According to statistics from CIAT, Peru and Colombia house 23% of the Amazonian rainforest. Photo: www.landscapes.org
This initiative is financed by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety of Germany. It’s duration is 4 years.
This past May 21, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, CIAT, inaugurated the project “Sustainable Amazonian Landscapes”, which seeks to reduce deforestation, increase carbon sequestration, and strengthen adaptive capacity to climate change at the local and national level. For the development of this initiative, which will have a duration of 4 years, there has been an investment of close to $7 million USD. The idea for the project first arose as a strategy to complement the initiatives that Peru and Colombia are pushing forward related to these goals.
Through this project, we have proof of our decided commitment to the sustainable development of the Amazon in Peru and Colombia, two countries with high potential to explore different models of ‘green growth.’ This is a good example of how the global negotiations around climate change have expressed themselves through concrete actions on the ground,
emphasized Marcus von Essen,
head of Cooperation in the Germany Embassy in Colombia.
According to the statistics of CIAT, Peru and Colombia house 23% of the Amazonian rainforest and are committed to reduce to zero the net losses of their natural forests and as well to design national plans to adapt to climate change and mitigate its effects.
From there, both countries urgently need to identify effective agricultural systems proven to increase carbon sequestration, protect forests in danger of extinction, build up the capacities of local communities to adapt to climate change, and increase their agricultural productivity,
asserted Marcela Quintero,
CIAT researcher, specialist in Ecosystem Services and leader of this project.
The initiative will be carried out in the departments of Loreto in Peru and Caquetá in Colombia, and has as its principal goal the provisioning of scientific evidence to national environmental authorities and to local agricultural producers, in order to improve their adaptive capacity to climate change and mitigate its effects, as well as improve ecosystem services and socioeconomic benefits for the farmers.
For his part, Elcio Pi. Guimarães, director of CIAT in Latin America and the Caribbean, assured that “this project is a concrete example of what we can achieve at the level of Latin America when we unit forces between governments, research centers, academia, and agricultural producers in order to work on topics of priority for the region.”
On this topic, Andy Jarvis, director of the Decision and Policy Analysis Research Area of CIAT, indicated that the Colombian Amazon right now finds itself in a critical moment, although it can still expect various scenarios of future development.
The big question is if they can generate models of development, based on sustainable agriculture, where there exists economic opportunities for the local communities, while at the same time conserving natural resources and generating ecosystem services,,
stated Jarvis, who added that this project seeks to provide concrete solutions for decision-makers, at the local and national levels, as well as for the local communities, about which direction to take.
The project Sustainable Amazonian Landscapes is financed by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety of Germany and counts on the collaboration between strategic partners such as the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research PIK; the Instituto Amazónico de Investigaciones Científicas Sinchi; el Centro para la Investigación en Sistemas Sostenibles de Producción Agropecuaria CIPAV; the Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonía Peruana IIAP; the Universidad de la Amazonía in Colombia and the Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina (UNALM) in Perú.
*Note that all directly attributed quotes are translated from their originals in Spanish.
