It all began with a request from her mother, Teresa Solari, and her aunts, to honor her grandmother, Eliana Fabella. From there came a personal reflection: “How could our family contribute to Chile and do our part in the field of conservation?”, Francisca Cortés Solari tells Forbes Chile.
It was then that Teresa Solari’s eldest daughter —part of the third generation of Falabella, the business group that leads the retail sector in Chile and Latin America— stepped away from the business founded by her grandparents, Alberto Solari and Eliana Fabella, which grew out of the family tailoring business, to devote herself entirely to philanthropy. She created Fundación Caserta, organizing summer camps for the children of those who cared for the racehorses at Club Hípico de Chile. Fundación MERI (Melimoyu Research Institute) was later established, making it possible to bring science and environmental education into the service of conservation.
In 2018, she brought all these initiatives together under Filantropía Cortés Solari to promote holistic education, climate change mitigation, and biodiversity conservation.
“First came the Puribeter Reserve, located in San Pedro de Atacama, followed by the Likandes Elemental Reserve, located in the Metropolitan Region. And when the opportunity arose to acquire the Melimoyu Elemental Reserve, a territory of more than 16,000 hectares located in northern Chilean Patagonia, that was when we truly began our conservation work.”
Cortés Solari explains.
Among the foundation’s successful projects are more than 12 years of research on cetaceans in northern Patagonia, which helped launch The Blue BOAT Initiative together with the Ministry of the Environment, using technology and acoustic monitoring to detect whales and reduce the risk of collisions with vessels.
For Cortés Solari, sustainability and profitability are perfectly compatible.
“The problem is that, to date, we have not valued the ecosystem services that nature provides us. For example, together with Ralph Chami, an IMF economist, we developed a study estimating the value of the ecosystem services provided by blue whales in Chile at more than US$3 billion, or around US$4 million per individual. If we begin to incorporate the value of the ecosystem services provided by cetaceans —carbon capture, biodiversity, water, climate regulation— the equation changes completely, and preventing collisions between whales and vessels becomes essential.”
she explains.
“The question is not how much it costs to conserve nature, but how much it will cost us not to conserve it,” she states. She adds: “Nature is the infrastructure that sustains the economy.”
For all of them, private conservation is an effective tool for protecting nature and generating shared value in local territories. Its consolidation depends on strengthening collaborative models that can enhance its environmental, social, and economic impact.
Source: Forbes Chile
