Caparo Forest Conservation through Ecosystem Services: The Last Opportunity for Success?
In the last fifty years, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA), driven by rapid social and economic changes, world population dramatically affected long-term stability of natural ecosystems and its capacity to provide vital services such as food, water and climate regulation. Recently, in order to deal with this complexity, in many Latin-American countries, including Venezuela, national governments have been focusing on new public roles with a strong emphasis on their normative and controlling functions regarding environmental issues such as pollution, deforestation and biodiversity loss. When it comes to forest resources, in Venezuela about 45% of the land is still covered by natural forests, however, since 1990 the country has experienced one of the highest rates of deforestation in the tropics with an average of 288,000 ha year-1. This forest loss was concentrated in the western plains where low production agriculture, cattle grazing and urbanization, expanded over at least six million ha of tropical semi-evergreen forests. Today, after the creation of Caparo Forest Reserve in 1961 with a total area of 174,000 ha, less than 4% still remains as a continuous forest cover where research and education programs have been taking place for 40 years. Based on ILTER´s project “Interactions among ecosystem services, ecosystem dynamics, and human outcomes and behavior”, this LTER site was selected to analyze current state of key ecosystem services and how people interact for its use, management and conservation. Data and information for examining biophysical and socio-economic conditions were collected from primary and secondary sources to integrate a rapid evaluation of ecosystem services. In all cases, medium to very low levels of public awareness were detected with a consistent increase, especially in recent years, of forms and intensity of main threats such as illegal logging and forest fires. Local people tend to recognize provision services such as food and water above regulation and cultural services. Results also show that a fast tendency of degradation is taking place severely affecting one of the last remnants of western plains forests in Venezuela. Additionally, ongoing conservation efforts and dialogue process are weak and poorly structured with a very low impact. A proposal of long-term conservation is presented here based on an innovative approach where ecosystem services are used to develop three strategies: a) Ecotourism program; b) Strengthening of local governance and c) Education and research. An additional plan is to address a monitoring program pursuing a systematic evaluation of conditions and interactions of ecosystem services. With a proper balance between public and private sectors it is thought that a well-designed policy for incentives is needed to promote the implementation of an Ecosystem Management not only in Caparo Forest, but also in other rural areas of the western plains of the country.
