REVIVING NATURE
WHILE MAKING A LIVING
REVIVING NATURE
WHILE MAKING A LIVING
Imagine a forest cover starting in South America, passing through Central America and continuing all the way to North America and you've just imagined the way things used to be. Today, unfortunately, this rich manifestation of nature has been reduced to a large number of disconnected forests facing the ongoing threat of destruction.
Just in Southern Mexico and the seven countries of Central America - 44 hectares of forest are lost every 60 seconds, mostly to satisfy the demand for firewood. If this were to continue unabated, the area would be virtually without forest in a decade and a half. At least 42 species of mammals, 31 species of birds and 1,541 species of higher plants (not counting algae and mosses, for example) are believed to be en route to extinction.
This is a potential loss of biodiversity that neither the region nor the global community can afford. Although measuring only 768,990 kilometers, accounting for just about half of one percent of emerged lands, this area accounts for about 8% of the earth's biodiversity and is numbered among the greatest riches of the world.
Panama alone has 929 species of birds - more than Canada and the United States put together. Belize is only 22,965 square kilometers in area but is home to more than 150 species of mammals, 540 species of birds and 151 species of amphibians and reptiles. Costa Rica, with a smaller landmass than Denmark comprises more than 55 distinct biotic units - communities of plants and animals with similar life forms and environmental conditions. It houses more than 365,000 species of arthropods (a large group of invertebrates, ranging from tiny mites to large crabs). Yes, that's 1,000 species for every day of the year! There are more than 800 species of orchids in Nicaragua. Some 70% of the vascular flora of the high mountains of Guatemala are endemic to that country.
Central America alone has 20,000 to 25,000 vascular plant species. That's as many as in Peru, which is four times as large, or in the United States, which is 15 times as large. Moreover, the principal archaeological sites and remains of the Mayan civilization are located within the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor.
The bad news is that the conservation status of a third of Mesoamerica's 33 ecoregions is judged "critical" and another third is regarded as "endangered." That leaves only one third of the area in an acceptable state of ecological health.
Fortunately, a major "Mesoamerican Biological Corridor" program has been launched to help save the biodiversity of this important corner of the earth's surface. "Today," says a April 11, 2000, note from the program's communications unit, "commences one of the most ambitious environmental and social program to be carried out in the Central America and Southern Mexico region." The goal of the program, the note adds, is the recovery of "the chain of forests that up to a few years ago united South and North America and which at this time appears as a series of barren patches threatened by indiscriminate felling."
This program, headquartered in Nicaragua, does more than project new hope in the environmental area. It projects a new Central America in the political realm. At the formal April 11 launching, Nicaragua's Minister for the Environment and Natural Resources, Roberto Stadthagen, declared, "This initiative reintroduces the Central American region in the world scene as a region of progress and sustainable development. After having been known for conflicts and wars, it emerges now as a brilliant example of international cooperation for peace, democracy and the environment."
Indeed, the Mesoamerica Biological Corridor program represents a study in international cooperation at the wider level. In his speech at the launching, Nicaraguan President Arnoldo Alemán expressed special recognition and appreciation to the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the German government for their support for the program. GEF, for example, is contributing almost $11 million and this investment is being overseen on the ground by UNDP. Among other sources of support for the effort are the World Bank and DANIDA, the Danish Government aid agency.
The need for such an international collaboration for the rescue of nature in the region became more and more evident over the years as each country developed institutions, usually at the ministerial level, in a valiant effort to meet the twin challenges of economic poverty and environmental degradation. In the course of the last 30 years, the governments of Mesoamerica established 461 separate protected areas. These covered as much as 31% of the territory (in Belize) and as little as 2% (in Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Mexico).
Regionally, these protected areas totaled 18 million hectares. Only half of the protected areas had any kind of staffing. Some 88% were without any management plans. Most are not even well demarcated. Only about 40 of the 461 have been host to research programs. Few have at their disposal the institutional and legal frameworks to facilitate either biodiversity conservation or the sustainable production of goods and services to meet the region's development needs.
Moreover, 270 - over half - are too small to make a meaningful impact on biodiversity without links to other protected areas. Hence the importance of the new approach to regional cooperation in Mesoamerica. This approach actually goes back at least as far as 1989 when Central American presidents signed the Central American Environmental Protection Agreement and established the Central American Commission on Environment and Development (CCAD). Since then, a culture of cooperation has characterized the work of environment ministries in the region. That the region speaks with one voice on environmental matters has been obvious from the development of the Central American Environmental Agenda. This agenda formed the basis for joint regional positions at the 1992 Rio Summit.
CCAD, elevated to an environmental secretariat within the Central American Integration System (SICA), a revived regional integration movement, has been instrumental in strengthening the united regional voice at international fora. It has also helped strengthen the countries' environment ministries and has been the prime mover behind a number of regional activities, including the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor initiative.
While directed towards revitalizing the natural corridor from Mexico in the north to Panama in the southeast, the initiative, according to its website, "is by no means focused exclusively on protecting the animals, plants and microorganisms which inhabit the tropical forests, but will provide benefit on a priority basis to the people who live there, to all Mesoamericans and, by extension, to the entire world."
To achieve all these things, the program is being built upon two main pillars. The first and better known is biodiversity conservation. This includes strengthening the existing protected areas and building links among them.
The second pillar is the sustainable use of the resources of the region. Rather than focusing on a policing role by telling people what they cannot do with the forests, for example, the program will educate them on what they can do and how they can do it without causing ecological harm. Environmentally friendly agricultural pursuits - including organic food production - as well as ecotourism, pharmaceutical prospecting and re-forestation have been identified as possible areas of activity and investment.
The region's governments hope that through the revival of the forests, they will contribute their "grain of sand," to borrow the words of Minister Stadthagen, to help reverse the trend of global warming.
In summary, the supporters and managers of the program hope that by their efforts to recreate the future, they will make it easier to imagine it. UNDP's Carmelo Angulo sought to capture this vision of the future for the benefit of participants at the launching of the program.
"Personally," said Angulo, "I wish to imagine many of those here present, within six years, when the evaluation of the successes and advances achieved by this great regional program is being carried out. I am completely certain that in that moment the region will have changed for the better, the panorama of human development will be clearer, and new opportunities will have opened so that a lasting and worthwhile life will be accessible to all."
Written by: Frank A. Campbell, Global Environment Facility
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