News For more than two decades, the AP Foundation has promoted forest conservation worldwide and helped to raise awareness of this issue among young people.
Created in 1992, the Audemars Piguet Foundation seeks to contribute to the conservation of forests around the world as part of a wider campaign of environmental protection and awareness-raising among young people. Be it forests ravaged by fire or storms, deforestation or ageing, it helps to make them whole again. To date, it has supported more than 80 projects in around forty countries. Its efforts are financed by a sum deducted from each of the brand’s timepieces sold.
Faced with the threats of climate change and overexploitation of forestry resources, it has become a matter of urgency to preserve, if not reinvent, the time-honoured knowledge that has enabled human beings to live for millennia in a relationship of respect with the world’s forests. Educating children to protect the environment, allowing forest peoples to regain their ancestral way of life, returning traditional forestry methods to their rightful place and promoting the use of wood substitutes are other areas in which the Foundation is active.
It also ensures that its parent company Audemars Piguet applies sustainable development criteria, in order to present a united front between the firm’s practices and the aims of the Foundation. Its efforts have seen the new Forges manufacture in Le Brassus become the first industrial building in Switzerland to receive the Minergie-Eco label. The building, heated by a wood-burning power plant which also serves many houses in the village, is supplied with Swiss-certified hydroelectricity. At the same time, all forestry products used by the firm are certified under the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) label, guaranteeing that they come from environmentally-friendly sources. Within the firm, an Eco-group has also been formed to oversee the conformity of all activities, for example transport and manufacturing processes.
Directed by Jasmine Audemars, the Foundation has its headquarters in Le Brassus, in the heart of the Joux Valley. Below we present some of the projects it has supported.
By boat on the Amazon
A link between people in the Amazon rainforest, the Selva Viva is a wooden boat built according to traditional methods by unemployed men and women in Iquitos (Peru). It encourages knowledge sharing and cultural exchanges. It also allows an inventory to be made of plants used in the traditional pharmacopeia. To pay its way, it serves as a cruise ship for several months of the year, welcoming tourists eager to live the Amazonian adventure. The AP Foundation equipped this boat and financed its construction.
With displaced farmers of the Cerrado in Brazil
A vast steppe to the north of Sao Paolo, the Cerrado plays a large part in Brazil’s economic development: breeding, mines, eucalyptus for cellulose and charcoal for steelworks. The problem is that the livelihoods of small farmers have been sacrificed for the profits of the export economy. In the region of Montes Claros, families have set up the Centre of Alternative Agriculture (CAA) which seeks to return a dignified way of life to small farmers of the Cerrado and ensure a future for their children. The AP Foundation is financing three parts of the long-term programme directed by the Protestant church association Entraide protestante suisse (EPER): training of young farmers, restoration of biodiversity, and reforestation of the land. Only organic farming offers a future to small farmers. To this end, young people must relearn environmentally-friendly agricultural methods. The first part of the training project financed by the Foundation has just been completed, a mix of theoretical teaching and practical courses.
Fruits with a unique flavour
In the last century, in the Swiss Jura, enthusiasts rediscovered and replanted some nearly extinct species of indigenous fruit trees. In 1999, the Lothar storm ruined fifty years of work, leaving only a few trunks standing. Now, near le Château de Miécourt (Jura), a hundred or more seedlings rescued from the disaster, some existing only in this arboretum, constitute a unique treasure. The AP Foundation financed the organisation of this plantation.
From desert to renaissance
The hillsides of the Sierra de Santa Marta, in Colombia - the ancestral territory of the Kogi Indians - have been stifled by cultivation of the poppy and the spraying of defoliants. Inhabitants have been driven out by clashes between drug traffickers and paramilitaries. Today, on land purchased by a European association, families have been able to resettle and recreate the original biodiversity. Villages have sprung up in the middle of cleared and decontaminated fields and, thanks to rediscovered springs, life has re-emerged on this territory. The AP Foundation financed the equipment these families needed to rebuild their villages and bring farming back to the land.
Understanding in order to protect
In Miyazaki, in Japan, specialists in biodiversity are focusing on the future of the tropical forest, threatened by climate change and urbanisation. They have involved schoolchildren in their work by organising discovery workshops. Aware of the importance of returning the forest to its original diversity, children have taken part in a replanting campaign on hillsides overlooking the town. The AP Foundation financed an international symposium as well as activities for children.
Time Garden
In 2012, to celebrate twenty years of activity, the AP Foundation presented an educational garden to Joux Valley residents and visitors bearing witness to the 350-million year evolution of a region that has been inhabited for around 800 years. The Time Garden gives visitors insight into the different stages of evolution of this landscape, whose beauty has inspired generations of great Joux Valley watchmakers. A visit to the Time Garden encourages everyone to take better care of nature, whose presence enriches and enhances all our lives.
March 05, 2014
