Since the launch of TUI Forest Peru, a lot has happened in the Andes mountains near Vilcanota.

With deforestation threatening the important natural habitat and impacting the livelihoods of the indigenous communities, the TUI Care Foundation set an ambitious target of growing and planting 1.9 million trees in Peru. Working in partnership with international NGO Global Forest Generation and local organisation Asociación Ecosistemas Andinas (known as ECOAN, winners of the 2023 Earthshot Prize), reforestation has focused on planting Polylepis trees, which adapt naturally to growing at extreme Andean heights of over 4,000 meters. Polylepis forests play an essential role in protecting the water security of the local communities, as well as being home to an abundance of wildlife.

So far, over 600,000 trees have been planted in the Vilcanota area, covering 135.53 hectares - the equivalent of over 300 football pitches. The planting was managed by 20 indigenous communities, with the trees originally planted and grown in community-run nurseries. Over 7,700 local people took part in the reforestation activities, which were organised as community tree-planting festivals called ‘Queuña Raymi, to celebrate moving the trees from the nursery to the forest plot.

As part of the project, 300 clean artisanal cookstove have also been produced and distributed in three communities (Huasahuasi, Tambo Huaylla, and Lares Ayllu). Traditional cookstoves and cooking techniques (which burn solid fuels) are harmful to both human health and the environment, so the clean cookstoves are a much healthier solution which focus on improving heat transfer to improve energy efficiency and reduce harmful emissions.