Networking

Through the generous donations of our partners, Horizontes is helping support

• INBIO: Inbiopark’s Adopt-A-School program: www.inbio.ac.cr/inbioparque/es/index_eng.html INBiopark is the non-profit educational nature park affiliated with Costa Rica’s National Biodiversity Institute, just outside Costa Rica’s capital city San Jose. The Adopt-a-school program aims to introduce conservation concepts to Costa Rican schoolchildren in an interactive environment that facilitates learning and instills a love of nature. Your donation will help give rural children access to the park for a special school trip that complements their classroom curriculum.

• Costa Rica’s National Forestry Financing Fund (FONAFIFO) www.fonafifo.com/english.html . Donations go to providing rural farmers with economic incentives for setting aside part of their lands for reforestation, rather than cutting any remaining timber for sale. The farms are strategically chosen to help create biological corridors between national parks and wildlife reserves that are otherwise isolated from each other. Biological corridors allow for wild animals to find safe passage from one protected area to the next, which aids in their health and proliferation. This project is supported by Costa Rica’s Environment Ministry and by private businesses.

• MARVIVA: www.marviva.net. Dedicated to protecting the coastline and marine life of the eastern tropical pacific and Caribbean, the non-profit MARVIVA is working to provide a marine safe haven for the vast and largely unexplored marine area between the Islands of Cocos (Costa Rica) Coiba (Panama) Malpelo and Gorgona (Colombia) and Galapagos (Ecuador). The corridor includes five national parks, three of which are World Heritage Sites: Cocos, Coiba and Galapagos. In addition to its high biological biodiversity, the area belongs to a region with some of the world’s greatest marine endemism.

• Corcovado Foundation: Created by members of the Drake Bay community, the foundation develops programs to help control illegal logging and hunting on the Osa Peninsula and is working to improve the management Corcovado and Piedras Blancas National parks. It has led the way in forming a coalition of local conservation organizations in the interest of creating biological corridors in the area. The foundation recently launched an English-language program to provide economic alternatives in ecotourism to people who would otherwise need to cut the forest to survive. To volunteer as an English teacher or to work in conservation areas with the foundation, visit http://www.corcovadofoundation.org