The Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has announced grants totaling $3.4 million in support of conservation and sustainable development in the southern Tropical Andes.

Grants were awarded to fifteen nonprofit organizations working in Colombia and Ecuador to help preserve natural and productive ecosystems from the effects of climate change and development and secure their benefits for human well-being. Grant recipients include the Runa Foundation, which was awarded $325,000 to create incentives for sustainable forest management and strengthen the community resource rights of indigenous Kichwa in the upper Napo watershed in the Ecuadorian Amazon; Conservation International, which will receive $200,000 to create digital tools and bolster provincial and municipal planning processes to promote ecosystem conservation in the Ecuador portion of the Mira watershed; and Corporacion Semillas de Agua, which was awarded $200,000 to reduce the effects of cattle ranching and open-pit gold mining on biodiversity and the degradation of ecosystems in the central Magdalena-Cauca watershed of Colombia.

The grants represent the third round of funding awarded as part of  the ten-year, $176 million commitment to conservation and sustainable development announced by the foundation in March 2011  — an effort that  includes work in the Andes; the Great Lakes of East Central Africa; the Greater Mekong region, including the Mekong River and its headwaters; and coastal marine programs in the Caribbean, western Indian Ocean, and western Pacific Ocean.

"The Andes region is often referred to as the 'global epicenter of biodiversity,' and preserving that biodiversity benefits human well-being," said Jorgen Thomsen, director of conservation and sustainable development at the foundation. "Our grantees are working to balance the demand for economic development in the region with the need to preserve its wide range of precious resources. We're already seeing effective conservation models coming out of this work that could be applied elsewhere in the world.