Despite Northern Mesoamerica's importance to global biodiversity and the progress achieved over the last two decades in advancing the conservation agenda, the region is under extremely heavy development pressure. Habitat is being lost at an alarming rate. Approximate 400,000 hectares of forest is destroyed every year. If current deforestation rates continue, Mesoamerica's forests will disappear in 12 years, by the year 2015. The rapid loss of habitat makes Mesoamerica one of the most threatened hotspots in the world.
To understand the causes behind the destruction, the CI team consulted with stakeholders, conducted a literature review and made site visits to determine the proximate threats to biodiversity and their root causes. Below is a synopsis of the findings. A detailed threats assessment for all eight key biodiversity areas to receive CEPF support is presented in Appendix 4.
Stakeholders concurred that threats to biodiversity can be attributed to three fundamental root causes. The first of these causes is an economic development model that has thus far failed to lift from poverty more than 40 percent of Guatemalans, more than 30 percent of Belizeans and between 10 and 20 percent of Mexicans. The poor lack access to education, health, credit and property, and have few economic options outside of working on the most marginal lands for agriculture, many of which are in the areas of highest biodiversity. The combination of poverty and lack of health and education have generated consequent problems: a demographic explosion, high mortality and malnutrition rates, and lack of capacity to use strategies for rational resource management. For the future, with high population growth, these pressures will only continue unless more sustainable land management practices are adopted.
The second root cause is a development paradigm and political vision that has been based on short-term resource extraction and that has failed to appropriately value biodiversity and the environment in terms of their contributions to the sustainable development and welfare of current and future generations. Indeed, many contradictory policies have been implemented. On the one hand, extensive areas have been set aside for protection and conservation, while on the other hand, development policies have promoted the extraction of natural resources such as extensive agriculture, logging and oil development. Agriculture has moved into protected areas. Such policy failures remain widespread throughout the region, and therefore require that civil society engage at the national and regional levels if it is to effect a change on behalf of conserving habitat and species.
The third root cause can be attributed to weak institutional structures and legal frameworks required to develop and enforce environmental policies and laws. A lack of coherence exists within the legal structure. Use of soil, water and biodiversity, for example, is covered by a series of legal instruments of different character and legal hierarchy. This legal confusion not only leaves regulatory gaps, but it also makes the application of a particular policy or law difficult. As mentioned previously, significant advances have been made in passing environmental laws in Mesoamerica, but the accompanying technological and financial instruments, such as the use of economic incentives, have yet to be developed to encourage environmentally sustainable economic development.
Laws protecting biodiversity are hampered by the lack of precision and legal implementation frameworks as well as by a shortage of human and financial resources assigned to legal institutions responsible for enforcement. As a result, even unambiguous environmental laws are difficult to enforce. Furthermore, while there has been a push toward decentralization in Northern Mesoamerica, in which more responsibility for resource management is placed on local governments, little has been done to date to ensure that local governments have the capacity to assume additional resource management responsibilities. Funding from central to local government has typically supported public infrastructure works and municipal debt servicing. As a result, local governments lack the technical expertise and resources needed to promote an integrated approach to rural development and to enforce environmental laws. Little support exists for land tenure laws or forest fire prevention and control at the local level.
Fortunately, these legal hurdles are well recognized and are beginning to be addressed through a joint CCAD - U.S. Environmental Protection Agency initiative called PROLEGIS, which is funded through USAID's PROARCA project. The initiative has four goals that, once instituted, should contribute to addressing this root cause: harmonize environmental standards and regulations; increase capacity to enforce and comply with environmental legislation; apply key international agreements; and develop a harmonized regional system for environmental audits, and compliance registry and certification.
While there are diverse manifestations of these root causes, their impact is similar: a direct loss of biodiversity. Stakeholders agreed that the most important proximate threats to biodiversity, which are described in more detail below, are deforestation due to agricultural encroachment, forest fires, illegal logging and fuel wood harvesting; infrastructure development; and poaching and illegal wildlife trade. These threats lead to habitat degradation, decline of species populations and disruption of ecological processes?all contributing to overall loss of biodiversity.
In spite of the rich biodiversity of the region, a territory once covered entirely by forest today maintains less than half of its original cover. It is estimated that on average 45 hectares of forest are lost every hour, which adds up to approximately 400,000 hectares every year. The expansion of the road network, logging, agricultural encroachment and livestock production and the use of wood for cooking by more than 60 percent of households have been the principal causes of this deforestation. Deforestation has wider impacts than the forest itself. Many hydrographic basins are suffering from the removal of their vegetative cover, leading to erosion, disturbed hydrological cycles and heavy sedimentation in rivers and coasts, thus exacerbating the impact of extreme climatic events. Several factors contribute to the rapid deforestation.
