A coalition of more than 15 Panamanian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) recently helped convince governmental officials to shelve plans for constructing a highway through Volcán Barú National Park in the Mesoamerica biodiversity hotspot.
The success is one that the groups expect to sustain with Panama’s new president, Martin Torrijos, who took office Sept. 1 after winning the May 2004 presidential elections.
Volcán Barú National Park covers 14,322 hectares of cloud forest, montane forest and a highland ecosystem known as páramo in western Panama.
The park is home to 115 globally threatened and unique species, including Baird’s tapirs and harpy eagles. It is also a core part of La Amistad Biosphere Reserve, a World Heritage Site that includes national parks, forest reserves and indigenous territories stretching between Costa Rica and Panama.
The highway, which the former government of Panama had planned to build, would have cut directly through the park, beginning in the town of Cerro Punta and ending in Boquete.
More than nature was at stake. The park is one of the most important water-producing areas in the region, providing water to Boquete’s 30,000 inhabitants, the region’s principal irrigation project and nearby farmlands.
“For the Chiricanos, the people of Chiriqui, the Volcán Barú, Panama’s highest point at 3,400 meters, is the symbol of their region, it is like Mt. Everest for the Nepalese,” said Stanley Heckadon-Moreno, former director of Panama’s natural resources agency and now director of Communications and Public Programs for the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.
“It’s a hydrological hotspot as well; most of the larger rivers of this agricultural region arise in its slopes,” he said. “Cutting a road across the Barú National Park was, in a way, a threat to the local identity.”
With support from the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF), Fundación para el Desarrollo Integral del Corregimiento de Cerro Punta and its partners in Alianza para el Desarrollo Ambiental de Tierras Altas (ADATA), an association of 15 local environmental NGOs working on the Pacific side of La Amistad Biosphere Reserve, worked at the provincial level to raise awareness about the biological importance of the park and impacts of building the road.
At the same time, Asociación Nacional para la Conservación de la Naturaleza (ANCON) coordinated efforts with several coalition members based in Panama City and led an initiative to build awareness through the national media.
ANCON’s efforts included taking journalists on a field visit to the site, carrying out a nationwide poll on the topic that received more than 11,000 responses (overwhelmingly in favor of saving the park) and working to inform decisionmakers and leaders in Panama City about the issue.
“There were so many emphatic declarations from top government officers, including Panama’s President Moscoso, about how this project was going to happen regardless,” said Lider Sucre, executive director of ANCON, which is a coordinating NGO within the coalition. “The fact that we were able to beat it is rather extraordinary.”
“It has left the entire environmental community in a very positive mood. And CEPF funds, made available in an extraordinarily quick fashion in response to the threat, were absolutely critical in achieving this success.”
To date, CEPF has committed approximately $2.5 million for local groups and communities to undertake diverse projects around the park and the larger La Amistad Biosphere Reserve, ranging from this campaign to development of innovative agricultural and forestry techniques that help stop the advance of the agricultural frontier into the reserve’s natural wealth and its benefits to communities.