Fausto Gómez Pezzotti TNC-Dominican Republic Program

1. Fausto Gómez Pezzotti TNC-Dominican Republic Program

2. Conservation Approach • To fulfill our long-term vision and achieve our goals, The Nature Conservancy employs an integrated conservation process comprised of four fundamental components:

3. Setting priorities through ecoregional planning and global habitat assessments. • Developing strategies at multiple scales to address ecoregional priorities and global threats. • Taking direct conservation action; and • Measuring conservation success.

4. Setting Priorities • The Conservancy sets priorities two ways: through global major habitat type assessments and through ecoregional planning.

5. GREATER CARIBBEAN ECOREGIONAL PLAN - GEOGRAFIC AREA

6. Developing Strategies Single-AreaStrategies • For all priority conservation areas in which the Conservancy invests resources directly or through partnerships, we employ the5-S Framework for Conservation Project Management.

7. The 5-S planning approach focuses on the following components:

8. Systems The focal conservation targets and their key ecological attributes. • Stresses The most serious types of destruction or degradation affecting the conservation targets or key ecological attributes. • Sources of stress The causes or agents of destruction or degradation.

9. Strategies The full array of actions necessary to abate the threats or enhance the viability of the conservation targets. • Success measures The monitoring process for assessing progress in abating threats and improving the biodiversity health of a conservation area.

10. Taking Action • In keeping with the Conservancy’s commitment to results, the bulk of our resources—human and financial—are focused on implementing well-conceived conservation strategies.

11. Measuring Success • For purposes of assessing progress toward our mission, The Nature Conservancy defines conservation success as the combination of three outcomes: the maintenance of viable biodiversity, abatement of critical threats, and effective protection and management of places where we take action with partners.

12. A unique Dominican case which is a result, among some other facts, of the assisting conservation actions of TNC in the Dominican Republic. “LOS DAJAOS”

13. Madre de las Aguas Mother of the Waters

14. Madre de las Aguas comprises some 320,000 hectares within the Central Mountain Range (Cordillera Central) of the Dominican Republic; this ecoregion is integrated by five national parks and two reserves with a territory under protection equivalent to 7% of the nation’s land mass.

15. Why the Conservancy Works Here:Unsustainable logging, uncontrolled fires, slash and burn agriculture, expansion of sun-grown coffee fields and hillside farming are causing soil erosion and significant species loss. 

16. Strategies being proposed by the Conservancy to mitigate these threats are: reforestation, and providing help to partner organizations that undertake economic and community development projects to build support for conservation work and alternative livelihoods.

17. Madre de las Aguas * Los Dajaos

18. El Manguito La Paloma Los Dajaos Los Marranitos Arroyo Dulce Piedra Llana El Bolo Josafá Los Dajaos watershed

19. Agriculture on high slope

20. A plot ready to be planted

21. A plot ready to be planted

22. Conuco

32. Strawberry

36. Nursery - Strawberry

37. Strawberries are kept in bags

38. Strawberry bundle

39. Strawberry nursery on deep slope

47. 1 hectare = 16 tareas

48. CONUCO VS NURSERY

49. Small farmer’s income Before the innovation of the greenhouses Working from 1 to 50 “tareas” = 0.063 to 3.13 hectares Less than RD$500.00 = US$14.29 per month In rare cases they made up to RD$1,000.00 = US$28.57 (exchange rate = 35)

50. Small farmers’ income After changing the agricultural practice (nurseries) Working from 1 to 3 “tareas” = 0.063 to 0.2 hectares RD$12,333 = US$352 to RD$37,000 = US$1,057 per month (exchange rate = 35)