Understand the forest you're planting.

Tourism accounts for roughly 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and flights are usually the biggest slice of a traveler's footprint. A single long-haul round trip to Lima can emit more CO₂ than many people produce in months of daily life.

The answer isn't to stop exploring the world — travel funds conservation, culture and communities. The answer is to travel consciously: fly less when you can, choose lower-impact options on the ground, and compensate what remains by funding real carbon removal, like growing forests.

Trees are still one of the most effective carbon capture technologies on Earth. A growing tropical forest pulls CO₂ out of the atmosphere every single day, while also cooling the air, holding the soil and sheltering wildlife — co-benefits no machine can match.

Peru holds the second-largest share of the Amazon rainforest after Brazil, yet it loses tens of thousands of hectares of forest every year — much of it cleared for short-lived cattle pasture that degrades within a decade.

That degraded pastureland is exactly where we work. Once the forest is gone and the soil exhausted, the land is cheap and abandoned — but not dead. With the right native species and a few years of care, it can become forest again.

Restoring degraded land relieves pressure on primary forest: every hectare replanted is a hectare that doesn't need to be carved out of standing jungle.

The Palcazú Valley, where Iscozacín sits, is part of one of the most biodiverse corridors on the planet — home to jaguars, spectacled bears, hundreds of bird species and thousands of plants found nowhere else.

We plant 20+ native species — not eucalyptus monocultures — because a mixed native forest becomes habitat, not just carbon storage. Within a few years of canopy closure, seed-dispersing birds and mammals return and the forest starts regenerating itself.

That's the quiet magic of restoration: you plant the first 1,100 trees per hectare, and nature plants the next generation on its own.

Dense planting mimics how forests naturally regenerate: young trees shade out grasses, protect each other from wind and sun, and race upward together. Planting sparsely on degraded pasture simply fails — the grass wins.

As the stand matures, foresters practice selective thinning (raleo): removing weaker stems in stages so the strongest ~500 trees per hectare get the light, water and nutrients to become the permanent canopy. The thinned timber is used, not wasted — its value funds maintenance and new land.

This is the same silviculture used in the best-managed forests on Earth. Nothing is clear-cut, the canopy never disappears, and the end state is a mature forest protected as a Private Conservation Area (ACP) under Peruvian law — forever.