Ecuador, Colombia and the Guiana Shield join the planning of sustainable land use

Ecuador

The territorial planning framework in Ecuador is known as the Plan de Desarrollo y Ordenamiento Territorial (PDOT). It is one component in an ambitious effort to articulate a Plan Nacional de Desarrollo (PND), which is being implemented via a constitutionally mandated policy to decentralize the administrative functions of the state. The PDOT is a process that is highly participatory and multi-sectoral, as well as re-iterative, since it is designed to be updated in future decades. The goal is to create a legally-binding framework that will promote (or constrain) the economic activities supported by an autonomous regional government at three scales: Provincial, Cantonal and Parochial. The PDOT incorporates three main elements:

(1) Strategic Diagnosis: an analysis of the current situation using biophysical and socio-economic information. The PDOT has all the components of a ZEE but also includes data on demographics (migration, stakeholder groups), finance and economics (GDP/sector), land tenure, infrastructure (energy, transport, communications), threats from climate change and governing capacity.

(2) Proposal: a vision of the future based on strategies implemented over the short, medium and long-term, which is built around an aspirational land-use plan (Categorías de Ordenamiento Territorial) and policies to achieve sustainable growth and conservation outcomes.

(3) Management Model: programmes and proposals to be implemented by the autonomous government, including a participation plan and a monitoring component to evaluate progress and set the stage for the next iteration of the PDOT.

The PDOT planning framework borrows concepts from various planning methodologies, such as a strategic environmental evaluation, and, as such, provides one of the most comprehensive frameworks for guiding a sustainable development in the Pan Amazon. The process, formally initiated in 2016, has compiled an impressive amount of information at all three scales that is freely available via government portals. It is not without its shortcomings, however. The Plan Nacional de Desarrollo is organized around a jurisdictional scheme that assigns the six Amazonian provinces into five different autonomous regions. Logic and tradition argue for a legal and administrative framework that coordinates governance among Amazon jurisdictions. Fortunately, that approach continues to prevail in other programmes, such as the PROAmazonía and Fondo Común del CETA (Circumscription Territorial Especial de la Amazonia).

PROAmazonía is a joint project of the ministries of agriculture and the environment and has coordinated the recent development of the PDOTs. More importantly, it provides technical assistance to promote sustainable production and biocommerce. Land-use planning is important, but it must be accompanied by programmes that motivate landholders to reform their business models and reward forest communities. The Fondo Común del CTEA, a trust fund that distributes royalties, is the principal source of capital for public investment in physical and social infrastructure.

Colombia

The government of Colombia is renowned for its capacity to develop conceptually coherent programmes for the challenges that beset the country. The programme to implement a modern land-use plan was adopted as a national strategy in 1997, and by 2003 all of the country’s municipalities had a POT. The relatively rapid compilation of these studies is due to Colombia’s unique system of environmental management, which depends upon an institution known as a Corporación Autónomo Regional. The CAR are regional regulatory agencies, broadly organized around watersheds, that advise sub-national departmental and municipal governments on natural resource management (see Chapter 7). Most were established and consolidated in the 1970s and over decades have compiled a knowledge base and institutional capacity unsurpassed in the Pan Amazon.

There are three CARs in the Colombian Amazon, and all have conducted dozens of POTs to support the regulation of land use within strategic watersheds and wetlands that provide socially and economically important ecosystem services to urban areas. They have also completed similar documents at the department scale, referred to as Agenda Ambiental (Caquetá, Putumayo, Amazonas) that are similar in content and format to a ZEE (see Annex 4.14). More recently, the government of Caquetá invested in a strategic evaluation entitled Directrices de Ordenamiento Territorial, which is similar to the three-part scheme used in Ecuador (Diagnosis/ Proposal/ Management). As commented previously, the challenge in Colombia is not access to information or capacity but the inability to establish the presence of the state on lawless landscapes.

The Countries of the Guiana Shield

While the Andean republics have invested in land-use planning with limited success, the nations of the Guiana Shield were latecomers in the effort to plan development of their forested hinterlands. Fortunately, the agricultural and infrastructure drivers of deforestation have been weak or absent historically.

In 2013, Guyana completed a National Land Use Plan (NLUP), the first comprehensive review of the nation’s renewable natural resources since independence. It is essentially a national-scale ZEE and combines information from multiple sources to identify development options based on potential land use. It incorporates an explicit effort to consider future climate change and was an integral part of the agreement between Guyana and Norway to develop a Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS). The NLUP includes a section dedicated to a REDD+ mitigation programme[xii] via forest management and identifies the need to shift agricultural production and populations away from the coastal plain due to rising sea levels.

Part of the motivation for the NLUP was a strategy to link its port facilities with the agricultural landscapes in Roraima, Brazil, via a highway, and a need to revitalize the economy to reduce the loss of human resources from emigration (see Chapter 5). Many of the issues that motivated the LCDS have become less germane, however, because of the discovery of offshore oil and gas reserves. The future influx of royalty revenues and investment should lessen fiscal pressures that might motivate a future government to unsustainably exploit the nation’s hardwood stocks or convert marginal soils to plantation agriculture.

Suriname has a land-use history similar to Guyana’s, with development concentrated on the coast, but it has yet to conduct a comprehensive study of its land resources. This will soon change due to an ambitious new effort to reform the country’s environmental legislation being led by the Ministry of Spatial Planning, Soil and Forest Management: Project Onze Natuur op 1 (Our Nature is One), a development initiative that will consider the value of natural capital when considering development options.

The most difficult challenge in both Guyana and Suriname are the small and medium-scale gold miners exploiting selected landscapes with gold-bearing rocks (see Chapter 5). Although it is unlikely that a land-use planning document will change the nature of those activities, which are regulated by different agencies, the public forum in which land issues are discussed is often dominated by debates about the mining sector.

Land-use on the Venezuelan sector of the Guiana Shield exists in two broad categories: (1) Areas Under a Special Administrative Regime (ABRAE) and (2) everything else (see Annex 4.15). The ABRAE system was established in 1984 and includes the national protected area system (national parks, monuments, biosphere reserves and wildlife reserves/sanctuaries/refuges), forest reserves, cultural monuments, select hydrological basins, tourist attractions, frontier zones and even farm land. About 55 per cent of the Venezuelan Amazon has been designated as an ABRAE, mainly as national parks (6) or natural monuments (22). In addition, there are a massive hydrological reserve and six large forest reserves, only one of which is being exploited for timber. Deforestation linked to agriculture is essentially nonexistent, and there are no conspicuous reports of land grabbing for agricultural development, although gold miners appropriate state lands with the consent of military authorities who have administrative authority over mining landscapes.

Presumably, some type of study preceded the construction of the Guri Hydropower facility in the 1960s; however, the first formal land-use study wasn’t completed until 2004. That plan was narrowly focused on biophysical features of the watershed and ignored the mining sector; it also lacked a participatory process. Spurred by several power-management crises linked to water levels in the lake, the government initiated an evaluation and planning process in 2008. Like most recent government initiatives, there is no evidence this project ever advanced beyond the planning stage. Any effort to improve land-use zoning in the Caroni watershed will be forced to contend with the massive gold rush that has overwhelmed the region, a development that highlights the real challenge of any land-use plan: It will not be effective if there is not the political will to enforce it.

Read the other excerpted portions of chapter 4 here:

To read earlier chapters of the book, find Chapter One here, Chapter Two here, and Three is here.