Farmers in Northern Mesoamerica have long used fire to clear their land for development and to regenerate grassland pasture. More than 500,000 hectares of forest were burned between 1990 and 1995. In 1998, with the aggravating circumstance of the drought brought about by El Niño, poorly controlled fire destroyed more than 2.5 million hectares in Central America and a further nearly 850,000 hectares in Mexico (Table 5).
The Historical Atlas of Forest Fires in Central America, produced by the Program for Sustainable Development in Agricultural Frontier Areas in Central America, states that a number of protected areas have "a high recurrence of forest fires, which constitutes a threat to conservation of biodiversity and of forest cover, a threat which also extends to the integrity of the MBC, of which these areas form the backbone." These fires affect several critical protected areas and represent a serious threat to the integrity and connectivity of the Mesoamerican Corridor itself, particularly in Mexico and Guatemala. Protected areas affected by recurring forest fires in Guatemala include the Laguna del Tigre National Park, the Sierra de Lacandón Park, Machaquila and the Montañas Mayas, with a total area of 5,100km². Stakeholders report that forest fires have not received the attention they deserve and that greater consideration needs to be paid to this threat. They acknowledge that advances have been made in recent years in the governmental and international response to fires, however, fire-prevention and fire-fighting capacity at the local level remains weak.
In the last 20 years, an additional 200,000 hectares of land per year has come under agriculture throughout Mesoamerica (Table 6). The advance of the agricultural frontier has rarely occurred in a sustainable manner. Many soils have rapidly lost productivity, forcing farmers to move to more fertile lands, those that are forested and even protected.
Poverty has generated strong pressure for development in the form of forest conversion into areas of more intensive land use, such as agriculture and livestock farming. Public rural development programs have promoted land-use change. In Guatemala, for example, the government encouraged forest conversion for agriculture up until 1995. Agriculture tends to be highly unproductive in the region. Even today in Guatemala, agriculture and forestry account for 60 percent of land use. Agriculture employs 50 percent of the population. However, the sector is highly unproductive, and only 10 percent of national investment goes for agriculture, reflecting a high degree of neglect and unsustainable extractive practices. The Government of Mexico invests annually around $60 million in traditional development programs in rural municipalities such as those surrounding the key biodiversity areas. Many of these investments are targeted toward development projects that encourage land-use change, and few taken into account environmental sustainability.
Insecure land tenure and title creates a major disincentive for sustainable agriculture and resource use secure title would anchor farmers in one area rather than requiring them to continuously extend their range into new, forested areas. Many farmers, especially those in politically sensitive areas such as Laguna del Tigre and the Peten, do not have legal title to their land, and therefore have little incentive to invest in resource management or in expelling outsiders who enter to exploit the forest. In the last eight years, more than 30 invasions have occurred in the Lacandona Forest Reserve. Invasions have also begun in other protected areas, including the Sierra de Lacand&243;n and Laguna del Tigre national parks. Local governments often lack the capacity to provide title to legitimate landholders, which is a contributing factor to unsustainable land practices.
Unsustainable forest management practices and policies in Northern Mesoamerica have been a major contributor to the large-scale deforestation. Several factors shed light on the problem. Financially, returns from sustainable forest management have traditionally been much longer in duration than from agriculture. Furthermore, landowners and communities have generally lacked knowledge about alternative, biodiversity-friendly uses of intact forest. While attention has been paid to the potential for non-consumptive forest-based activities, most rural communities lack information about forest management practices that promote sustainability. Alternatives to logging, such as shade grown coffee, sustainable ecotourism, and sustainable timber harvesting and forest management, have been attempted with varying degrees of success throughout the region. However, stakeholders report that information and the lessons learned about the strengths and weaknesses of such interventions have not been systematically collected, analyzed and disseminated. As a result, capacity to implement sustainable development options for forests remains limited.
Another factor underlying deforestation has been that basic ecosystem services derived from maintaining forest cover, such as soil conservation, watershed management, biodiversity conservation, and carbon sequestration, have been undervalued. Failure to monetize these services has meant that landowners and communities have not received direct income from intact forest. Few, if any, formal and well-publicized mechanisms have been developed by which communities and landowners can negotiate payments for environmental services from a position of knowledge and strength. These factors have hampered discussions and negotiations that could lead to better conservation, with international NGOs for conservation easements or concessions, with local industry, municipal governments or other communities for watershed services or with the private sector for a sustainable ecotourism concession. Potential market-oriented mechanisms for the creation of private and municipal reserves need to be more widely disseminated, and greater incentives need be developed to encourage such actions.
