Save Your World’s Conservation Strategy: Leasing Land
For Save Your World’s President, Scott Cecil, father of  three and with his own childhood spent in U.S. National Parks and Forests, seeking to preserve the natural resources he had come to love as a kid made clear and absolute sense.
When Scott decided to take action, he found the best possible path for his efforts and energy: a working partnership with the highly respected Conservation International. That decision was founded upon a few simple but important issues: our badly ailing and worsening climate, the general public’s lack of environmental awareness, and no significant changes to continuing destructive practices all over this fragile planet…
In 2006, Scott gathered a group of family and friends to act upon their concerns and frustrations by putting their vision in motion, creating together the Guyana Reserve with the Save Your World project. Led by Scott, the mission of this organization is to provide financial support for and create public awareness around conserving our world’s natural resources.
Save Your World’s conservation and preservation projects are designed to achieve the best possible results for consumers, the environment and the communities most affected by ecologically minded efforts. At every opportunity, Save Your World attempts to implement a plan of action that effectively engages with and enhances all three of these entities.
Conservation International and the Government of Guyana
 Put simply, Save Your World’s mindset is one of complementing and coordinating with other companies seeking the most effective, productive and imaginative methods for conservation and preservation. Conservation International is one of these.
By purchasing our products, you are contributing to the Save Your World project, a partnership with Conservation International and the Government of Guyana Forestry Commission. The project secures rainforest habitat that would have been leased by mining or logging companies. Every purchase consumers make helps protect one whole acre of dwindling habitat, thus keeping it in its pristine condition.
It has become important to explain why the Save Your World project chooses to lease the Upper Essequibo Conservation Concession in Guyana rather than purchase the land outright. Indeed, this land is in many ways invaluable to our conservation efforts, and Save Your World hopes to clarify the advantages of our strategy for creating “Conservation Concessions,” or “Conservation Incentive Agreements.”
Conservation Incentive Agreements
 What was once a small grassroots movement of academics and perceived environmental extremists has become a globally enriched, individually fortified effort to preserve and conserve the Earth’s natural resources. Many who were once skeptical are beginning to realize the current moment in humankind’s existence is perhaps the only opportunity we have to save our planet by solving its unhealthy environmental dilemma.
The destruction of rainforests over the next 25 years is predicted to wipe out or endanger almost half the world’s animals, plants and microorganisms. This is factual, albeit daunting, information, seemingly worsening every day.
Conservation International's stated mission is “to conserve the Earth's living natural heritage – our global biodiversity – and to demonstrate that human societies are able to live harmoniously with nature.” In July 2002, Conservation International signed an agreement with the Government of Guyana to protect 200,000 acres of pristine forest, establishing a new era in environmental conservation and preservation: the “Conservation Concession,” or “Conservation Incentive Agreement.”
This unique plan, effectively giving Conservation International a 30-year logging license for these priceless rainforest areas, allows Conservation International to manage the entirety of these natural resources for conservation rather than timber exploration and exploitation. In exchange for the right to conserve this land, the agreement requires Conservation International to pay the Government of Guyana annual fees equal to those of an enterprising logging company.
This type of Conservation Incentive Agreement achieves important biodiversity conservation goals, with Conservation International and Save Your World acting as the world’s purchasing power for conservation, and Guyana supplying the conservation opportunity.
Because the conservation of bio-diverse and resource-rich habitats is a very difficult problem for nations feeling they need to exploit their natural resources for economic development, there must be a built-in provision allowing these countries to receive economic benefit while conserving those resources. One difference, and an integral part of the success of any Conservation Incentive Agreement, is the implementation of a “Voluntary Community Investment Fund,” which ensures benefits to the local communities such as training, employment and investment in socioeconomic development.
Logging, mining, grazing, agriculture and other natural resource development offer the prospect of solid economic benefits but are often environmentally destructive. The key to the success of the Conservation Incentive Agreement approach is its ability to perfectly match the fiscal opportunity of resource depletion with a conservation alternative. In effect, it has made industrial development and resource destruction less attractive to the Government of Guyana.
Leasing vs. Buying
The question for some has been why should Save Your World be leasing these natural resources when buying the land would ensure perpetual conservation for generations to come?
The basic idea behind and goal of a successfully implemented Conservation Incentive Agreement is to encourage governmental cooperation while preventing further destruction. That said, it is nearly impossible and fiscally unsound for companies like Save Your World and Conservation International to attempt to purchase these bio-diverse land tracts. Many nations, and Guyana is one, are unwilling to sell their land for fear of loss of natural resources – a valuable and sovereign right for nations lacking first-tier access to global markets.
In resource-rich but revenue-poor continents such as Africa, South America and Asia these natural resources – timber, minerals, agriculture, etc. – are viable means by which to build equity in a burgeoning global marketplace. Developing countries as well as established, fully industrialized nations desire these natural resources and are willing to pay high prices for their acquisition.
Protecting Assets and Conserving Natural Resources
The competitive structure of the ecology-and-economy market is necessary, as is any market’s price-value system, to allow these countries to receive revenue from their natural resources and to be rewarded for their willingness to do the right thing. Favorable lease conditions protect Save Your World and the environment, while offering countries like Guyana compensation for their participation in alternative methods to ensure a safer, healthier world.
In addition, Save Your World has an opportunity to balance resource protection with economic development by leasing land from represented owners and allocating the saved capital from this lease agreement for future investment – Borneo’s rainforests, for instance, or marine sanctuaries in the Pacific – to continue strengthening partnerships and saving our world.
The Conservation Incentive Agreement to lease land provides more benefit to all parties involved with less risk for Save Your World and the governments, communities and peoples involved. As Scott Cecil, President of Save Your World, puts it, “We are able to protect in perpetuity, with more funds available for ongoing and future investments.”
The good intentions behind Save Your World’s conservation and preservation projects are designed to achieve the best possible results for consumers, the environment and the communities most affected by ecologically minded efforts. Conservation Incentive Agreements effectively achieve this goal and set a pattern for forward-thinking, imaginative and concerned companies to make meaningful impacts.
 Indeed, the novelty of the Conservation Incentive Agreement is its ability to work within an existing economic structure, effectively achieving results without discouraging or frustrating landowners, government leaders or impoverished communities.
Conservation Incentive Agreements are good, solid imagineering of a simple solution to a complex problem. The phrase “outside the box” might be an apt description for this thought process, but we prefer the simpler Save Your World mantra. For anything humans design and implement with residual destruction of our planet, Save Your World believes there’s an opposite, equal force that preserves its health.
How to Help Save Your World’s Conservation Efforts
By purchasing our products, consumers are contributing to the partnership between Conservation International and the Guyanese Forestry Commission as well as future partnerships like it. Every purchase made helps protect one whole acre of dwindling habitat, thus keeping it in its pristine condition:
1 Product = 1 Acre of Rainforest Saved for 1 Year
The substantial progress being made in protecting our planet’s precious resources is directly influenced and supported by purchasing Save Your World’s products. It’s like a carbon credit, only better, since you get great all-natural products while reversing negative effects on the environment by saving rainforest acres.
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