The deforesting of the Amazon Rainforest has an impact that reaches far beyond forest limits. Specialists are certain that the loss of trees in this region have an influence from the rain’s cycle in the Colombian capital of Bogotá up to the climate of the North American Midwest. Therefore, it is urgent to monitor the region’s policies and level of deforesting, something which until then had only been precariously developed in Colombia.

In order to fulfill this gap, the idea of the “Amazon 2030” project was born, an initiative that brings together civil society companies and the media in Colombia to lend visibility to a region that, according to anthropologist Martín von Hildebrand, director of the Gaia Amazonas Foundation and a member of this project, “has received a backyard treatment until now.”

With the “Amazon 2030”, the intention is to give continuity to the policies and actions conducted in the Amazon, to ensure that ecosystems and the inhabitants of this region can develop in a sustainable manner and improve their quality of life. The project is committed to promote a change in vision, stemming from a new development model and social and environmental sustainability, which is adequate to the peculiarities of the region and its cultural and biological diversity. To this end, it promises to monitor this region in a systematic and periodic manner through a definition of social/environmental indicators, the building of a databank, a baseline and publication of analytic bulletins. It also foresees the conduction of surveys with the population on its perception with regard to the Amazon, aside from seminars, forums and other opportunities for social participation.

Relevance of the initiative

“Eighteen percent of the Amazonian basin has been deforested, and the annual deforesting today produces an amount of CO­2 equivalent to the emissions of the entire world’s transportation. If we don’t win the fight against deforesting, we may lose the fight against climate changes” said Martín von Hildebrand during the launching of the initiative that for more than two decades has been working with the region’s communities of indigenous people.

“In recent years we have seen longer summers, longer dry seasons and more frequent forest fires. All of these are warnings about the impact that the climate changes in the Colombian Amazon are provoking”, he ensures. In this context, he also assured us that this region in Colombia may be the last possible refuge to mitigate the effects of climate changes; however, its rightful importance has not yet been acknowledged. “Colombia has always been perceived as a Caribbean and Andean country and not an Amazonian one as such. It is time for that to change, because it has the largest tropical forest on the planet”, said he.

“Colombia could be the last refuge of the Amazon as we know it today”, he emphasized. And although he acknowledges some of the efforts towards conservation conducted by the country, such as the creation of territories for indigenous people, the 17 Protected Areas, the 14 National Parks, 2 National Natural Reserves and a Sanctuary of Flora and Medicinal Plants, he insisted that even greater efforts are in order.

Precarious investigation in Colombia


Wendy Arenas, director of the Alisos Foundation, that is also part of the project, stressed the poor state of investigation in existence about the Colombian Amazon and the lack of quality information available on that region.

According to Arenas, it is necessary to improve investigation on themes such as the impact of the climate changes on the ecosystems of tropical forests. Likewise, it is necessary to improve the use of the available data to measure future levels of deforesting.

“Without this information, it will be difficult to help to formulate a government policy”, she guaranteed. “The Amazon is not only Brazilian. We need a more overall approach in order to witness the development of regional policies, particularly between Andean nations such as Peru, Colombia and Ecuador, that share the forest”, she said.

“According to the IPCC (the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and the WWF, if the current pace of deforesting continues, by 2030 there will only be 45% of the forest left, which means the collapse of the Amazonian ecosystem. This process will reduce its ability to capture carbon from the atmosphere and will disturb the regime of rains in the entire continent”, she stated.

César Caballero, manager of Cifras e Conceitos, a company that has gathered the existing information in the region, indicated that 22% of the existing data are from 2005 or prior to the year 2000. “There are no current data on the population, neither is there information with an ethnical perspective, this doesn’t allow for any guidelines for the discussions on the theme”, said he.

For this reason, the promoters of the initiative insist on the urgency of conducting a census of the Amazonian population, since due to the difficulty to reach remote locations, the number of inhabitants is not even known.

Natalia Hernández, coordinator of the “Amazonas 2030” project, pointed out that “we have an enormous responsibility before the world to preserve the Amazon Rainforest, and to that effect we must plan and think about it from an Amazonian viewpoint, with indications of the different life conditions with regard to those in existence in the rest of the country.”

The “Amazon 2030” project counts on support from the AVINA Foundation and from the government of Holland. The country spared 5 million dollars for the project, where 4 million go to support Colombia’s environmental policies in 2011 and one million during the next 4 years for the “Amazon 2030” project.

For more information, please head for: www.amazonas2030.net