Towards environmental reconciliation in Páramo land in Boyacá: resolving ecosystem trade-offs in post-conflict spaces

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Land was at the heart of Colombia's long-running armed conflict and is now the pillar on which the success of the peace agreement rests. The war changed the country's social landscapes as much as its natural ones and efforts to address the ecological balance are doomed to fail unless they confront that legacy of conflict. Decades of conflict displaced millions of people from their land and traditional livelihoods, disrupting the social fabric as much as the ecological. The páramo regions in Boyacá illustrate these socio-ecological conflicts. For the last 50 years Boyacá has experienced substantial conflict over resources, manifested through land-grabs, dispossession and displacement of local communities. The situation has deteriorated in the last decade associated with the mining boom that has pushed traditional campesinos into páramo land, further complicated by the fracking concessions currently being awarded in the region. In the wake of the peace agreement Boyacá faces substantial environmental problems, particularly with regards to the páramos, which the local authorities will have to delimit for ecosystem preservation and biodiversity conservation. In doing so, they risk potential new conflicts between contested land usages. Their decision-making needs to balance conservation priorities with concerns for the social and economic future of the displaced traditional campesinos, potato and onion growers, commercial and artesanal miners and small farmers. At the same time, the loss of these livelihoods imposes risks to local and regional food security and rural development programmes. This project integrates a group of multi-disciplinary scholars from environmental and veterinary sciences, cultural and historical geography, anthropology, economics and design, working with an understanding of the social and ecological nature of these challenges. At the heart of the project is our conviction that peace and reconciliation between the different users of páramo land in order to facilitate and legitimise decision-making is not an add-on to conservation efforts but a sine qua non condition to the effective conservation of páramo land.