Cusco Ecosystem Restoration and Community Development
“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.”
- Chinese Proverb
The Challenge
By studying and working in the rural districts of the Peruvian Andes, Pachamama Raymi highlights that rural poverty in the area is largely caused by environmental degradation. Generations of poor land management aggravates the situation, generating a vicious cycle. Decades of overgrazing have stripped once-forested Andean mountainsides down to thin soil and bare rock. With little to hold it in place, every rainfall washes more soil away, carving gullies that channel yet more soil downhill and unleash destructive floods.
This has devastating consequences for families who depend on growing crops and raising cattle. As the land fails, so do incomes, affecting funding for education and healthcare. The result is migration, as more people abandon their communities for the cities, leaving the land to degrade further.
The Facts
Soil degradation by water erosion is intensified in the Andes by steep slopes, sparse vegetation cover, and short bursts of high-intensity rainfall over shallow soils, so soil is washed away far faster than it can naturally reform.
Between Peru's 2007 and 2017 censuses, the rural population fell by 19.4%, and the highland Sierra region's population shrank by 5.7% as families, especially the young, left failing land for the cities.
Climate shocks fall hardest on these communities: the 2017 El Niño alone affected 1.3 million Peruvians and caused an estimated USD 3.1 billion in losses, with flooding and landslides hitting rural, low-income households worst.
Pachamama Raymi's methodology, developed since 1986, has helped lift more than 280 rural communities out of poverty across Peru, Tanzania, and Nepal.
Potential Solution
The recovery begins with resilient pine trees, whose roots break apart the compacted rock and open up pockets where grass, native species, and mushrooms can take hold. As the soil rebuilds and the forest returns, so do the animals, and families can raise guinea pigs and cattle on land that had been written off as lost.
Alongside the planting, Pachamama Raymi trains local people to grow fruit, tend livestock, cultivate the pasture grasses that feed bulls and guinea pigs, and run their own businesses. A distinctive part of the method is motivation through friendly contests between families and communities, which drives rapid, lasting adoption of dozens of innovations at once, in natural-resource management, in productive activities, and in everyday health and home life.
Our Initiatives
EcoSwell has partnered with Pachamama Raymi to extend its reforestation and ecosystem-restoration work into the Peruvian highlands and to channel volunteer support into this proven model through both manual labour and applied research. This project aims to break the vicious cycle that causes this issue, so both the land and the families who live on it can begin to recover together.
Through this partnership, EcoSwell supports Pachamama Raymi's work across its network of Cusco-region communities, allowing volunteer interns to get directly involved in:
Reforestation: growing and sourcing seedlings, georeferencing where trees have been planted, planting out the native species that anchor the soil and rebuild the forest, and survival monitoring of the seeds planted.
Ecological research: practical projects such as designing and building nesting structures to bring birds back to the recovering landscape or water infiltration assessments to study soil erosion.
Productive projects & market development: helping families strengthen small businesses and opening up new markets for community products, such as the edible mushrooms that grow in the pine plantations.
The impact of Pachamama Raymi’s work is visible. Instead of leaving for the cities, people are returning to their communities. Incomes are rising, populations are growing again, and children who once went without are now studying at university and coming home to strengthen the family business. EcoSwell’s partnership can channel volunteer energy and resources to strengthen and spread the positive impact of Pachamama Raymi. Restore the mountain, and you restore the family. Restore enough families, and you restore a whole region and community.
