ENVIRONMENT-CHILE:
Private Conservation at a Snail's Pace

Gustavo González*


SANTIAGO, (Tierramérica) - The organisation and activism of individual landowners to protect biodiversity is a relatively new phenomenon in Chile, where 376,552 hectares of nature preserves are in private hands. But they have a long way to go to catch up to the public sector, which protects 14.1 million hectares.

The number and size of protected areas in private hands have grown, but they still lack official recognition and there are no incentives for them, say environmental groups.

”Objectively, we are lagging behind,” Cristina Cornejo, an official with the governmental National Environment Commission (CONAMA), told Tierramérica.

However, a process has begun in Chile ”that is encouraging from the perspective of the work that needs to be done, and the fact that there is a great deal that public agencies have to learn about the issue,” she said.

Cornejo works in what is known as Chile's 8th region, 500 km south of Santiago, and is one of the promoters of the Nevado Chillán conservation project, a coming together of public and private efforts.

The National Committee for the Defence of Flora and Fauna, CODEFF, in 1997 founded the Network of Private Protected Areas, which unites 130 organisations and individuals who oversee conservation of biodiversity on their own land, encompassing 133 wildlife areas for a total of 376,522 hectares.

In December 2003, seven years of negotiations between the Chilean government and U.S. millionaire Douglas Tompkins ended successfully with the declaration of a 300,000-hectare nature sanctuary known as Pumalín Park, in the south. That project considerably expanded the amount of land under private protection.

Claudio Donoso is a member of RAPP and of an association of forestry engineers working to protect native flora in the province of Valdivia, 850 km south of Santiago. He heads the ”Sendero del Bosque” (Forest Path) project, centred on a 32-hectare area that his family purchased 20 years ago.

”This land was quite degraded, and my father, a forestry engineer, saw it as a sort of experimental area and reconstituted its native vegetation. Now it is a beautiful landscape with a great diversity of trees and animals,” he told Tierramérica.

”Sendero del Bosque” today encompasses its original area plus two neighbouring lands, ”one of which includes a pristine forest that is 500 years old.” In the middle term, this endeavour will begin to turn a profit, ”when we launch an ecotourism programme,” said Donoso.

Victoria Maldonado, a CODEFF biodiversity expert, says that despite this case and others like it, Chile is a long way from ensuring sustainable environmental conservation in the long run, ”because the protected areas are concentrated in the south, but in the entire central-south, central and northern regions there are almost no protected areas.”

The properties covered by the RAPP network have not yet been formally recognised by the Chilean government, nor are there incentives or stimuli to encourage more individual landowners to participate in conservation plans, she said in a conversation with Tierramérica.

”We often think that 'private' means a person with a lot of money, but that is not true. Most of the people who are protecting (biodiversity) have smaller areas, less than 1,000 hectares, and they do so with a great deal of effort,” the expert added.

A CODEFF report authored by Maldonado and Alberto Cortés, which did not include the Pumalín Park, states that 38 percent of the privately held protected areas in Chile represent individual lands, formal or informal.

Another seven percent is land donated to the national park system, and 25 percent is land that different communities -- mostly indigenous -- maintain collectively under conservation systems.

The document also says that 22 percent of the total area is designated for ecotourism or ecological real estate projects, while just seven percent are concession for conserving lands that are government property.

The notion that environmental conservation is not the exclusive domain of governments and requires more active participation by an array of different actors took on new force in the wake of the 6th Inter-American Private Conservation Congress, held in mid-April in Santiago.

The participants in that event said they would arrive at the next Congress, slated for 2006 in Colombia, with substantial progress in strengthening and expanding conservation networks and building new alliances with the public sector, Myriam Pinto, CODEFF communications chief, told Tierramérica.

(* Gustavo González is an IPS correspondent. Originally published May 15 by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.)