Selene Orellana

Peru is known for its rich natural and cultural history, Peru drew over 4.5 million tourists in 2019, generating over US$ 4.7 million and 3.5 million jobs.

Within its three geographic regions, Peru contains 80% of the world’s climate types and 84 of the 114 life zones. Peru’s people and economy have suffered greatly from a loss of tourism revenue because of the pandemic.

Between January and July 2020, the arrival of international tourists decreased by 67.3%, compared to the same period of the previous year.

Our work with IUCN will support a COVID-19 response to impacts on local benefits from tourism by collaborating with communities in two protected areas in Peru, the Rio Abiseo National Park and Amarakaeri Communal Reserve.

Introducing Rio Abiseo

In January, Planeterra’s project team in Peru visited Rio Abiseo National Park for the first time to kick off the project activities. Rio Abiseo is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site covering 274,520 hectares of the Eastern Cordillera – a vital part of the Amazon watershed.

The area protects thousands of species of flora and fauna, including iconic, rare and endemic Amazon wildlife such as the critically endangered yellow-tailed woolly monkey and the Huallaga Toucanet!

A significant area of the Park is under rehabilitation, which has the potential to provide local employment and ‘green jobs‘ with further investment. In 2019, there were approximately 1,200 visitors, mainly domestic, but the steady increase in international guests was cause for optimism and growth in tourism service and promotion for the area along the value chain.

However, in 2020 this growth substantially decreased. Our team is working to implement the training and development needed to activate the community’s vision for sustainable tourism in the national park; particularly, through community-based tourism initiatives.

Activities in Rio Abiseo Last Month

In the last week of January, the Peru team met with 77 community members across five villages to discuss project goals, better understand the tourism potential of each community, and most importantly, learn about the communities’ vision for their families and how nature-based tourism can play a key role in achieving those goals.

During the first week of February, 150 baseline surveys were conducted to better understand how COVID-19 has impacted the communities’ livelihoods, their current tourism initiatives and their perception about implementing sustainable tourist products in post-pandemic scenarios, so that project activities can be adapted to community needs, and impact tracked over time!

Planeterra and IUCN are working together to ensure that communities will once again benefit from sustainable tourism, and that tourism is better integrated into protected area management planning and operations at both sites in Peru, and inform a blueprint for other places in the country!

We are also working in Vietnam currently, and we will update you on that progress soon! We thank you and our entire community for supporting us and the communities we work with.

The Planeterra team is excited to share more about our partnership with IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature. We are working together to deliver community tourism development, with a focus on four protected areas in Peru and Vietnam.

Protected Areas play a crucial role in maintaining the health of the planet and our health as a species. They are important in conserving biodiversity and ecosystem services, such as food, clean water supply, medicines and protection from the impacts of natural disasters.

Tourism is a key economic driver to support protected areas and provides a way to foster the public’s and local communities’ connections to protected areas. Tourism can provide a powerful argument for the conservation of protected areas because it depends on beautiful natural areas, healthy wildlife, and authentic cultures.

Sadly, COVID-19 has already resulted in the closure of parks and protected areas in many countries.

There are concerns that as a result of job loss, many people living around the national parks are considering bringing back unsustainable forms of income, including hunting, mining and deforestation. 

Tourism provided jobs and a sustainable income for families and helped protect the environment.

Planeterra and the IUCN are working in Peru and Vietnam to bridge the gap created by the pandemic on tourism in and around priority protected areas and kickstart economic recovery through community-led tourism.

Our goal is not to simply get tourism back to where it was before, but to do tourism better for the people, wildlife and ecosystems in the targeted protected areas.

Over the past 2 years of the pandemic, we’ve witnessed the vulnerability of people, livelihoods and economies to the declining health of our environment.

However, it has also highlighted that human health and well-being depend on healthy ecosystems and biodiversity providing essential goods and services.

Recognizing that tourism operations need to become more sustainable and nature-oriented, Planeterra and IUCN are working with Indigenous people, local communities and protected area managers to build up safe, equitable and sustainable community-based tourism experiences.

These experiences are strengthened with community benefit-sharing programs to support community recovery from the pandemic and to build a better future for people and wildlife.

To achieve this, Planeterra will provide training to community members to improve their tourism businesses and increase their benefits.

Planeterra has welcomed six people to our team, Phuong Tran and Richard Bazan Callupe, who will be managing the project in Peru and Vietnam as well as two more team members in each region!