The Challenges and Opportunities of Conserving Tropical Forests
COP 16 may be the best opportunity to stem the planet’s biodiversity hemorrhage
Carlos Zorrilla
One of the topics that will be vigorously discussed In the COP 16 in Cali Colombia will be stopping the deforestation of tropical forests as the most efficient way to halt the loss of biodiversity. These ecosystem, which include tropical montane forests, are home to most of what is left of the world’s terrestrial biological diversity. The problem is that Cali will also be populated by special interests groups that will fight like hell to stop any plan to limit where they can dig up metals, pump out oil, or monocrop pristine forests with palm oil and soya to death. We saw a similar power dynamic and outcome in the COP 26 where the oil lobby killed any hopes of moving the world’s economies from an oil-based economy.
Let us hope that the extractive industries (mainly agribusiness, mining, gas and petroleum) lobbyists aren’t as successful in Cali. The lobbyists will try very hard to sell the idea to the decision makers in Colombia that they can compensate the loss of biodiversity by planting trees somewhere else. That would be like comparing live orchids to plastic flowers. Besides playing a key role in mitigating the climate crisis by locking away hundreds of tons of carbon per hectare in their trunks, branches, leaves and soil, native forest have had millions of years to experiment in getting everything just right for the system to function perfectly and for species to thrive and evolve. Plantations, on the other hand, create biological deserts: lots of trees but very little biodiversity, where a single pathogen can wipe out the whole plantation.
Undoubtedly, native ecosystems can withstand ecological shocks much better than plantations- including the climate crisis. Therefore, if you try to fix the climate crisis by eliminating species and thereby weakening ecosystems, you inevitably end up worsening both.
The most obvious thing, from where I’m sitting (a cloud forest in Northwest Ecuador), is for the international community to agree on calling a immediate halt on deforestation of tropical forests and other biodiversity hotspots, but especially those harboring endangered and/or endemic species, as well as finding the most efficient ways of protecting them. The fight will not be an easy one given the hunger for the transition minerals to feed the oxymoron known as the “clean energy” transition, which include copper, nickel, cobalt and lithium. Any minerals coming from these biodiversity jewels will be anything but clean.
Paper Parks
Just what the best way to protect the world’s biodiversity? Is it better to create national or regional protected areas? Well, as it turns out, it is not. While it may work in some instances, a recent study concluded that the loss of biological diversity is greater in protected areas than outside these, sometimes referred to as paper parks. They got the name because they come into being via laws, presidential decrees or local ordinances signed by some authority in a nation’s capital. They may look great on paper, but in real life, unless there is a real commitment and sufficient funding on the part of government agencies to protect these areas, coupled with direct involvement of the local communities, protection is far from guaranteed. This is especially true in countries where corruption is rampant and where the rule-of-law is only an aspiration and not a reality. And this, unfortunately, includes many of the countries where most of the tropical forests are found.
There are many other conservation strategies besides the creation of National and regional protected areas, or via special conservation laws. For example, there are plenty of private ecological reserves owned by national and international NGOs all over the world. Though well intentioned, these can run into trouble if the communities’ perspective and needs are not respected and seriously taken into account. Furthermore, if the local communities are not receiving some kind of direct benefit from these sites, it is likely their shelf life will be short.
What Works
A very efficient conservation strategy that has been shown to work is for countries to ban all extractive activities- whether officially sanctioned by governments or illegal miners and loggers- in lands occupied by indigenous peoples. Most studies have shown that ancestral peoples are good stewards of their land for the logical reason that they need it for their survival and physical and spiritual wellbeing. Besides banning extractive activities from indigenous lands, governments should actively support securing legal status for their territory.
Clash of Visions
When extractive corporations or illegal miners see the same land, all they are capable of seeing is the resources that lie in the subsoil and the money they can make from it, while being completely blind to the richness that lie above it. And governments are not, by any means, exempt from the myopia. The same hand that one day may create a protected area, can give away oil leases or mining concessions in the same site. It’s not that difficult to see how this perverted vision of the natural world is what is driving most of the biodiversity loss and climate hell our species has created.
Small Can Work
There are many other examples of conserving biodiversity from all corners of the world, but I want to tell you briefly about our organization’s experience in Intag’s tropical montane forests in northwest Ecuador. These forests, though little known, harbor many more endemic and threatened species per square kilometer than the more well-known lower elevation tropical forests, such as the Amazonian lowland forests. The reason is pretty much straight forward. In mountain forests there tends to be many more ecological niches than in lowland forested ecosystem. This has to do mainly with what comes with changes in elevation. Among other criteria, the changes in elevation create different temperature and rainfall conditions which, in turn, provide species with different bio-physical conditions for them to adapt and evolve. For example, there are common birds and plants at my home, which is at 1800 meters above sea level, that are nowhere to be found just one kilometer and a few hundred meters higher or lower in elevation.
In this wildly biodiverse and beautiful ecosystem, DECOIN, the organization I helped found, has been able to create 38 community forest and watershed reserve that protect approximately 12,000 hectares of montane cloud forests. The forests are the home of hundreds of species of plants and animals facing extinction, including jaguars, sloths, orchids, and three species of monkeys= one of which is considered one of the world’s most threatened primate. There are also 22 species of frogs facing extinction, including two species found only in two micro watersheds and nowhere in the world. Importantly, these same forests are also protecting dozens of micro watersheds which daily provide safe drinking water to thousands of inhabitants. Other sites are being used for ecotourism and scientific investigations. A win-win situation.
The initiative has been incredibly successful1, mainly because not only are they the source of the communities’ drinking water, but also because we turned over the ownership and protection of the reserves over to the communities, local governments and local social organizations. Our organization does not own a single hectare of the land under protection.
Unfortunately, these same forests are also overlaid in mining concessions, in the hands of some of the world’s largest mining corporations — including Codelco of Chile, the world’s biggest copper producer, and giant and appropriately named, Broken Hill Properties (coincidentally, BHP just recently settled a USD 23 billion-dollar settlement for its part in the Mariana mining disaster in Brazil). These and other transnational companies (Hancock Prospecting out of Australia is another) have concessions to mine for copper and gold in the primary biodiverse cloud forests described above. Governments give out these concessions like candy without prior consultation or giving a damn about environmental impacts, making it clear that it is not only the corporations that are unable to see the forests for the minerals.
Red Lines and Land Titles
What to do? Short term there are many things that can be done to halt the tragic loss of species without relying on creating more paper national parks or vacuous conservation laws. At the very least, the heads of States and other powerbrokers meeting in Cali should call for a moratorium on extractive activities in areas where ancestral peoples live, as well as in those harboring endangered species as defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and/or a country’s equivalent Red Lists. These Red Lines need to be agreed on and put in place as soon as possible to avoid the loss of more species and disrupting the lives of indigenous peoples. Recognizing and actively supporting successfully administered local conservation initiatives such as the one I outlined above, should also be in the conservation toolkit.
Certainly, without serious and long-term financial backing from the wealthier nations who are largely responsible for the double environmental crisis our planet is facing, not much will happen after the COP 16 ends, regardless of the well-intentioned agreements.
As is the case with the alternatives to the oil-based economy, there are ways of protecting the world’s biological diversity while respecting collective and human rights and the Rights of Nature. What is missing is the vision to make it happen and the guts to stand up to the extractive industry’s interests.
1. In 2017 DECOIN was awarded the United Nations Development Program’s prestigious Equator Prize for our conservation work in the Intag region of northwest Ecuador.