In the coming years, significant funding is expected to flow into Northern Mesoamerica for major development initiatives. These investments hold great promise in terms of introducing new opportunities for economic development for the people of Northern Mesoamerica and to address the poverty that is a root cause of environmental degradation. At the same time, however, large infrastructure projects could well fuel wide scale habitat destruction if not designed and implemented with adequate protection. Several large projects currently on the drawing board are of particular concern to stakeholders.
Plan Puebla-Panama (PPP). This ambitious $20 billion, 25-year development program launched in 2000 by the Government of Mexico runs from Puebla in southern Mexico to Panama with the goal of promoting economic development and integration of the region. The PPP could present important opportunities for conservation by investing large sums of money for economic development; however, it also could introduce serious new threats. Planned infrastructure is massive: 5,565 miles of new or improved highways, 1,130 miles of electrical lines to distribute energy from gas and dams and six development zones for industrial facilities. Clearly, the environmental and social impacts could be commensurately harmful without adequate measures. Indeed, widespread opposition exists against the PPP. Hundreds of groups have denounced the plan. In addition to concerns about the environmental impacts, these groups denounced the PPP for its failure to engage in genuine consultation with indigenous peoples and campesinos; the potential negative impacts on the land tenure and livelihoods of indigenous and rural people; and unequal distribution of the economic benefits toward large businesses and governments rather than to local communities.
To address concerns over the negative impacts on the environment, several NGOs have met with officials of the PPP to explore potential collaboration for addressing the potential environmental impacts and promote innovative models for conservation through the sustainable use of natural resources. Furthermore, governments of the eight countries supporting the PPP have adopted the Mesoamerican Sustainable Development Initiative. This initiative supports three primary strategies to ensure the environmental sustainability of PPP projects: the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor initiative, modernization of the regional environmental management project (PROSIGA) and the Mesoamerican Program for Sustainable Natural Resource Development. These activities represent important opportunities by which NGOs, through CEPF support, can influence the development of this large-scale development project in a way that truly achieves the ecologically sustainable and socially equitable development sought by the governments and people of the region.
Mundo Maya Sustainable Tourism Program. The Mundo Maya Program is a $120-million initiative of the Inter-American Development Bank designed to promote social and economic development in the countries of the Selva Maya through large-scale tourism. The program calls for building a circuit linking cultural, ecological and adventure tourism based on the preservation of cultural and environmental sites of interest. While NGOs recognize that tourism is the fastest growing economic sector in Mesoamerica, generating billions of dollars in foreign exchange and representing an important source of potential revenue for conservation and rural poverty alleviation, several concerns about Mundo Maya and tourism growth in general persist. Mundo Maya proposes improvements to a number of roads, including one from the archaeological sites of Tikal to Uaxactun in the Peten, which would facilitate access into the Maya Biosphere Reserve. Tourism projects promote large infrastructure works and attracted visitors that surpass the carrying capacity of fragile areas. Fortunately, through projects as the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, efforts are underway to work with communities to conduct land-use planning in which the carrying capacity of protected areas is considered.
Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). The proposed free trade agreement for Central America will commit Mesoamerica to greater openness, deepen the roots of democracy and the rule of law and reinforce market reforms. These reforms, coupled with increased trade and investment, will promote growth and achieve stronger environmental protection and improved working conditions. The World Bank's CAFTA support strategy includes loans and analytical support as well as grant funds. The North American Free Trade Agreement continues to encourage extensive investment in infrastructure and communications. However, with free trade, civil society is concerned that the environmental consequences could be significant, as new land is converted for cash crops and industrialization results in more pollution.
Dam and reservoir construction. Several dams and reservoirs are slated throughout the region. Development agencies continue to propose hydroelectric dams that would flood parts of the lower Usumacinta River basin in Selva Lacondona, even though it is likely that a more cost-effective way of increasing capacity would be to improve efficiency in existing facilities. Furthermore, the damming of Belize's pristine Macal River has been temporarily halted by legal action, but the planned project has not been cancelled.
Petroleum development. There has historically been a lack of coherence between petroleum infrastructure investments and the application of laws. Conflicts between economic development and the defense of the environment have continuously occurred. This question is particularly critical in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Laguna del Tigre and in Chiapas and Tabasco, where petroleum activity is intense and investment in exploration and exploitation have grown over recent years.
