A LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT Dear friend, Nature and Culture International has always taken a holistic approach to our work. It’s embodied in our very name - nature and culture - two equal parts so intertwined as to always be mentioned in the same breath. It’s why we partner with rural and Indigenous communities. To try to conserve nature without them makes no sense. It wouldn’t work. To drive this point home, note the accomplishments we’ve highlighted in this report, almost all of which depended as much on strong Indigenous partners as on our very capable staff. This isn’t a coincidence. In aggregate, Indigenous territories in the Amazon show lower rates of deforestation, and have lost less carbon to deforestation, even than protected areas.
Indigenous peoples are very successful conservationists and have been for centuries. We focus on whole ecosystems for the same reason: we believe in an integrated approach. In our Five-Year Strategic Plan written in 2019, we selected 13 landscape mosaics as our areas of geographic focus. It is through the thoughtful placement of individual pieces - thinking about their relationship to each other and to the whole - that a meaningful pattern emerges in a tile mosaic. It is the same with a landscape mosaic.
It is in their relationship to each other that the component parts combine into a functioning whole. That’s true whether the individual pieces are national parks, Indigenous territories, protected municipal watersheds, or some combination of all.
