January sees our first campaign of 2020! We start the year in Sumatra, at a critical time, during their biggest wildfires.
Our community developer, Sarah Wang, went to Sumatra to work with schools, NGO’s, Rangers, and communities from all over Indonesia. See the video of her campaign here.
She taught her sustainability program: Youth Rangers, to hundreds of teachers and students in and around the Leuser Ecosystem rainforest.
You can see a second, a more personal video she made about her adventures with friends and fellow conservationists on this campaign, here.
Participating groups learned everything from First Aid, to wildlife conflict resolution, to jungle trek communication and safety, and humane education teaching techniques.
From cities to rainforest communities, it was amazing to see everyone’s commitment to creating a sustainable future for their children!
As always, we want to express a huge thank you, for making all of this possible, and for helping all our local partners, the rainforest, the local wildlife, and the forest communities!
This year has been huge already and we’re not even through the first month yet! We are proud to announce Piggy’s programs are coming to another region of Africa: Morocco!
We are starting another wildlife habitat restoration and school rebuilding program with local Moroccan partner and fellow UN animal group RAPAD-Maroc. We are thrilled to be working together this way!
We have been working together for the past year in our capacity at the UN, and we will be starting our new collaborative program in the Moroccan city of Essaouira. A very important location, and the home of the tree-climbing goats!
TREE CLIMBING GOATS!!
But there are a lot more animals to protect and bring back through ecological restoration. And their restoration will mean a more sustainable future for the local community!
As always, the thanks goes to all our supporters for making all of this possible, and to all our local partners like RAPAD-Maroc help these animals and the local community!
A dramatic rescue story, which could easily have been a tragedy!
You may be aware just how devastating the Indonesian wildfire situation has become. Rainforests in Sumatra and Borneo are burning at a more intense rate than ever before, leaving one million Indonesians struggling to breathe and survive in the smoke and the wake of the fires. Sadly countless wild animals are in trouble as well.
Thankfully, The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) has stepped in to give communities and wildlife the support they so desperately need! Thanks to a generous grant by IFAW, DAD’s local Indonesian partner Indonesian Species Conservation Program (ISCP) has been able to increase capacity to help stem the wildfires and save countless more animals now in need of rescue.
Our collaboration with ISCP has recently expanded to Aceh which lies at the edge of the Sumatran rainforest, increasing the range of our partnership’s protection to over 240 kilometers! Here we share the first dramatic rescue and rehabilitation story from Aceh, an injured, one-eyed slow loris.
His friend in the cage will also be rehabilitated and released, after some current wildlife conflicts are resolved near this wildlife authority facility.
In addition to our wildlife rescue and rehabilitation effort, when our collaborative ISCP network discovers a new fire about to be set, they intervene, and offer local farmers alternatives to setting palm oil fires, giving them sustainable options. These initiatives are already underway in the Leuser Ecosystem village of Batu Rongring, where we have been working for the past year. We are happy to report have shown great success, thus, the local farmers have decided not to continue with palm oil farming after learning from our sustainability education program.
As for our one-eyed slow loris friend, the ISCP team, in cooperation with the Wildlife Authority rehabilitated him; transferring him to a transport container to be released back into the Leuser Ecosystem UNESCO Site rainforest.
And thanks to this amazing team, our one-eyed friend is now back in the rainforest living his best slow loris life, while he could very easily have been a victim of a growing forest fire in the region instead.
All of us cannot thank IFAW enough for the opportunity to give these communities, animals, and ecosystem a chance in the face of growing wildfire disasters!
We are so excited to share the year ahead with you all!
Firstly, we want to share the effectiveness of our education program in Sumatra from the past year. The results speak for themselves. We are so proud of our local partner, Sumatra Sapo Zuma Zuma, with whom we have been creating rainforest school classes and implementing rainforest restoration, in a heavily palm oil farmed region. We have been interviewing palm oil farmers there, to see what changes they will be making a year since our program was implemented. We are thrilled to see that farmers are now planning to end the planting of palm oil trees, and instead will grow sustainable fruit trees!
Click here for a YouTube video of one of our community’s farmers explaining their end to palm oil farming:
Our partner Sapo Zuma Zuma has also begun compiling data from the past year about our collaborative rainforest school, to discover how effective our education and Youth Rangers initiatives have been in enhancing the lives of children in this UNESCO Site community.
We’re excitedly awaiting more results and look forward to sharing it with you soon! Thanks to your support, we are helping to transform Sumatra and stop the deforestation devastating the community!
-Tod and Piggy, Presidents, Darwin Animal Doctors
Cute Piggy photo (and probably a band photo) of the week!
