Fundación Pachamama

Fundación Pachamama works to permanently protect the headwaters and indigenous territories in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Fundación Pachamama has 22 years of experience in promoting a resilient and innovative conservation model respectful of life, and with an emphasis on the recognition and respect for human rights and the rights of nature, to generate the necessary conditions in which the nationalities and indigenous peoples strengthen their processes of self-determination. This approach is based on the social philosophy of Buen Vivir.

Fundación Pachamama, alongside indigenous federations CONFENIAE, AIDESEP, ORPIO, COICA, and in partnership with Amazon Watch, Pachamama Alliance, and STAND Earth, is part of the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative (ASHI). This joint initiative strives to permanently protect more than 33 million hectares of tropical rainforests in the headwaters of the Amazon River – the Napo, Pastaza, and Marañon river basins of Ecuador and Peru.

This area is the ancestral territory of 30 indigenous nationalities that are over 500,000 people strong, including some groups living in voluntary isolation. It is also one of the most biodiverse terrestrial ecosystems on Earth and contains 3.8 billion metric tons of carbon in standing forests and 1.9 billion metric tons of carbon in undeveloped oil and gas fields.

By advancing indigenous forest stewardship of these lands, ASHI works to avoid environmental and social degradation in the area for short-sighted, discriminatory and destructive industrial development projects. Synchronicity Earth’s Flourishing Diversity Programme is supporting ASHI building a shared alternative vision, incentives, and leverage to establish a bi-national (Ecuador and Peru) protected region that is off-limits to industrial scale resource extraction under indigenous peoples’ stewardship.

The initiative conserves local biodiversity, human rights and contributed towards the global effort to reverse the climate crisis by prioritising the well-being of communities and the Amazonian biome and its ecosystem services.