At this week’s meeting with the community in the village of Cerro Azul in the Guaviare department, both the gateway to the Colombian Amazon and the epicenter of the voracious deforestation that befell it, the Minister of the Environment, Susana Muhamad, arrived together. High Commissioner for Peace, Danilo Rueda. In the helicopter that landed there on Monday, very close to the cave paintings that turned Cerro Azul into a thriving tourist attraction, they were accompanied by Norway’s Minister of Climate and Environment, Espen Barth Eide, on a visit to Colombia. The emphasis of the message is clear: peace and the environment must go hand in hand in one of the most biodiverse countries in the world.

Early each year, in the dry season, llamas that have long stalked both the sanctuaries and game reserves devour huge chunks of the Amazon rainforest. Those responsible include mafia, land grabbers, landowners and armed groups. The burning is most intense in the deforestation arc that extends through Caquetá, Meta, and Guaviare, in the south of the country. The efforts of the Government of Gustavo Petro to stop logging in the Amazon, which is called the lungs of the world, are closely linked to the quest for total peace with various armed groups and rural reform. In particular, for negotiations with one of the FARC’s extinct guerrilla dissident currents, the self-styled Central General Staff, which was the dominant group in the department. The president himself this month announced a dialogue table with the EMC, his administration’s second peace process following the one already underway with the ELN.

“Peace is only possible today, in this region, with an unprecedented, new vision of the world, anchored with ecosystems, with water, with forests,” Commissioner Rueda told dozens of participants at the Cerro Azul meeting. , which he invited to build a region of environmental and social justice, where the rights of farmers, of African descent, and of indigenous people coexist with nature. He also acknowledged their efforts to stop the expansion of agricultural borders and stop deforestation. These are matters to be discussed at the upcoming negotiating table with the Central General Staff. “We started aligning peace issues, social issues and environmental issues, with international cooperation,” said the commissioner who faced a moment of upheaval following the suspension of the truce with Clan del Golfo.

“We can’t achieve peace in this region if we don’t make peace with nature,” Minister Muhamad scolded them, who visited Guaviare last month as part of a strategy to curb deforestation. In this dialogue with the newspaper, he expressed his hope that the opening of the table would actually lead to a “great pact to keep nature together”.

“Here are farming communities willing to work on another model of development, namely entering into a conservation agreement with the State of Colombia, there is great potential for ecological tourism, but if we don’t succeed in consolidating total peace, this will always show. restricted”, assessed the official. In contrast to the deal with FARC, he said, environmental issues would play a major role in the negotiating agenda both with the ELN and with dissidents from the Central General Staff.

In its first approach with dissidents, the Government asked as a gesture of goodwill to stop deforestation. Observers agreed that the decline was notable. The government of Iván Duque, Petro’s predecessor, initially set out to maintain annual forest loss at record levels for 2017, at around 220,000 hectares. However, with support from Germany, the UK and Norway – by far Colombia’s biggest environmental donors – they set more aggressive targets. Currently, in 2021, 174,103 hectares have been deforested, an increase compared to the 171,685 lost in 2020. This figure is partly due to cattle farming, land grabbing, illegal mining, and coca cultivation. While Duque militarizes environmental policies, Petro supports cooperation with communities that own forest concessions.

Despite structural delays with submitting consolidated figures for forest loss it only allows knowing a given year until the middle of the following year, an airplane flying over the Guaviare and Chiribiquete natural parks, vast seas of trees declared World Heritage Humanity sites, allows us to verify far less columns of smoke, the first signs of combustion, compared to the critical panorama a year ago.

Environmental issues in general, not just deforestation, occupy a prominent place on the total peace agenda, according to Rodrigo Botero, director of the Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development (FCDS). The famous environmentalist is now also one of the negotiators at the ELN table. “Yes environmental conflict continues, it is very difficult to get out of the scenario which eventually turns into social and political conflict”show. Although he warns that in other parts of Colombia there is an urgent need to solve problems such as alluvial mining, he points out that the environment is never the first step in rapprochement with armed groups.

Norway is a guarantor for negotiations with FARC and is now at the table with ELN. Conflict resolution and “green diplomacy” are explicit foreign policy goals. Oslo considers Colombia a key country because “the maintenance of an integrated ecological system in the Amazon is necessary for all of humanity; if it collapses, it is a problem for the entire continent and also for the global climate,” said Espen Barth Eide, Minister of Climate and Environment –who became chancellor during rapprochement with FARC–. Without going too far, the The forests of the Amazon ensure, among other things, climate regulation and water supply in the Andean zone –including distant Bogotá–, through “flying rivers”. There is a greater awareness of global climate and environmental challenges than there was a decade ago, recalls the Nordic politician, which is why it is now also enacted in a different peace process. Colombia is no exception.

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