large scales of space and time.
A new partnership between Ecological Restoration Fund (ERF) and Rewilding Chile (RC), the legacy of Tompkins Conservation, will help us over the next three years to protect as much surface as possible as marine and terrestrial national parks, restore key ecological corridors, work in national parks´ buffer zones for promoting wildlife/wildlands/people coexistence, and develop advocacy groups among locals, while promoting a nature-based economy throughout the Route of Parks of Chilean Patagonia.
THE NEED
In this crucial decade for Ecosystem Restoration (2020-2030), protecting primary ecosystems and climate refuges such as the Route of Parks of Chilean Patagonia is more urgent than ever.
The partnership between ERF and RC responds to the urgency of implementing action-oriented programmes to reverse the damage we have done to the natural world and its living communities, endorsing the bridge between climate and biodiversity crises, and embracing the need for bold action if we want to prevent the planet from warming above 1.5°C.
