ÑÜRÜM, Panama — Isidrio Hernandez-Ruiz has a soft spot for the bright yellow flowers of the guayacan trumpet tree (Tabebuia guayacan), a native species that blooms across Panama each spring. It’s one of many reasons why Hernandez-Ruiz, a rural farmer known locally as a campesino, chose to participate in a reforestation effort to plant native trees across his land that will soon earn him income — without harvesting them. Between the nonnative pines on his land now grows a mix of native trees that promise at least 20 years of payments for the carbon they sequester. Hernandez-Ruiz’s plot is part of a larger effort to give reforestation a do-over in Panama. The total project spans 100 hectares (247 acres) of planting across 45,000 hectares (111,000 acres) total in a rural district called Ñürüm in the Ngäbe-Buglé Comarca, an officially recognized Indigenous land. The project is co-led by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and the district’s traditional leadership with financial support from the Rohr Family Foundation and a grant from the U.K. government’s Global Centre on Biodiversity for Climate. Nearly 30 individuals and families chose to participate, and landowners keep full ownership of their land. The Ngäbe-Buglé Comarca is the largest Indigenous territory in the country, covering more than 9% of Panama’s land area and encompassing two Indigenous groups, the Ngäbe and the Buglé. In Ñürüm, the landscape has been heavily deforested over the decades from burning for cultivation, clear-cutting for cattle and government-sponsored plantations of nonnative pine and teak.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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