In the middle of the Christmas season, we have another reason to celebrate: 10 years of Chances for Nature! On 15 December 2011, we founded CfN in a PhD student’s office at the German Primate Center and can now already look back on a whole decade of work for nature and species conservation.
2021 was clearly one of the most challenging years in our history and it was not only the Corona pandemic that affected our project countries. In Madagascar, a drought which has been lasting for years also had an impact on the Kirindy dry forest, where we had to strengthen our protection measures for the forest due to the loss of income from tourism. In Myanmar, everyday life and also our project work was severely affected by the military coup and the subsequent unrest throughout the country.
Despite these difficulties, there are also many positive things to report. For example, we were able to plant over 25,000 trees in the Kirindy Forest in 2021 and new Little Rangers could participate in our environmental education camp in September. Together with our local partner CNFEREF, our team organised and carried out forest patrols to protect the forest from commercial plundering during the pandemic.
In Myanmar, our vets were able to provide over 150 treatments as part of the mobile elephant clinics, recapture several runaway bull elephants and moreover, we initiated the formation of an elephant owners’ association. In January 2022, we will start the construction for the student accommodation of the environmental education centre at Lake Indawgyi.
Next year, we will also become active in Indonesia and start a project for forest-friendly coffee cultivation on the island of Java for the protection of the endangered silver gibbon.
We are particularly looking forward to Chances for Nature’s first nature conservation project in Germany: as of 2022, we will support the renaturation of a biotope for native flora and fauna. And this will be on the grounds of the German Primate Center, where it all began 10 years ago.
We would sincerely like to thank all our members and supporters who have made the projects in 2021 and over the past 10 years possible. Together we will certainly set up many more initiatives for nature and species conservation!
