This, unfortunately, is a trend for the country (and world). According to satellite data from the University of Maryland and visualized on the forest monitoring platform Global Forest Watch, Colombia lost around 2.8 million hectares – more than 3% – of its tree cover between 2001 and 2014. In other words, an area of forest bigger than the U.S. state of Massachusetts was cleared in 14 years. The government has made a series of commitments to reduce human impact on the nation’s forest (including a promise to cut net deforestation in the Amazon to zero by 2020), and while last year the rate fell compared to 2014’s figures, the country still lost around 124,000 hectares of forest – an area three times the size of the second-largest city, Medellin.
But the region’s remaining indigenous groups, the Kogi, Wiwa, Arhuaco, and Kankuamo, which are the descendants of the Tayrona, are not willing to let their sacred land go without a fight. For the last 20 years, indigenous communities have been buying land around Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta Natural National Park, aided by The Nature Conservancy, and now satellite data indicate this may be helping prevent deforestation, with less tree cover loss within the Indigenous territory than outside of it.
“As part of the Sierra we share the responsibility for conservation and equilibrium between man and nature. We are the interlocutors. For nature, for the animals,” says Edinson Videl Daza, a member of the Wiwa community and a spokesman for the environment. “We see the earth as our mother. Our father, the sea. The rivers and streams are living. The animals are our younger brothers,” he says.
The Wiwa use traditional conservation and cultural practices to manage forests, and believe it is their purpose to act as environmental stewards. Following Mongabay News, “TNC has purchased 5,241 hectares of the Sierra over the last 20 years under programs that transferred ownership from cattle and crop farmers to the Arhuaco, Kogui y Kankuamo tribes. The indigenous communities had to keep 70 percent of the land for conservation, while the remaining 30 percent could be used for traditional uses. The result? An analysis the organization carried out two years after the sales found that tree coverage was increasing in the former agricultural areas, and that the land was being inhabited by indigenous families from the higher reaches of the mountains that tend to have a more positive impact on the mountain’s ecosystems than do other communities.”
The following video is in Spanish. Even if you don't understand Spanish, the images of the indigenous groups and their cultivation practices speak through the limit of language and are worth a watch.
Sources: Mongabay News, National Geographic, The Nature Conservancy, Sacred Land Film Project