Latin American economy can grow without deforestation
hace 10 year
Latin American countries face the challenge of building and growing their economies in a “technically and economically viable” way. This is what Mariana Panuncio, director of the Climate Change Program of the organization (WWF), assures, who presented the example of Brazil at the international conference on “Forests and Climate Change”, held in Asunción (Paraguay).
In the last decade, Brazil reduced its deforestation rate by 70%, while increasing its soybean production by 80%, thus exposing a model applicable to the rest of Latin America.
For Panuncio, the key is to regulate the areas that can be deforested and under what conditions, through public policies, as well as to enforce the laws that prohibit deforestation and penalize those who violate them.
It is of utmost importance to have incentive systems such as land tenure for villagers, credits transferred to farmers with the condition of preserving the environment or that products from well-managed forests have a better price.
«Forests have a crucial role to play in addressing the negative impacts of climate change. They are not only a carbon reservoir, but also provide resources such as food or medicines, and contribute to the regulation of water resources,» said the expert.
«It is a myth that there is a conflict between economic development and forest conservation,» said Josefina Braña, director of public policy in WWF's Global Forest and Climate Program, who also participated in the conference on the conservation of forested areas in the region, ahead of the Climate Change Conference (COP21), to be held in Paris on November 30.
He proposed, among his contributions, that another incentive should be to pay peasant communities for the environmental services they provide, and that forest conservation decisions should be made “locally”, especially in situations where dependence on crops is the only means of subsistence.
«It is not true that there is a contradiction between food security and forest conservation. Although some peasant communities need small-scale agriculture, with good planning there can be a balance between forests and crops,» Braña added.
While agriculture and livestock are two of the causes of deforestation in developing countries, so are droughts and rising temperatures associated with climate change. For this reason, conference attendees, including representatives of the UN and the World Bank, concluded that good management of these practices would prevent dire environmental consequences.
Source: ConexiónCOP y El Tiempo
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