It turns out that decades of civil war in Colombia was better for the preservation of wild lands than the country鈥檚 more recent years of peace.
Colombia is one of the most biodiverse countries, with more bird, amphibian and butterfly species than anywhere else in the world, to the World Wildlife Fund. This is partly due to the country鈥檚 high variety of ecosystems, from the central Andean mountains to the Amazon rainforest in the east.
The country has also spent much of the past five decades in a civil war that has killed more than 220,000 people. During the civil war, Marxist guerrillas called the (FARC) controlled most of the wild territory sitting between the Andes and the Amazon until they finalised a peace treaty with the Colombian government in 2016. Now, research tracking land use from 1988 to 2019 across this area using satellite images reveals that the loss of forest cover was relatively slow until after the FARC鈥檚 demobilisation.
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Although the end of the civil war is undoubtedly a positive event, it is 鈥渟ad to see deforestation increasing [as a result]鈥�, says , a researcher with NASA. Murillo Sandoval, then at Oregon State University in Corvallis, and his colleagues analysed satellite images of four departments in the country, determining the land cover of 30-metre-squared plots. They compared these with conflict data from , which included information on deaths, locations, dates and who was involved in conflicts.
The team also used information on droughts and other climate events that could cause land changes in order to be able to better separate out the effects of conflict on the landscape.
The researchers found that forest loss increased massively since the 2016 peace treaty 鈥� particularly in areas where the population was lowest in the Amazon. They also have new, unpublished, research showing the pace of deforestation is also increasing 鈥� 2020 saw more land clearing than 2019.
While the FARC committed a number of humanitarian atrocities during the civil war, Murillo Sandoval says it had strict regulations about deforestation in some areas. Its presence also served as an obstacle to many companies that may have otherwise been interested in clearing forest for agriculture or other projects.
After the peace treaty, nobody was stopping the wealthy from grabbing up land and clearing forest, says Murillo Sandoval. 鈥淢any of the FARC people left these areas and new actors decided to establish new rules.鈥�
Global Environment Change
