Road creeps into Peru’s Sierra del Divisor as it awaits national park designation

An unauthorized logging road has encroached in the past three months on the border of what could soon become Peru’s newest national park, according to new satellite imagery of the dense, mountainous rainforest known as Sierra del Divisor.

“It is terrible to see how what was once a forest has become a very wide road” of 20 to 40 meters in places, said Maria Elena Díaz, the chief of the Sierra del Divisor Reserved Zone, in an email to mongabay.com.

Based on analysis of the satellite imagery by the organization Monitoring of the Andean Amazon, or MAAP, recent construction has brought the road in contact with the edge of the 1.47-million-hectare section of rainforest in central Peru. Advocates argue that the area’s promotion to national park status would further protect lowland volcanic mountains unique to the Amazon, along with its carbon-dense forest that is vital to the region’s abundant biodiversity as well as to a host of indigenous groups living in and around Sierra del Divisor.

Since 2006, when it was first designated a reserved zone affording some protection from activities such as logging, indigenous communities, NGOs, and government officials have pushed for Peru’s government to formally create the 1.35 million-hectare Sierra del Divisor National Park. They hope national park status would provide SERNANP, the government agency that runs Peru’s protected areas, with the resources to protect it.

Members of the coalition, including eight representatives of native communities from the Sierra del Divisor area, are imploring Peru’s president and prime minister to use the recent United Nations Sustainable Development Summit as a platform to announce the new national park to the world, said Candy Vilela, spokesperson for the Peruvian NGO CEDIA, short for the Center for Amazonian Indigenous Development.

“They’ve been waiting for nine years, and they think that’s too long,” Vilela said.

Since 2012, SERNANP officials have watched an extension of 75 kilometers of an existing east-west road. At that time, they brought the construction to the attention of the special prosecutor for environmental affairs because they considered it “irregular and a threat to the protected area,” according to the MAAP article.

This recent analysis by MAAP scientists revealed that construction finally brought the road into contact with the reserved zone boundary within the past four months.

SERNANP told MAAP that the road was operated by a “neighboring forest [concession holder].”

Díaz said that the road’s incursion on the reserved zone makes the designation of the area as a national park “extremely urgent.”

She added, “The threats of illegal logging have increased with the construction of the road.” Logging isn’t allowed in reserved zones.

Díaz is also concerned that it may allow farmers to set up bases for cultivating illegal crops like coca and could lead to the invasion of indigenous community lands.

In June MAAP scientists analyzed high-resolution satellite imagery of Sierra del Divisor and found evidence of human activity, which CEDIA representatives said was likely coca farming in the park.

Formalizing the park’s protection would also form a massive binational protected area, often called a peace park, contiguous with the Serra do Divisor National Park in Brazil. Park proponents say protecting such a large area would be a boon for indigenous communities and help safeguard their traditions and heritage.

Díaz pointed out that the park is home to the Isconahua people, who are among the groups that wish to continue living isolated from the outside world.

“We know very little about these people who still roam through these broken mountain ranges and across the border into Brazil,” said David Salisbury, a geographer at the University of Richmond in Virginia, in an interview in July. Salisbury conducted his doctoral research in the region.

Of particular importance to the international community, the area holds the second-highest storehouse of above-ground carbon in the country, behind only the 2.5-million-hectare Alto Purus National Park, another of Peru’s protected areas that is also dealing with the specter of recent deforestation. The 165 million metric tons found in Sierra del Divisor’s forests, according to research by Greg Asner at the Carnegie Institution for Science, works out to the equivalent carbon dioxide emissions of more than 127 million passenger cars in a year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Protecting such a resource represents “a good opportunity for Peru” to show its commitment to the pact it made with Norway and Germany in 2014 to reduce deforestation in its more than 70 million hectares of forest in return for $300 million through 2021, Vilela said. The agreement also requires Peru to set aside millions of hectares for indigenous communities.

“I think the declaration [of Sierra del Divisor National Park] would be the most effective way to guarantee the participation of Peru in fighting climate change,” she added. “This is the time to do it.”

The top image is of a logging road in Sabah, Malaysia. Photo by Rhett A. Butler.