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Few environmental education programmes established in parks in Brazil have been formally evaluated. This paper describes the study of a school programme that was established to use formative evaluation to select and improve programme strategies, and employs summative evaluation to assess the effectiveness of the programme as a whole. The programme consisted of pre-visit strategies, such as a slide show and information given to teachers; on-site activities, which comprised Nature trails and a visitor centre; and post-visit materials furnished to the students at their schools. For the evaluation procedure, child students (N=144) from fifth to eighth grades were randomly assigned to treatment or control groups and answered a written questionnaire on three different occasions — pre-test, post-test, and memory-retention test. The results were statistically analysed and significant differences were assessed between the two groups (F=98.29, p≤0.05). A Scheffé Test demonstrated correlations and located significant differences among the variables. A reliability test was done on the written questionnaire (r=.77). Informally, the programme contributed to the conservation of the Park as it encouraged community involvement in helping to solve specific problems.The results of the Black Lion-tamarin environmental education programme suggest that such programmes in Nature parks and reserves can be effective and should be established far more widely. Awareness education programmes should be encouraged, especially in underdeveloped countries which still hold great portions of the planet's biodiversity. This education programme was beneficial to both students and members of the local community, who learned about the Park and became proud of it as their natural legacy, as well as to the Park itself of which the protection became enhanced through awareness and community involvement. The Black Liontamarin programme serves as an effective example to other sites with similar contexts and constraints.

This study describes the 35-year progression of activities in the Pontal do Paranapanema region of São Paulo State, Brazil. These activities began as a research project on the conservation ecology of the highly endangered Black Lion Tamarin and broadened into a landscape-scale restoration and conservation project involving the active participation of hundreds of landless families that colonized the region. Rather than viewing these colonists as a threat, a non-governmental organization arose to address their needs, providing training and support livelihoods. Local communities were engaged in conservation and restoration activities focused on studying the movement patterns of endangered species, environmental education programmes, planting native trees along riparian corridors, establishing coffee agroforestry plantings and initiating community-managed nurseries for the production of local native seedlings and non-native fruit trees. Farmers gained knowledge, income and food security, and developed a sense of ownership and shared responsibility for protecting wildlife, conserving forest fragments and restoring forests. Land sharing and restoring forest functions within an agricultural landscape matrix created new opportunities for people and endangered wildlife. We explore how key factors and partnerships critically influenced the landscape trajectory and conclude with lessons learned that may be relevant to sustainable landscape initiatives in other contexts.

Environmental education has evolved over the years to respond to the varied complexities found in the different localities where it is practiced. In many parts of the world where biodiversity is rich, social conditions are poor, so educators have included sustainable development alternatives to better the environment and the livelihoods of local communities. Primate conservation education programs, which are often based in areas that face such challenges, have been a vanguard in creating means to integrate people with their natural environment and thus conquer supporters for the protection of natural habitats. In the search for effectiveness they have adopted evaluation methods to help assess what was offered. An example from Brazil is described in this commentary.