After Amsterdam and São Paulo, we now have our presence in Munich, Germany! Thanks to the devotion and energy of our dedicated team-member Floris Wouterson, we now have a dedicated team of BJF supporters in Germany.
Headed by Hans Hagen, the team will create partnerships, raise awareness and funding for the Araguaia Biodiversity Corridor. The Munich based company Drehmoment Film sponsors the BJF with offices and facilities. 23 July 2015 was the kick-off presentation.
Meet Hans Hagen. As an energetic businessman Hans leads his insurance-brokerage company based in Munich. With a passion for preserving our planet, Hans donates his valuable time to organize fundraising-events and to establish partnerships for the BJF in Germany and beyond.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=71&v=Iv7AUoheeQs
Have you ever heard of the “flying rivers”? This term was created to define the giant quantities of water that float above the Amazon rainforest and Cerrado. They come from the tonnes of water that evaporate from the trees: it is a green water factory! Huge masses of vapour travel thousands of miles bringing rainfall over Latin America. The droughts in South East Brazil prove what we have known for a long time: no forests, no rain!
Last April 2015, our sponsor-partner Roemer Kamp & Partners, a leading asset-management company based in the Netherlands, organized a special dinner-info-evening for their clients, seeking to share their partnership experience with the BJF and communicate their involvement with preserving our planet. It was a great success!
After a 1-hour presentation about the importance of the Araguaia Biodiversity Corridor and BJF’s tasks to help realize it, the guests enjoyed a delightful dinner. A special thanks to Prof. Jan van Hooff for the introduction speech and for Jord, Jean-Michel and Marco for making this inspiring evening come true.
In May 2015, the Brazilian government extended the deadline by one year to register all rural properties on a national registry named CAR (Rural Environmental Registry).
This database will be fundamental for the new Forest Code, as it creates a complete map of all (de)forested areas in Brazil. Each property must preserve at least 20% for nature, depending on the region.
The BJF engages on social platforms to raise awareness of our cause. In April 2015 BJF joined a new social platform, Tsū. Tsū counted 4 million registered accounts after the first six months, a number that took Facebook two years to reach.
We thank both contestants @LiveFearlessly (Dan Skaler, Australia) and @AnnaLieb (Anna Ortlieb, U.S.), for their incredible creativity and hard work they put into their respective campaigns.
Meet Ivan Nisida, one of BJF’s representatives working full time in Brazil. His job is to extend the BJF network in Brazil and conduct research in preparation of our Mapping Project, such as the New Brazilian Forest Code.
Meet our illustrious new Ambassador, Dr. Jan van Hooff! Jan is a former president of the Royal Netherlands Zoological Society and has built a successful career as a professor in Ethology and Socio-ecology at Utrecht University.
Dr. Jan van Hooff believes another path of development, less destructive, can be chosen. To achieve that, a truly ecological mentality must rise, and he wants to help building it through his role as Ambassador of the Black Jaguar Foundation.
The new Brazilian Forest Code was implemented in 2012. The Code establishes a percentage of Legal Reserve for every rural property (20, 35 or 80% according to the area). It also redefines the size of sensitive areas such as river margins or hilltops (called APP or Permanent Preservation Area).
Another mechanism to protect forests can be found in the RPPN (Private Reserve of Natural Patrimony), which consists in conservation units promoted by the landowners themselves (there are over 1,000 RPPN in Brazil).
The BJF aims to congregate all those legal mechanisms to help creating the 2,600km long Araguaia Biodiversity Corridor.
Watch the Araguaia Corridor Animation for further information:
The year of 2015 marked the arrival of a critical water crisis in Brazil. Due to the drastic deforestation of the Amazon and Cerrado, it has stopped raining in the Southeast of Brazil! Martijn Van Rooij, former director at Citi Bank Brazil, is aware of that situation and supports the BJF. The video below was recorded on the dry bottom of one of São Paulo’s largest water reservoirs.
Projects such as the Araguaia Biodiversity Corridor are a sustainable answer to this crisis. By creating this Corridor, one of the largest South-American reforestation projects, we will help to recover the climatic role of rainforests in Brazil as well as halt biodiversity erosion.
