#refuges

Excerpt from this story from Anthropocene Magazine:

In Panama, the best protection for keeping rainforests from disappearing hasn’t been putting them inside protected refuges. It’s been putting them in the hands of the region’s Indigenous tribes.

In the two decades starting in 2000, just 3% of the roughly 19,000 square kilometers of Indigenous forestland was deforested. By comparison, protected areas lost more than 5% of their forests, while 27% of forests outside these designated regions were cleared, according to a new study in the journal Ecology and Society.

The findings add to the growing evidence that giving Indigenous people more control of lands is often an effective way to stem the tide of forest loss sweeping much of the world. And scientists’ interviews with inhabitants of Indigenous villages in Panama help illuminate key reasons why their lands keep more of their trees. It’s not that the forests are left untouched—in fact, it’s the opposite.

“Forests remain intact not just because they’re remote, but because of how people value them,” said E. Camilo Alejo, who completed the research as a Ph.D. biology student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. “These aren’t just undisturbed forests; they’re consistently cared for.”

To document how the country’s forests were altered over two decades, the scientists used common methods: They looked at satellite images and tracked how they changed. Pixels from those images were classified as showing signs of long-lasting deforestation, continued forest coverage, or a sort of in-between state, in which there was evidence of temporary loss of forests that then regrew.

This bird’s-eye view allowed the scientists to see how the fate of forests differed depending on who protected they were and by whom. It showed that deforestation rates were lowest in Indigenous lands, and that forest cover in those areas experienced the most long-term stability. But it came with a twist: Compared to protected areas the Indigenous-controlled lands were more than twice as likely to experience temporary disturbance, where forest was at least partially cleared and then regrew: 7% versus 2%. Lands with no protections had the highest disturbance levels—nearly 10%—as well as the most rapid deforestation.

The picture that emerged was a human presence in a multitude of places spread across the landscape. High-impact farming of crops such as corn, rice and yams, associated with deforestation, was concentrated at the edge of forests. By contrast, the villagers pointed out a sprawling network of activities inside the forests that might create temporary disturbances, such as: harvesting wood to build homes or canoes. Other places were used for hunting and honey-gathering, or more religious and cultural activities such as a sacred mountain or a place where the kipara fruit, used for body painting, was collected.