Conservation is bloody complicated. I’m not the first to say it, and I definitely won’t be the last. But spending time here in the Colombian Andes, I’ve been thinking a lot about one of my favourite topics: forest regrowth on former farmlands.
Secondary forest regrowth is becoming something of a hot topic and I love it. In my opinion, there is nothing more amazing than witnessing the capacity of nature to rebound if given half a chance. I think we should be turning way more agricultural lands back to forest. The Colombian government thinks so too. By next year, they’ve committed to restoring a million hectares of forest on degraded landscapes.
But like any conservation challenge, the more you learn about it, and the more different perspectives you try understand, the more complicated things seem to become.
The Biological
Us biologists understandably like to focus on, well, the biological. We’re pretty pro-forest regeneration and we’re getting fairly good at suggesting places where it should be left to happen. We can draw a nice regional map for you with farmlands coloured in in green or in red depending on whether they’ve got a high or a low biological chance of ever recovering native forest.
Those nicer green farmlands might be areas very near to existing expanses of forest, which therefore would have a solid head start in the regeneration process. They might also be farmlands with the right soil type, the right amount of rainfall and the right climatic conditions for forests to start sprouting out of current grasslands.
Hell, we might even get super sophisticated and start looking at the animals flanking those nice green farmlands as an indicator of their capacity for regeneration. Ohh, look, the forests near these farms have big populations of seed-dispersing birds, bats,monkeys [insert functionally-important animal here]. Those will really help to get the ball rolling with forest regeneration.
On the other hand, those nasty farms coloured in red would be a rubbish place to set-aside for forest regrowth. There’s no decent forest nearby to kickstart the process, the soil and weather are all wrong, and there’snot a seed-dispersing bird in sight.
Stop farming on the green farms and leave them for regeneration. Increase yields on the red farms to make up for any losses in productivity. And there you have it, a logical biological recipe for targeting forest regrowth. Simples, right?
The Economic
But then you have to throw in the economic dimension,remembering of course that conservation is underfunded and that cheap therefore almost always trumps expensive. You start to ask questions like: How economical would it be to take this farmland out of production compared to that one? How much would you have to compensate farmers in order for them to leave their land to revert back into forest?
The good news is when areas with a high biological chance of recovering forest would also be relatively cheap to restore. That’s the case in the Colombian Andes. The cattle farming up in the mountains here is happening at such low densities that you can literally walk across acres and acres of fields and happen upon two or maybe three cows.
Farmers aren’t making much money from grazing cattle on their land. So, if only we can get the funding for it, maybe we can reimburse those farmers and ask them very politely if they’d please instead let cloud forests take over their pastures.
The biological boons of doing so would be massive. In fact, they’d be globally significant, since the Andes is a hotspot of endemism. In just thirty years, dung beetle and bird communities in regrowing forests already closely resemble those in pristine, old-growth forest.
Scaled up to national levels, maybe economic policy should therefore be incentivising the large-scale abandonment of cow fields in the Andes? After all, cow fields are currently taking up a mammoth half of the Colombian Andes, and some 75% of its agricultural lands. Wouldn’t it be better if all of those cows were relocated into much more productive, efficient systems? How about in the lowlands, in places like the Llanos?
Of course, entirely shifting a meat production market is probably not feasible. But what about a mixed strategy, where some of the cows that would otherwise currently be reared in the Andes start to be grazed in the Llanos. The rest of the Andean cows could then be concentrated on a smaller area of mountainside; instead of having two or three cows clinging onto several acres of steep pasture , you could have fifty.
Then there’s the question of what farmers would think about this. Are they even open to essentially selling their farmlands to conservation or forestry agencies in the first place? Suddenly, we’ve lurched into the social.
Related article: From cowlands to cloud forest
The Social
I have no doubt in my mind that if you gave some farmers in the Andes the right amount of money, they would be willing to give up their cowfields for forest regrowth. It’s not easy carving out an existence at high-altitude, particularly for the ageing demographic that tend to still be working in the mountains, far from cities, decent roads and phone signal.
But for others, rearing cattle is a way of life—something that stretches back many generations. Maybe they don’t want to give it up. From my understanding, rearing beef or dairy cows is also not something done only for sale in domestic markets. It also serves as a personal insurance policy. Should crops fails, or hard times strike, having a few cows—which require little day-to-day upkeep —ready for the slaughter can make tough times weatherable.
Then then there’s a whole other can of worms still left to open. Once you’ve decided which farms would be cheap and biologically feasible to recover forest on, how do you go about implementing this on-paper strategy into the real world?
If your plan is to relocate cow lands down the mountains and into the Llanos, you need to have a proper benefit-sharing mechanism that works across hundreds of kilometres. It’s no good to Andean farmers if their counterparts in the lowlands reap all the rewards of cattle intensification,and they’re left with insufficient compensation.
Even if intensification was applied at local scales in the mountains themselves, under the 3-to-50 cows on a farm scenario, that would still take some clever social organisation. It might require some sort of“common lands” setup, where instead of each farmer grazing their few cows on their own vast farmlands, groups of cattle-owning families rear their animals together on a single, shared pasture—leaving space for forest regrowth.
The Political
And then you can always rely on politics to throw a spanner of some sorts into the works. After decades of war between the army of Colombia and the rebel left-wing paramilitary group FARC, a peace deal recently brought a tentative end to an era of violence. What this means for Colombia’s environment, and in particular for the prospect of restoration in the Andes,has yet to be seen.
A major consequence of FARC’s existence and operations in and around the Andes was the mass exodus of entire families out of the mountains.With these areas rendered relatively safe once more, the expected influx of displaced families—many fleeing or thrown off their lands a generation ago—could seriously hinder any forest restoration efforts.
These are the sort of largescale processes that are hard to account for even under the best-made conservation plans.
The Cultural
Reduce the demand for beef, and you don’t need to supply as many cows. Supply fewer cows, and you can make room for forest. If only it were so simple. Beef-eating plays an important part in Colombian culture and cuisine and compared to many other Latin Americans, Colombians have traditionally eaten much more beef than pork.
Whenever I’ve chatted with Colombian friends about becoming vegetarian in the country, the response is always the same. It’s pretty darn tricky to do. Country-wide trends in Colombia show that beef consumption is at about 12 kg per person per year, with this number set to continue rising. How to spark cultural changes in diet is arguably one of the biggest planetary challenges.
And as side note, if you don’t think that culture plays a massive role in the interplay between meat consumption and forest conservation, then have a little think about what would happen to the Western Ghats if tens of millions of vegetarian Buddhist Indians suddenly woke up tomorrow deciding they fancied a hamburger.
Of course, just because a problem is hard and multifaceted, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and do it. Most problems are hard and multifaceted. Besides, conservation can’t just be the job of trying to fend off human pressures inside increasingly shrinking areas of intact habitat. It’s time to get started on the wholesale restoration of degraded landscapes.
But the only way we we’re ever going to achieve that–in Colombia or beyond– is by taking seriously the complexities of restoration and realising that biology or ecology or politics or sociology alone is not going to crack it. Conservation in the 21st century really does have to be a collaborative endeavour. There is no other choice.
RELATED ARTICLES:
One Comment