Fundación Avina is on a journey to net zero. The global organization has committed to reducing and compensating its own emissions and promoting urgent climate action across all levels of society. As part of its strategy, Avina is working with its partner IDESAM to reforest through agroforestry systems an area in the Brazilian Amazon, capturing carbon and providing benefits for local communities.
In September 2019, Fundación Avina published its Climate Emergency Declaration, including a commitment to reduce its own emissions and promote urgent action across all levels of society. This commitment involves “the implementation of a strategy to bring our portfolio to be carbon neutral by 2025” and “working with all of our programs to bring about robust impacts on climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts,” says Juliana Strobel, Fundación Avina’s program manager in Brazil. The implementation of the strategy involves the entire ecosystem, including WWT, Fundación Avina, and Avina Americas, and includes calculating the impact of operations in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, taking action to reduce it, and compensating what was not reduced through collaboration with the Carbon Neutral Program of Institute for Conservation and Sustainable Development of the Amazon (IDESAM). IDESAM is a partner to Avina and through its Carbon Neutral Program has already reforested 330 thousand square meters of forest through Agroforestry Systems in the Uatumã Sustainable Development Reserve. 
Fundación Avina is collaborating with its partner IDESAM to offset carbon emissions through agroforestry. Photo by Gabriel Ramos on Unsplash.
Agroforestry – more than just planting trees
Planting trees is not enough. In order for the carbon compensation mechanism to be reliable, the trees need to be conserved and the social and economic challenges of local communities considered. IDESAM works with rural workers in the Sustainable Development Reserve of Uatumã and supports them in implementing agroforestry,
The planting model – called the Agroforestry System (SAF) – is a form of land use that combines tree species (fruit and/or timber) and agricultural crops: these two elements interact ecologically and complement each other, optimizing the farmer’s produce, the diversification of production and the more efficient use of natural resources.
The agroforestry systems that IDESAM supports are based on both Amazonian tree species as well as agricultural and fruit species. This means that the trees not only remove carbon from the atmosphere, but they also provide food security and income for the 35 families that live in the area. The trees' benefits also encourage the local communities to conserve and take care of them, maximizing the climate benefit.
To compensate Avina’s operations emissions, IDESAM has successfully planted a total of 2,694 native tree species, intended to compensate for emissions of 942.99 metric tons of CO2 equivalents, the amount generated by Avina between 2019 and 2022. Read more about the partnership on Fundación Avina’s website:
https://www.avina.net/en/fundacion-avina-partners-with-idesams-carbon-neutral-program/