Despite appropriate laws and regulations, illegal timber and wildlife harvesting inside protected areas is widespread throughout the region. Weak law enforcement allows illegal and unsustainable hunting and trafficking of fauna, despite the fact that Belize, Guatemala and Mexico each have laws that prohibit the hunting or collection of endangered or threatened species, that outlaw hunting inside a protected area and its buffer zone, and that regulate in other areas through strict permits capture rates and closed seasons and areas. Subsistence and trophy hunting not only kill individual animals, but also can affect biodiversity in the rest of the forest through the loss of potentially important ecosystem processes.
To date, civil society's response to these threats can be characterized as having a mixed record. On the one hand, NGOs have made significant strides within individual sites and in helping to establish environmental institutions and legislation. NGOs have been at the forefront of advocating for the establishment of new protected areas and environmental legislation. Management plans for protected areas have been prepared. Environmental education programs have heightened awareness about the importance of conservation. Local communities have been engaged in the full gamut of environmentally sustainable development activities conceived and promoted by NGO. NGOs remain an important source of information and expertise on various conservation issues. More recently, several NGOs have become involved in conservation decisionmaking in fora such as the CCAD, although open access to such venues is not the norm for most NGOs. In short, NGOs have served as the principal advocates for and practitioners of biodiversity conservation in Northern Mesoamerica over the past two decades.
Despite these important contributions, a wide gap still exists between the threats facing the region and the ability of civil society to respond to them effectively. Part of the problem is that the environmental community in Northern Mesoamerica only began to take shape about 20 years ago and is still nascent in comparison with other civil society groups in such areas as health or agriculture. In most cases, individual NGOs were established to conserve a particular site or in reaction to a particular issue, such as a proposed dam. As a result, members of the NGO community have tended to focus on their individual sites and issues, rather than on the broader threats at hand. This single-site and -issue orientation has resulted in a fractionalized and dispersed environmental community, where collaboration is weak and where the broader and integrated vision required to tackle such complicated and pernicious issues as agricultural encroachment or colonization at the policy level has yet to be fully realized.
Another part of the problem that has hampered collaboration among civil society groups with similar agendas is the lack of the funding and opportunities to discuss and cooperate on issues of common interest. Little funding has historically existed to support the development of collaborative alliances comprised of individual groups working to achieve common goals. One result of this weak coordination has been that the NGO community has yet to scale up beyond what are many innovative and promising initiatives to the degree required to address large-scale threats. Rather, NGO initiatives have often developed in isolation of one another with little cross-fertilization of ideas, lessons learned and synergy achieved in working together. Therefore, NGOs working in ecotourism, conservation coffee or protected areas management, for example, have had little opportunity to learn from each other or to work cooperatively on activities that are mutually beneficial.
Another impediment within the NGO community has been the lack of technical knowledge required to engage in and influence decisionmaking on such topics as agricultural policy or infrastructure development. Civil society groups, especially those representing indigenous peoples and others in the poorest sectors of the region, lack access to information, and have difficulty tracking and analyzing complex technical information. They lack the technical background in areas such as economic analysis or environmental impact assessment in order to interpret the data using the latest analytical tools.
These limitations have resulted in a NGO community that is reticent and even ill-equipped to engage constructively in decisionmaking on the critical broader issues impacting biodiversity. The need to strengthen dialogue and collaboration has been underscored repeatedly in the region. For example, during the Conference of the Mesoamerican Society for Biology and Conservation held in San Jose in Costa Rica in September 2002, representatives of leading NGOs and regional projects met to present conservation priorities. The results of this meeting reflected the importance of establishing mechanisms for communication and coordination at regional, national and local levels. Among the points agreed on was the need to strengthen regional collaboration between NGOs and CCAD.
In the future, as billions of dollars of government and donor funds are invested in Northern Mesoamerica for development and conservation, the impact of these weaknesses within the NGO community will potentially have greater consequences. As the principal advocates and practitioners of conservation, civil society will need to develop the capacity to work collaboratively to serve as influential, technically solid promoters of conservation which can engage in policy discussions to address current and future threats. For CEPF, therefore, a high priority must be to help the NGO community to evolve and mature to a new, broader level of action. The challenge will be to build networks of NGOs that have the technical capacity and organizational wherewithal to help develop and implement strategies and policies that tackle the most critical threats to biodiversity.
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