A community-led conservation programme in Guatemala has halted and started to reverse two decades of deforestation in an area that was severely threatened by the land grabs of cattle ranchers and drug traffickers.
Life is now returning to swathes of the that were illegally cleared 13 years ago. Regeneration of the forest means it was 25 square kilometres larger in 2020 than in 2019 and grew another 3.5 square kilometres in 2021. What were uniform pastures punctuated with bare trees in 2009 have gradually become blankets of forest teeming with tropical birds and monkeys once more.
Trusting local communities and emboldening them with scientific research was key to the forest鈥檚 survival, says , director of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Guatemala programme, which supported the project.
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Researchers helped communities find ways to live off the forest without cutting down trees 鈥� a model that could be emulated across the world.
鈥淭he concessions in Guatemala are globally recognised as a successful community model that promotes the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. As long as the forest can provide the people with the livelihoods they need, they will be the guardians of this forest,鈥� says Ponce Santizo.
The reserve stretches across 21,000 square kilometres, making up a fifth of Guatemala鈥檚 total land area and a large part of the Maya Forest 鈥� the second-largest tropical rainforest in the Americas after the Amazon 鈥� shared with Belize and Mexico.
Ancient Maya ruins are scattered throughout the reserve as well as myriad communities and endangered species like jaguars and scarlet macaws.
In 2009, the reserve was thought to be all but lost, says Ponce Santizo. Ranchers were torching as much as 8 square kilometres of forest a day to clear land to raise cattle for profit and use their businesses to launder money for drug traffickers.
Bold actions taken then seem to have put the reserve on the road to restoration. The government evicted ranchers and prosecuted those with links to the drug trade before joining forces with the army, local communities and rangers to protect it. Checkpoints were established throughout the reserve and the WCS trained local groups in forest monitoring.
Community leaders were threatened by those being evicted and one was killed in the struggle to protect the region from criminal groups, says Ponce Santizo.
鈥淭here were a lot of brave people, both in the authorities and the local communities, that really believed that this was the only way to save the Maya Reserve. It was like a cancer in your heart, if you didn鈥檛 stop it, it was going to be very difficult for the rest of the communities to survive,鈥� says Ponce Santizo.
The key to the turnaround was putting the community and their needs at the centre of the strategy, says Ponce Santizo. As long as they could survive, so would the forest.
Local communities were granted control of the forest by the government, provided they conserve it, while researchers at Guatemala鈥檚 helped them divide it into areas for different crops.
The communities now live sustainably off products like allspice, gum and pepper. The areas used to extract them rotate after a period determined by the sustainability of the resource and the time it takes to regenerate.
Traditional practices are also carried out more sustainably. Local fauna like the Xate palm, which was in steep decline, are now more numerous because they are only harvested for their flowers if they meet export size and quality requirements. The rest are left to regrow.
Some trees are cut down for timber, but 10 per cent of those in harvested areas are left as seed trees to encourage regrowth. The parts of the forest used alternate every five years, so that by the end of a 25-year cycle, the first part of the forest used has fully regenerated.
The communities are also restoring the soil and planting trees where the earth had been exhausted by cattle, while patrolling areas that can regenerate alone.
The gains in the past two years are a fraction of the 270 square kilometres lost in the reserve since 2000, says the WCS, but the forest has switched from annual net loss to annual net gain, and communities continue to restore it.
Nearly 5000 square kilometres are managed under the scheme and another 700 were granted 30-year forest concessions in October 2021.
鈥淭his is a very inspiring project for all of the planet鈥檚 tropical rainforests,鈥� says at the University of S茫o Paulo in Brazil. 鈥淭he regrowth is very impressive and has to drive the funding of this at a large scale in all the tropical forests of Central and South America.鈥�
鈥淭he lessons of the Maya Biosphere Reserve can be transferred elsewhere in all tropical forests,鈥� he says. 鈥淭here are similar ongoing projects in the Amazon, although at a small scale, to combat growing land grabbing, illegal logging and mining.鈥�
鈥淎 big challenge that must be faced by all countries holding tropical forests is to combat widespread illegalities and organised crime, provide the means with international cooperation to preserve and restore most of the tropical forests on Earth, and improve the livelihoods of all forest peoples,鈥� says Nobre.
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