The tragedy of the (green) commons
With 60 million hectares of its land covered by woods – which is equal to 52% of its territory – Colombia is the third country in terms of forest area of South America and is considered a mega-biodiverse country. According to the Colombian government, the largest area of forests in the country is found in the Amazon with more than 39 million hectares (66%) and the Andes with over 11 million hectares (19%), followed by the Pacific, Orinoquía and Caribbean region with more than 5 million hectares (9%), 2 million hectares (4%), and 1 million hectares (2%) respectively.
Colombia: A synonym for biodiversity (and laws)
Colombia has numerous normative and policy antecedents, information systems and institutions to work on, among others, forest management and conservation, forest economics, climate change and control of environmental crimes. For instance, the country has established different – but sometimes overlapped – figures for forest management and conservation, among which stand out the Forest Reserve Zones (FRZ) of Law 2 of 1959, the System of Natural National Parks (SPNN), the ethnic territories and the peasant reserve zones, each one with a different level of protection and management, diversity of socioeconomic contexts and causes that generate the transformation of natural covers.
The first, the FRZ of Law 2 of 1959 are protected areas oriented to develop the forest economy and to protect soils, waters and wildlife. The second, areas belonging to the SPNN, distributed in 59 protected areas that cover 16% of the territory, have greater restrictions mostly related to forbidding agriculture and natural resources extraction. The third, ethnic territories, where approximately 53% of the country's natural forests are found, are divided in indigenous reserves (46%) and collective territories of Afro-Colombian communities (7%). The latest, peasant reserve zones occupy 1.9% of Colombia’s forests. In general, these social groups have high levels of poverty and unsatisfied basic needs. According to the National Statistics Bureau, 39.9% of people living in rural areas lived in multidimensional poverty in 2019, and in 2020, 42.9% lived in monetary poverty and 18.2% in extreme poverty.
Most recently, in January, President Ivan Duque chose Leticia (Amazon) to launch Colombia’s new deforestation policy. This policy analyses the legislative and policy framework, its shortcomings, as well as the actors and drivers for deforestation and combines all these into a roadmap for the coming 10 years (2020-2030). The roadmap contains 66 proposed (inter-sectoral) actions. The estimated investment for implementing the actions identified in this policy is estimated to be 714,144 million Colombian pesos (around 156 million Euro). But for the moment no resources are allocated nor secured.
Information is power… enough?
With regards to the generation of timely environmental information, in 2008 the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development designed the National Program for Monitoring and Surveillance of Forests and Forest Aptitude Areas (PMSB), which has the main objective of contributing to improve the state of natural resources and the environment, to promote the sustainable development of the country, and to improve the environmental management by governmental entities. Based on the PMSB, forest information tools were structured and put into operation, through Decree 1655 of 2017, to organise and set in motion the National Forest Information System, the National Forest Inventory and the Forest and Carbon Monitoring System that are part of the Environmental Information System for Colombia.
Even though Decree 1655 states that forest information must be publicly available, the official data presented at national level is not always available or easy to understand and compare, lacking mechanisms to facilitate access to and analysis of the data to most of the civil society. Moreover, these data are reported periodically and there is no information about forest degradation not from official nor independent sources locally or internationally.
Data production in real time and public dissemination of data on deforestation and degradation occurring in the Colombian forests, implementing early warning systems, are needed to enhance monitoring and surveillance of forests while ensuring timely reactions. Making information publicly available to different stakeholders, especially the civil society, may lead to joint solutions. Even actors that have economic interests (expressed in terms of sustainability), like the palm oil or the cattle ranching sector, could benefit from more precise information that may reflect the magnitude of deforestation that can be attributed to those productive activities and could help them identifying producers which could be removed from the (formal) supply chain as they would be actors of deforestation.
