A foggy view of the vast Mayabe Valley nature reserve in the eastern Cuban province of Holguín. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
HAVANA, Dec 5 2013 (IPS)

Nature reserves act as a safe deposit box for biodiversity and contribute to adaptation to climate change. But in a country like Cuba, plagued by a chronic economic crisis, efforts to increase the number of protected areas go largely unnoticed.

“They are a reservoir of genetic biodiversity of many species,” biologist Ángel Quirós told IPS. “Many of the species of economic importance for the future will come out of these areas, adapted to the new environmental conditions.”

But “the varied and complex role played by protected areas in curbing global warming is not very well-known,” said Quirós, a researcher with the Centre for Environmental Studies and Services, a government institution.

According to Quirós, each protected area helps curb climate changes that are already being seen, such as higher temperatures, a rise in sea level, and unprecedented meteorological events like Hurricane Sandy, which wrought havoc in the east of Cuba, other Caribbean nations and the U.S. northeast in October 2012.

Nature reserves “containing large forests contribute to stabilising average rainfall and temperatures,” the scientist said. “Climate factors are going to be extreme,” he added.

Cuba’s investment in protecting the environment rose from 278 million dollars in 2007 to 488 million dollars in 2012. But lack of funding is a constant headache for the teams in charge of the protected areas.

The clean-up efforts and monitoring and surveillance to prevent poaching in the Sur Batabanó Wildlife Refuge are new for Dielegne Quiñones, the representative of the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment in the municipality of Batabanó in southwest Cuba.

The 33-sq-km land and marine reserve is the first protected area in Batabanó. “There have already been sightings of manatees [Trichechus manatus] and hutias [Capromyidae],” Quiñones told IPS with satisfaction. “But we need more funding to strengthen surveillance and supervision.”

Daymí Castro, a teenage girl who lives in Surgidero in the coastal wetlands of Batabanó, said that having a nature reserve “is important for the community.”

“Through school we do clean-up work and we have participated in educational talks in the nearby neighbourhoods, to get people to take care of nature,” she told IPS.

Carlos Alberto Martínez, a young biologist who oversees the Los Mogotes de Jumagua park in the western province of Villa Clara, said the protected areas must urgently be adapted to climate change.

“There is a lot to do, such as strengthening the forests, especially the mangroves, which protect the coasts,” he told IPS.

Martínez explained that the park, where eight upper cretaceous formations are preserved, generates some funds of its own from visits by members of neighbouring communities to the ecotourism hiking trails and from sales of yagua, a fibrous tissue from the wood of the royal palm that is used to pack tobacco leaves.

In other protected areas, selective logging is carried out and the wood is sold, as one way to raise funds, he added.

Cuba created 23 new nature reserves in 2012, which means 18.3 percent of the country’s 109,884-sq-km territory is now protected. The National Centre for Protected Areas (CNAP) hopes to increase that proportion to 24.4 percent with a total of 253 areas, including the insular shelf up to 200 metres deep, under some kind of protection.

This Caribbean archipelago is made up of the main island, Cuba, the much smaller Juventud island and dozens of islets and keys.

The proportion of protected territory in this island nation with a large number of endemic species has grown fast in the last few years. The number of nature reserves rose from 35 in 2007 to 80 in 2011 and 103 in 2012, according to the national statistics office.

In addition, the CNAP has identified another 150 land and marine nature areas of great local significance, which are awaiting approval by the Council of Ministers Executive Committee to be included in one of the various categories of protection.

A recent study found 2,178 “irreplaceable” protected ecosystems around the world, and 192 proposed new sites, essential to the survival of threatened species.

The study carried out by scientists from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other international conservation organizations, published in the U.S. journal Science in November, identified 78 sites in 34 countries as “exceptionally irreplaceable,” out of 173,000 terrestrial protected areas looked at by the researchers.

These 78 sites – 38 of which are in Latin America and the Caribbean – are home to more than 600 birds, amphibians and mammals, half of which are globally threatened, and many of which cannot be found anywhere else, the study said.

The national parks of Sierra Nevada (Colombia), Manu (Peru), Canaima (Venezuela), Galápagos Islands (Ecuador) and Ciénaga de Zapata swamp (Cuba) are some of the irreplaceable habitats listed by the study, which drew on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and World Database on Protected Areas.

The report urged governments and environmental bodies to ensure that all of the sites be granted international protection under the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) World Heritage Convention

In the last two decades, the environment has received little attention in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the 2012 edition of the Social Panorama of Latin America.

On average, countries in the region dedicated only 0.2 percent of public expenditure to environmental activities, sanitation, housing and drinking water, according to the report, published by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

In Cuba, the administration of the Los Caimanes National Park, a mainly marine park located on the coast between the provinces of Villa Clara and Ciego de Ávila, has turned to community work to help raise badly needed funds.

“We have provided them with sustainable economic alternatives, and we emphasise environmental education,” Quirós said. “By reducing people’s needs, poaching and other furtive activities have gone down, and we have to spend less on surveillance.”

