Lap Chan

I am the founder and main shareholder of EcoMapuá. I was born in Hong Kong and my parents immigrated to Brazil during the Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1968 when I was still a child. Later I went to University in the United States (Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island) where I majored in Economics and International Relations. During my university years I also spent 2 semesters in Sweden on a exchange program whereby my studies were focused on the social democratic political and economic system. After graduating from University I went to work on Wall Street at a major investment bank Morgan Stanley, where I worked for three years in Corporate Finance, Real Estate and Scandinavian Coverage at Morgan Stanley International London. In September 2000, I came across an opportunity to acquire a company which had land holdings in the Amazon Forest.
Unfortunately, due to the difficulty of adaptation of the Japanese ex-patriots to the local business practices and customs, the company closed down its operations in 1978.
Since then the land was kept without exploration and the company was put for sale in 2000, at the point whereby I saw the opportunity to acquire the shares of this company with the land holdings.
My intentions at the time, and currently, are to develop the first large scale sustainable development project for carbon sequestration through reforestation of degraded land and the development of sustainable businesses linked to non-timber forest products in the Brazilian Amazon.
In the last 6 years the focus was on collecting data and developing research projects with the support of important national and international institutions. One of the conclusions for the success of this large scale project is the need to implement a financially sustainable production of a NTFP which would involve the local communities, generate employment and protect the biodiversity. For this reason my intention is to build a strong team of professionals who believe in the same ideals.