The tragedy of the (green) commons
In spite of the different information systems, policies and institutions related to forest management and conservation, between 2000 and 2020, nearly 3 million hectares of forest were lost, 2017 being the year when the highest deforestation took place (about 219,000 hectares). Paradoxically, deforestation increased dramatically after the signing of the Peace Agreement between the Colombian Government and the former FARC guerrilla in 2016, especially in remote areas where FARC used to exert territorial control like the Amazon, now concentrating more than 60% of Colombia’s deforestation.
According to the Colombian government, in 2019, 67% of total deforestation was concentrated in 12 Nuclei of Highest Deforestation (NAD). The 66 actions proposed in the deforestation policy are directed towards these NAD, which implicitly means that a third of deforestation may be left out of this scope of action. The policy, however, acknowledges that deforestation is rooted in socio-economic conflicts and mainly takes place in isolated regions where lack of state presence is aggravated by factors such as population displacement and growth, poverty and limited (legal) income generating opportunities. In consequence, illicit activities like illegal mining, cultivation of illicit crops (coca) and illegal logging are drivers of deforestation filling the vacuum. Other drivers are transfer of soils into grasslands – also for land accumulation and/or speculation – extensive cattle farming, expansion of infrastructure (laboratories, runways and informal but also formal roads) and expansion of the agricultural border. Last but not least, existing policies that promote unsustainable land use and corruption also play a role.
Land tenure informality and deforestation: The vicious circle.
Issues related to land tenure are important underlying causes of deforestation. Unequal land distribution, land tenure insecurity and land grabbing fuelled the 57-year conflict and were core issues at the negotiation table in Havana. In spite of prioritizing cadastral formation and actualization programs with the sole purpose of taxation, currently 66% of the Colombian cadastre is 10 years outdated in average. This, in combination with a lack of continuity and effectiveness of land formalization programs, has led to an inefficient land market and an ample estimated land tenure informality index among 20% and 59,5%. At the same time there is no proper information available about the extent of State owned land and its location, which may comprehend areas for forest management and conservation.
The impacts of land tenure informality surpass the usual focus on its economic effects and the link between land access/tenure and poverty. In fact, insecure land tenure is a favourable factor to land grabbing and forced displacement as people without property titles are more prone to be dispossessed than those with land deeds. As a consequence, areas where land ownership remains uncertain are breeding grounds for (illegal) occupations of land in seek of profit. As the Colombian government acknowledges, these occupations go hand in hand with informal or even illegal activities that are, in turn, the aforementioned deforestation drivers. Hence, when earnings result from illicit products (like coca, minerals or timber), illegality reinforces land tenure informality, as less binding ties with land (like a title deed) facilitate moving from one production area to another at any time.
Notwithstanding, even in those isolated regions very distant from urban centres (and markets) when assets can be legalized (like cattle, palm oil or other crops), land tenure could tend more towards formalization. This can be explained by the fact that land tenure regularisation has proven to hinder land expropriation and land grabbing. So, even if these productive activities are non-profitable in the short-term, preventing from expropriation or land grabbing are incentives for regularising land tenure, because it is a way of securing (long-term) investments for productive purposes or land speculation.
The invisible guardians of biodiversity and nature
The regions where deforestation takes place are also home for the – highly threatened by illegal actors – indigenous and afro-descendants communities with communal tenure or claims on land. In spite of being acknowledged in the deforestation policy as having more effectiveness on conservation of forests as guardians of biodiversity and nature, especially in remote areas with little or no State presence, in the document it is concluded that over the period 2000 – 2018, a substantial 20% of total deforestation took place in indigenous reserves (13%) and in Afro communal areas (7%). So, there may be an overlap of deforestation in these areas with that of the 12 Nuclei, maybe even a considerable one.
The policy document, however, does not take a look into the underlying factors of the deforestation in indigenous reserves and afro communal areas. Nevertheless, any intervention from the Colombian government, like the actions proposed in the deforestation policy, must undergo previous consultation processes with each community – which take some time – and must overcome existing tensions and lack of trust between the different parties. This is particularly true for the indigenous peoples, after the reluctance from the government to both negotiate with the Minga group during the past national strikes and to ratify the Escazú agreement, an international treaty concerning the rights of access to information about the environment, public participation in environmental decision-making, and environmental justice comprising provisions on the rights of environmental defenders – including ethnic groups.