But raising environmental awareness among the local populations of protected areas is a long-term task, María Elena Chirino, 69, commented to IPS. She has lived her whole life in Ciénaga de Zapata, a biosphere reserve and the largest wetlands in the Caribbean islands, located in southwest Cuba.

“When I was little, we would kill birds, for example. But we weren’t really taught not to do so. Now people have a better idea of the importance of what surrounds us, but there’s still a long way to go,” Chirino said.

Dead mangroves in Jutía Key, in Cuba’s Pinar del Río province. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
SURGIDERO DE BATABANÓ, Cuba, Oct 22 2013 (IPS)

In the 1960s, the Cuban government declared that storage of fresh water for times of drought or hurricanes was a matter of national security, and it began to dam up the country’s rivers. But that policy has claimed an unforeseen victim: mangroves.

The sea swallowed up the old road connecting Batabanó and Mayabeque beaches, in southwest Cuba. In the last 50 years, more than 100 metres of coastline have been lost in that area to the south of Havana. The weakened mangroves, which now receive hardly any fresh water, were unable to prevent it from happening.

“The mangroves deteriorated so much that in 2008, Hurricane Ike pushed the sea a metre and a half inland, and it never went back out. Since then, it has continued to advance inland,” Flora Yau, who lives in Surgidero de Batabanó, told IPS.

People in this town in the municipality of Batabanó in the province of Mayabeque, some 70 km south of Havana, are tired of the flooding that now happens every time strong winds blow from the south.

The worst thing is the loss of land to erosion. In some places, nearly two metres a year of coastline have been lost, and some areas are completely submerged now, like Bujamey Point.

The mangroves have been weakened, first and foremost, by the fact that they are not getting as much fresh water as they used to, because of the dams built inland, biologist Leda Menéndez said. “The dams cut the natural circulation of the water.”

Mangroves, which make up 20 percent of the forests in this Caribbean island nation and cover 4.8 percent of the territory, need a constant flow of a mixture of fresh and saltwater, the researcher explained.

Most rivers in Cuba have been dammed. There are a total of 969 reservoirs, according to the National Institute of Water Resources.

This vast amount of fresh water stored up is due to a policy dating back to the 1960s, when the government decided it was necessary to confront droughts and hurricanes.

“In some places, if we want the mangroves to thrive, we’ll have to give them a little water from the reservoirs,” said Menéndez.

She said that was an indispensable measure for strengthening coastal forests, which act as barriers that protect life inland from natural disasters and other meteorological phenomena that are getting worse due to climate change, according to the scientific community.

Besides the lack of fresh water, mangroves are under threat from the construction of channels and dikes, soil sealing, industrial pollution, and deforestation.

Four species of mangroves – red (Rhizophora mangle), black (Avicennia germinans), white (Laguncularia racemosa) and button (Conocarpus erectus) – have traditionally been used in Cuba to produce charcoal, railroad ties and tannin for curing leather.

Mangroves play an essential role in all tropical areas of the Americas. The 11 species in the region are also threatened by tourism and the shrimp industry.

Cuba‘s agriculture ministry prohibited the exploitation of mangroves in December 2012, as a measure aimed at adaptation to global warming.

“Climate change has triggered an interest in preserving the mangroves,” said Menéndez. “Human beings need them to protect places where people live and economic activities take place,” at times of rising sea levels and salinity, and when extreme weather events occur.

In a warming planet, the environmental services provided by the mangroves are becoming more and more crucial: they curb erosion of shorelines, provide breeding grounds for fish and other marine life, prevent saltwater intrusion into farmland and water sources, prevent flooding and preserve biodiversity.

“If we cut the mangroves down, the sea advances with greater intensity,” geography teacher Miguel Díaz explains to his students in Batabanó.

Teachers in the area, where communities like Surgidero de Batabanó are suffering the consequences, now educate their students about the problems facing the mangroves.

Besides the loss of land, the soil on farmland near the coast is becoming more and more saline, and flooding is becoming routine.

“When we go out to clean up garbage, we see that they steal sand for construction and cut down the trees, and other things are damaged too,” said Roxana Vitres, one of the 32 students from the Bac-Ly de Surgidero school involved in a programme in which students are taught about environmental issues.

“We carry out inspections and alert the authorities,” said 15-year-old Daniel Cruz.

The children and teenagers learn about ecology while cleaning up and monitoring parts of the coast, as part of the SOS Mangroves programme led by the Batabanó History Museum, the local partner of the non-governmental organisation Pronaturaleza and education authorities.

Efraín Arrazcaeta, the coordinator of SOS Mangroves and a Pronaturaleza activist, told IPS that “we need a strong corps of forest rangers to reduce incidents [of destruction] and keep the Southern Dike overflow channels clean.”

The dike, which began to be built in the 1980s, caused the death of the biggest and most productive forests along the coastline starting 130 km south of Havana – an area that includes Surgidero – according to a study by the state Institute of Ecology and Systematics.

A large part of the mangroves in that area have been protected since last year because they form part of the South Batabanó Wildlife Refuge Area.

But violations continue to be reported, because Cuba’s environmental oversight systems are weak and fines are small.