Share the page
Libération: “Giving deforestation in Colombia the chop”
Published on
First published in Libération on 21 August 2019, this article revisits the sustainable forestry planning project in the Colombian Pacific region, supported by the FFEM, the EU and ONF Andina (French National Forestry Office), who fight deforestation in Andean Colombia.
Colombia is home to over 59 million hectares of forest, 8 million of which are found in the Colombian Pacific region, making it a biodiversity hotspot. Today, like for many other forest regions around the world, deforestation is a real threat to the Colombian Pacific region. Extensive mining and agricultural exploitation are the principal sources of income for local populations but are also the main culprits behind forest degradation and the loss of native biodiversity.
Supported by the FFEM, this project has many ambitions. It aims to strengthen the tools and empower the actors in charge of forest management, to facilitate multi-actor coordination while also implementing sustainable forest management models, enhancing the sector and creating additional value for local populations. Thanks to scientific research, it also seeks to produce the knowledge needed for decision-making and to update public policy in terms of sustainable tropical rainforest management in Colombia.
More globally, this project forms part the FFEM’s strategy of supporting initiatives which tie into the French National Strategy for Combating Imported Deforestation (SDNI) and the Rainforest Alliance. These projects span the agriculture-forest interface and contribute to the fight against deforestation, forest degradation and land use change that are undermining the regulatory functions of forests in the face of climate change.