Current solutions: More repressive than persuasive
At the beginning of 2019, President Duque launched the “Artemisa” operation – a mainly military strategy – that seeks to halt deforestation, recover the tropical rainforest and prosecute those behind the logging and forest burnings. In line with it, last 4th of August, President Duque announced the new law to punish environmental crimes. This new law is an important step to ensure that penalties to crimes against the environment will be hardened and with it, six new crimes were created: 1) Wildlife trafficking; 2) Deforestation; 3) Promotion and financing of deforestation; 4) Financing the invasion of areas of special ecological importance; 5) Illegal appropriation of the nation's vacant land (baldíos); and, 6) Financing the illegal appropriation of baldíos.
Regarding the first, the results up to date show that the ultimate responsible and financiers of deforestation have been able to evade justice, because in some cases, on the one hand, the information about the operations has been filtered and only executors are captured and, on the other hand, the presence of the military forces is temporary and deforestation agents tend to return after the army has left. These two factors combined have increased mistrust from communities towards State interventions.
In relation to the second, the close link between the new crimes and land ownership will most likely exacerbate long lasting conflicts. The common case in Colombia of peasants using lands within the boundaries of natural parks exemplifies an ancient problem related to land tenure i.e. some peasants may have claims on plots they have occupied for many years. These plots were never formalised in the past and now cannot be legalised because they are “territories of ecologic importance”. Nowadays, with these new crimes against nature, these occupants will likely face pecuniary punishments or imprisonment due to unresolved tenancy situations from the past.
The agrarian jurisdiction: an ancient utopia
As established in the deforestation policy, the National Land Agency (ANT) plays important role for the execution of the actions included in the second objective of this policy concerning the social ordering of property in the municipalities prioritised by ANT and part of the NAD; developing processes for granting use rights over baldíos located in FRZ; developing a strategy for the implementation of agrarian procedures (to clarify land ownership) in areas with high deforestation; and, continuing the formalization of ethnic territories, including areas inside the NAD.
With an original mandate to regularise land tenure of 7 million hectares up to 2026 taking into account potential conflicts with occupants, this agency will be most likely overloaded. While, another aggravating factor is that 2021’s budget for entities created by the peace treaty, like ANT, was reduced. And moreover, it seems contradictory that the bill to create an agrarian jurisdiction found its major opposition from the President’s political party. The rejected bill proposed the creation of special judges to resolve conflicts related to land tenure, prioritising the municipalities most affected by violence and State abandonment which could be served by itinerant (mobile) offices with a deputy conciliator. Likewise, this bill favoured the use of conflict resolution methods and set the figure of the “facilitator”: a social leader trained to guide communities in the mechanisms of access to justice or conflicts resolution. No doubt this proposal coming back from Law 200 of 1936, if approved, would have lessened the burden of this (highly) centralised system.
In conclusion, deforestation and soil degradation in Colombia are very complex environmental issues, responding to different dynamics and stakeholders. Considering the findings of the UNODC showing that in spite of a reduction in the number of hectares with coca, cocaine production increased due to a rise in productivity, a decrease in deforestation could be expected. This does not necessarily reflect a victory in the fight against deforestation but a defeat in the fight against drugs. Therefore, solutions to deforestation and degradation should be inclusive (multi-stakeholder) and comprehensive, aiming at a) clarifying land tenure and solving conflicts around land ownership; b) improving livelihoods of local and ethnic communities – by strengthening existing productive activities and income alternatives derived from community-based enterprises, biodiversity-based value chains (including timber/non-timber products), ecotourism, among others; and, c) implementing sustainable forest management plans (including use and conservation), while creating financial incentives so that local communities conserve and use nature in a sustainable way through, for instance, inclusive financial mechanisms such as forest carbon credits like Redd+, and other types of Payments for ecosystem services.
Author: Andrés Santana Bonilla