“What is used is conserved.” This local saying is particularly applicable to the Selva Maya… or at least what is left of it. This forest, the largest in Mesoamerica, is a key biodiversity corridor between North and South America. This makes it a remarkable asset from both a natural and a cultural point of view, since it was the heart of the Maya civilization (250-950 AD).
Reconciling human activity and nature conservation
Northern Guatemala is home to the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR), part of the Selva Maya, which it shares with its neighbours Belize and Mexico). The zone has been classed as a biosphere reserve since 1990. This is a protective status introduced by UNESCO to promote a balance between human and cultural activities and natural ecosystem conservation. After 34 years, the zone, which faces both climate and anthropic constraints, has proved hugely successful in terms of conservation: deforestation rates in forest concessions are negligible, whereas they are three times higher on a national level, notably in conventional protected areas.
Forests under pressure
This apparently paradoxical situation can perhaps be put down to the very fact that those forest concessions are used. “In the case of the 12 community forest concessions, people in these zones have signed a contract with the government through the country’s national council for protected areas (CoNaP). This gives those communities the right to log and sell timber and non-wood forest resources, within a strict framework set by the CoNaP, notably in line with the rules of the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council®) label”, CIRAD ecologist Marie Ange Ngo Bieng explains. “Farming is authorized within those forest concessions, but only for self-consumption.
However, these forest zones are under substantial pressure, primarily from agriculture, with the aim of using them for livestock farming. They often suffer as a result of fires and of activities linked to drug trafficking.” Marie Ange Ngo Bieng is working to foster tropical forest conservation by means of sustainable use. “Strict protection systems are inappropriate for several types of managed tropical landscapes”, she points out. “This is why I am now focusing on sustainable forest management, with the assumption that like in northern Guatemala, what is not used is lost.”
Logging to protect forests
To this end, she is studying the community forest concessions of the MBR. “These concerted forest management models prove that sustainable logging can conserve forest ecosystems.” In line with the CoNaP framework and FSC label standards, an average of two trees per hectare are felled every 30 years, particularly noble species such as caoba (bigleaf mahogany). “This type of rational logging is largely sufficient to avoid disrupting forest dynamics”, Marie Ange Ngo Bieng explains, “particularly since community forest concession stakeholders help nature to regenerate by planting trees of local species produced in their nurseries.”
Towards concerted forest management
However, the community forest model observed in Petén, Guatemala, is under threat as a result of political changes, land insecurity, climate change and a drive to promote the area’s archaeological heritage.
The Petén forest community association (ACOFOP) is counting on a high-level scientific collaboration to come up with new ways of rolling out this community model. That collaboration will take the form of the ConForMA project, aimed at future concerted forest management.
The project, funded by the Fonds français pour l’environnement mondial, is due to launch in January 2025, to run for three and a half years, and will be coordinated by CIRAD, along with ACOFOP and local partners (CATIE, Rainforest Alliance, CEMCA, ATIBT).
“ConForMA aims to support innovative community forest management tailored to areas affected by growing pressure on forest systems and by climate change, within territories that are themselves managed in a concerted way”, says Marie Ange Ngo Bieng, who will be heading the project. “It encompasses several of my research topics, as regards an in-depth understanding of how forest systems function under anthropic and climate pressure, and the implementation of appropriate strategies to preserve and restore biodiversity and associated ecosystem services.”
Reconciling conservation and sustainable production
“Increasingly, in the tropical landscapes of our Anthropocene era, particularly those surrounded by other artificial land uses that are more productive in the short term, we really need to be thinking about reconciling forest conservation and sustainable forest resource production. And this is one of the advantages of this forest management model”, she concludes, “particularly since it also illustrates the vast potential of indigenous peoples and local communities in terms of conserving natural ecosystems.”
The degree of conservation in community concessions is almost unheard of for lowland tropical forest fragments on a global level!
Marie Ange Ngo Bieng
ecologist with CIRAD
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Publish date : 2024-10-30 23:11:00
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