Promoting Regenerative Livelihoods in the Amazon

To create value for our customers, communities, suppliers, partners, employees, and shareholders, we need to focus on what we truly believe. In this sense, we turn our energies to the communities that supply biodiversity products based on our sustainable Livelihoods Approach.

This Sustainable Livelihoods Approach is a method of understanding the lives of people experiencing poverty and disadvantage. It is a participatory approach based on the belief that people experiencing vulnerability have abilities and assets that can be used to help them manage and improve their lives.

Working hand in hand with communities at the grassroots level, Bekoherent® puts people at the center of our approach. As we seek to improve the health of the forests, we are mindful of all stakeholders as we strive to provide solutions to the threats facing these partner communities and their fundamental habitats.

Partnering with the Local Communities

 

The Amazon is mainly occupied and protected by hundreds of indigenous communities. In our pursuit of being koherent, we protect and add value back to nature and the Amazon communities. To create value for our customers, communities, suppliers, partners, employees, and shareholders, we need to focus on what we truly believe. In this sense, we turn our energies to the communities that supply biodiversity products based on a sustainable livelihood approach.

 

Sociobiodiversity is our source of inspiration. By providing nature to your care products, Bekoherent® is connecting local Colombian communities to its clients and helping them achieve their sustainability goals through its ingredients, creating shared value strategies within its supply chains of raw materials from Colombian biodiversity.

 

At Bekoherent®, we care about comprehensively protecting the forest and understanding the needs of communities and the ecosystem to impact the environment in the long term positively. We are closely working with the Piaroas Community, located in Vichada, Colombia, to create a comprehensive partnership to promote sustainable livelihoods for this community.

 

With our approach, we link poverty reduction, sustainability, and empowerment processes (e.g., participation, gender empowerment, and good governance). We believe in peoples' interconnectedness #feelingconnected with the natural environment, and we are very aware that the earth's natural resources are not limitless. 

 

We strongly believe that it is possible to produce and consume resources and realize our livelihood aspirations without jeopardizing the capacities of each other or of the future generations in maintaining at least the same level of opportunities. 

 

We seek that we can all benefit from the privileges of the jungle, allowing future generations to see the fruits of the commitment we must have with this ecosystem and its communities.

 

In general terms, the relationship between the sustainable development of indigenous communities and the health of the forests they inhabit should be oriented towards the active construction of guarantees that protect these spaces - understood as environmental and socio-cultural territories.

 

 

Partnering with Saving the Amazon 

 

 

We are working with Saving the Amazon to offset our footprint towards climate neutrality, where we offset our net carbon emissions, a goal we hope to achieve by the end of 2022. It is crucial to keep in mind that when appropriately done through accredited providers, carbon offsetting is a valuable tool to combat climate change, but it is not a solution. We cannot plant enough trees, mangroves, or rainforests to keep up with the large amounts of greenhouse gases we are sending into the atmosphere by 'keeping doing the same thing.' That is why we will review our emissions every year and make sure we are continually looking for parts of our business to improve. We are continually looking for ways to reduce our environmental impact.

 

Improving livelihoods while protecting the environment ensures that communities can continue to thrive for decades to come, which is essential to our community-centered conservation approach.

 

What exactly is the carbon footprint?

The carbon footprint is expressed in tons of CO2. It corresponds to the number of emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) produced by direct or indirect effect by an individual, organization, event, or product.

Today, almost all the activities that we carry out (mobility, food, manufacturing processes ...) and goods that we consume and use (electrical appliances, household products, boilers, refrigerators, ...) involve energy consumption.

This aspect shows that we continuously contribute to emissions into the atmosphere and participate in the planet's global warming. To reduce our carbon footprint, we can all take action, even on a personal level. It is mainly about changing certain habits and acquiring others who are more respectful of the environment and, consequently, ourselves.

People, organizations, and companies, with their activity, raw materials, and waste that we all generate, cause a considerable environmental impact. And clearly, we leave a mark. Calculating the carbon footprint makes it possible to identify the primary sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

The aim is to collect data on a company's energy and material consumption and translate it into equivalent CO2 emissions to have a complete and reliable inventory of emissions as possible. Once the carbon footprint has been calculated, a record is kept using a standardized system.

For companies and organizations, calculating the carbon footprint is configured as a reference or starting point. Their registration makes companies aware of the impact they generate and allows them to implement the most effective actions to reduce emissions or compensate (if the emissions can not be avoided) in compensation projects. A calculation method is accessible to everyone and created by the French climate change expert engineer Jean-Marc Jankovic. If you are interested, on an individual level, you can analyze what your impact is in the following link here

* Carbon Neutral means that a company (or a person) pays an organization to offset all the carbon they emit through their daily operations. The globally accepted standard is that 15 trees will offset one ton of carbon over twenty years of growth (considering variables such as temperature, tree species, growth rate, climate, etc.).