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Project Goal: to create both a sustainable future for Yasuní and identify alternatives to high-impact activities that threaten the park. Finding Species is focusing its work in three realms: 1) Bringing the park to the public and decisionmakers through photographs, so that the public and decisionmakers can see and relate to what is in the park and why it is valuable 2) Strengthening the scientific information about the park, and making it more accessible to decisionmakers, the public, and the press. 3) Promoting the ITT Initiative and other viable alternatives that can protect Yasuní and to serve as a model for how high biodiversity forests can be kept intact.

  

Yasuní National Park protects among the most biodiversity forests per hectare of any forests in South America, and perhaps in the world, according to a 2010 analysis by Finding Species’ staff scientists with a prominent international research team. Yet Yasuní is threatened because of the oil reserves beneath it. Oil concessions are mapped over much of the park, and access roads and pipelines have been built or could be proposed in the near future. The ITT Block, overlying the remote northeast corner of Yasuní, holds three proven oil fields (Ishpingo-Tamboococha-Tiputini), and has been slated for production. Finding Species is engaging with scientists and engineers to provide technical information about biodiversity, renewable energy, and alternatives to oil roads. Finding Species is widely circulating this information to decision makers and the media by compiling it into straightforward text and beautiful photographs, making it readily digestible and compelling. To further provide solutions rather than just seek to stop oil production, Finding Species together with UNESCO and with the support of UNDP and FLACSO organized an influential workshop in Quito attended by Ecuadorian ministers, civil society leaders, and technical experts: Renewable Energy and Post-Petroleum Development (Energía Renovable y Desarrollo Post-Petrolero). Similarly, Finding Species has been working with the Ecuadorian national government and civil society organizations on the Yasuní-ITT Initiative, a novel alternative to oil drilling in this environmentally sensitive area.

Finding Species is working to protect Yasuní National Park in Ecuador, one of the most biodiverse parks in the world. Yasuní is threatened by industrial development, road-building projects, and illegal logging and hunting. The main strategic aim of the campaign combines public education, media outreach, a traveling photographic exhibit, dissemination of the technical report on the biodiversity of Yasuní and the impacts over it by road building produced by the international leading tropical scientists joint in the “Scientists Concerned of Yasuní” network. The campaign has raised national and international attention on the region and avoided the construction of a new oil road within the Yasuní.