Protected areas of Brazil included various classes of area according to the National System of Nature Conservation Units (SNUC), a formal, unified system for federal, state and municipal parks created in 2000.
The Programme for Belize is a private initiative, the first project undertaken in 1988. Financial and management assistance was generously given by the Massachusetts Audubon Society. After the project was identified and started, loans were provided by the Nature Conservancy and donations provided by the World Land Trust. The goal of the project was to purchase and protect tropical rainforests in Belize to prevent them from being sold and cleared to make way for ranching. The project was launched at the London Butterfly House in May 1989. The famous naturalists Gerald Durrell and his wife Lee Durrell were guests of honour, and also visited Belize in 1989 to help with in-situ conservation efforts there. By 1996, more than 250,000 acres (1,000 km2) of land had been purchased and was under the ownership and protection of PfB. The World Land Trust then initiated Friends of Belize to help raise funds to cover costs of continuing protection of the purchased lands, as well as to aid in-situ conservation efforts. Since 2006 World Land Trust has organised regular symposia for the decision-makers of their project partners, and in 2008 PfB hosted the event at their La Milpa ecolodge.
Since declaring independence in 1981, Belize has enacted many environmental protection laws aimed at the preservation of the country's natural and cultural heritage, as well as its wealth of natural resources. These acts have established a number of different types of protected areas, with each category having its own set of regulations dictating public access, resource extraction, land use and ownership.
Rainforest Trust is a US-based nonprofit environmental organization focused on the purchase and protection of tropical lands to strategically conserve threatened species. Founded in 1988, Rainforest Trust was formerly known as World Parks Endowment. In 2006, then World Parks Endowment affiliated itself with World Land Trust, a UK-based nonprofit environmental organization, and became World Land Trust-US, as both organizations were dedicated to minimizing their costs in order to allow donated funds to flow to habitat conservation projects on the ground. On September 16, 2013, because of diverging modus operandi, and as part of celebrating the organization's 25th anniversary, the World Land Trust-US changed its name to Rainforest Trust.
Tourism in Belize has grown considerably recently, and it is now the second largest industry in the nation. Belizean Prime Minister Dean Barrow has stated his intention to use tourism to combat poverty throughout the country. The growth in tourism has positively affected the agricultural, commercial, and finance industries, as well as the construction industry. The results for Belize's tourism-driven economy have been significant, with the nation welcoming almost one million tourists in a calendar year for the first time in its history in 2012.
The Northeast Ecological Corridor Nature Reserve (NECNR) refers to an area designated as a protected Nature Reserve located on the northeast coast of Puerto Rico, between the municipalities of Luquillo and Fajardo. Specifically, the lands that comprise the NEC are located between Luquillo's town square to the west and Seven Seas Beach to the east, being delineated by PR Route # 3 to its south and the Atlantic Ocean to its north. It was decreed as a protected area by former Puerto Rico Governor Aníbal S. Acevedo-Vilá in April 2008, a decision reversed by Governor Luis G. Fortuño-Burset in October 2009, although he later passed a law in June 2012 re-designated as nature reserve two-thirds of its lands, after intense lobbying and public pressure. Later, in 2013, Governor Alejandro García-Padilla signed a law declaring all lands within the NEC a nature reserve. The area comprises 2,969.64 acres, which include such diverse habitats as forest, wetlands, beaches, coral communities, and a sporadically bioluminescent lagoon. The Corridor is also home to 866 species of flora and fauna, of which 54 are considered critical elements, meaning rare, threatened, endangered and endemic species classified by the Puerto Rico Department of Natural and Environmental Resources (DNER), some even designated as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). These include, among others, federally endangered species such as the plain pigeon, the snowy plover, the Puerto Rican boa, the hawksbill sea turtle and the West Indian manatee. The beaches along the NEC, which are 8.74 kilometers long are important nesting grounds for the leatherback sea turtle, which starts its nesting season around April each year.
Chamicero de Perijá is a small nature reserve in Colombia established in 2014. It is centered on the Colombian side of the Serranía de Perijá mountain range, part of the East Andes. It holds incredible biodiversity and home to numerous endangered and endemic bird species. Chamicero de Perijá protects a 1,850 acres (750 ha) area of cloud forest habitat which is home to several rare bird taxa, including the Perijá thistletail, the Perijá metaltail, the Perijá brush-finch, an endemic subspecies of the rufous antpitta, and the Perijá tapaculo.
Rio Ronuro Ecological Station is an ecological station in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil. It protects an area of contact between Amazon rainforest in the north and Cerrado semi-deciduous forest in the south. Since being created in 1998 it has been reduced in size and has suffered from significant deforestation.
The Rio Roosevelt Ecological Station is an ecological station in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil.
Terra do Meio Ecological Station is an ecological station (ESEC) in the state of Pará, Brazil.
The Golden Stream Corridor Preserve is a nature preserve in Belize with a unique diversity of habitat types and ecosystems. The preserve is owned and managed by Ya'axche' Conservation Trust. The preserve protects the Golden Stream watershed.
The Central Rio de Janeiro Atlantic Forest Mosaic is a protected area mosaic in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The mosaic is inland, to the east of the city of Rio de Janeiro.
The Central Amazon Ecological Corridor is an ecological corridor in the state of Amazonas, Brazil, that connects a number of conservation units in the Amazon rainforest. The objective is to maintain genetic connectivity between the protected areas without penalizing the local people, where possible using participatory planning that involves all affected actors.
The Central Atlantic Forest Ecological Corridor (Portuguese: Corredor Central da Mata Atlântica is an ecological corridor in the states of Espírito Santo and Bahia, Brazil. It promotes improvements to connectivity between fragments of Atlantic Forest in the region with the goal of maintaining genetic health among flora and fauna. The greater Atlantic Forest is also home to many native endangered or vulnerable species that are endemic to this part of the globe including but not limited too the: Golden lion tamarin, Three-toed sloth, and the Bristle-spined rat. The Central Ecological Corridor is beneficial in connecting hundreds of at-risk populations experiencing reduced gene flow and genetic variation due to deforestation.
The Esmeralda Provincial Park is a provincial park in the Misiones Province of Argentina.
The Juatinga Ecological Reserve is an ecological reserve in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It protects a rugged peninsula projecting into the Atlantic Ocern that is mainly covered by Atlantic Forest, and also helps maintain the traditional lifestyle of residents of small villages along the coast.
This is My Earth (TiME) is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving biodiversity by using crowdsourcing to purchase lands in biodiversity hotspots.
Martha Isabel "Pati" Ruiz Corzo is a Mexican environmentalist. She is the founder of the Sierra Gorda Ecological Group, which has successfully led grassroots efforts to conserve the Sierra Gorda in central Mexico since 1987. In 2013, she was named a Champion of the Earth by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
The Maya Forest is a tropical moist broadleaf forest that covers much of the Yucatan Peninsula, thereby encompassing Belize, northern Guatemala, and southeastern Mexico. It is deemed the second largest tropical rainforest in the Americas, after the Amazon, with an area of circa 15 million hectares, of which at least 3 million lie within protected areas.
