Community-based conservation of Andean rainforest and arid ecosystems in the Soto Province, Santander

The project area is the Soto Province, department of Santander, in the north-eastern Andean region of Colombia. It forms part of the Santurban biological rainforest corridor, distributed in the 800 - 3000 Mt. altitude range. 6% of the corridor is situated in páramo - cloud forest, 12% montane forest, 24% temperate climate landscape and 58% tropical climate terrain. Temperature change is typically defined by altitude and varies between 18oC and 25oC, with a bimodal seasonal precipitation regime (1,200 - 2,000 mm/annual). This biological rainforest corridor, although suffering from problems of fragmentation, is habitat to endangered mammals such as the howler monkey, sloth, tigrillo, pacarana, and mountain deer. The main economic activities in Soto Province are agriculture and cattle raising, both small and large scale, and mining. Liberalization and reduced government support to small scale farmers have lead to increasing poverty in the rural areas, as well as to urbanization. The major threats to the area are loss of biodiversity due to deforestation, irrational extraction and mono-cropping farming models, ecosystem fragmentation due to lack of planning and consultation of development projects, hunting and trafficking of endangered mammals and birdlife, commercial and illegal logging, contamination of water resources by agro-chemical run-off, soil erosion, desertification and loss of traditional knowledge about agro-biodiversity. Fundaexpresión identifies the lack of self-confidence and empowerment of local populations, the lack of effective environmental education and the lack of community participation in conservation and implementation of environmental laws as the major cause of these problems. Following this problem analysis, the overall goal of the project is to strengthen community structures and foster cultural and territorial identity to support community based conservation of ecosystems, whilst safeguarding agro-biodiversity, traditional knowledge and rural peoples’ livelihoods. The project will contribute to this goal by reaching three main objectives: 1) Establish a network of community based conservation areas 2) Empower marginalised rural communities and 3) Replicate existing community initiatives for sustainable use of agro-biodiversity. The first objective includes activities to set up small community protected areas. Although these areas are small, they support several endangered small mammals and birds and are an important source of water to the local communities. The second objective includes training of local communities and participation of these communities in institutional meetings and public forums. The last objective is mostly concerned with the development of food and non food products based on a sustainable use of agro-biodiversity, both for local consumption and for sale.