Guyra Paraguay

ERF funding will support the creation of a larger protected area of approximately 27,000 ha in conjunction with the 20,000 ha Gaai indigenous territory and secure a key intersection of the proposed Chaco corridor network.

The Gran Chaco is a wide ecologic-geographic region with no regard for national borders. It stretches south from Bolivia through Paraguay, into the southwestern extreme of Brazil and into the northern reaches of Argentina. This region exhibits extreme temperatures, from searing heat to frosts, supporting a highly adapted biodiversity and endemic species.

In recent years, a factory farming system has advanced across the Paraguayan Chaco with more than a million hectares turned into soybean fields, displacing subsistence farmers and cattle barons alike, part of the rush that has made the Chaco one of the world’s deforestation hot spots. WLT is now urgently assisting several partners in a co-ordinated campaign to save as much of the Chaco as possible, working with Fundación Biodiversidad Argentina to create the Chaco Taguá Biological Corridor as well as with Nativa and Natura Bolivia in the north.

Success here would be transformational for the ecological future of wide areas across South America.

In response to this challenge, WLT partner Guyra has established an innovative scheme for biological connectivity over a huge area between Defensores del Chaco National Park in the south and Chovoreca National Monument in the north. Key to their plan is large-scale collaboration with members of the agricultural-livestock association APAD, with the aim of bringing private land into coordinated conservation protection, creating long-term habitat corridors which create financial value as carbon sinks.