The El Bosque children’s theatre group singing a song about protecting the wetlands, for which Cuba is seeking World Heritage Site status. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
CIÉNAGA DE ZAPATA, Cuba , Nov 28 2013 (IPS)

The 18 communities in Cuba’s Ciénaga de Zapata, the largest wetlands in the Caribbean, have long survived on the abundant local hunting and fishing and by producing charcoal. But that is no longer possible, due to climate change.

Years ago it was inconceivable that the people living in the Zapata Swamp, a UNESCO-recognised biosphere reserve in western Cuba, would one day stop using the forest here to make charcoal, extract precious wood, or hunt crocodile and deer.

“We used to pillage the flora and fauna,” said one local resident, Mario Roque, who lives on the small secluded bay of Batey Caletón, 200 km southeast of Havana. “I even poached as a fisherman. But I learned how to make a better living while causing less damage to nature,” he told IPS.

Enterprising residents of the wetlands like Roque have been spontaneously exploring green-friendly ecotourism initiatives, small animal production and small gardens, none of which were common in this area, where people have always been hunters, gatherers and fishers.

Roque, or “Mayito”, as he is known to everyone, started renting out four rooms in his house to tourists after Cuba’s communist government expanded the scope of private initiative in 2010.

Like him, many local residents in Playa Girón, Playa Larga, Caletón and other coastal communities in the wetlands have hung up “Rooms for rent” signs on the front of their homes.

Just 9,300 people live in the 4,322-sq-km Ciénaga de Zapata, the most sparsely populated municipality in this country of 11.2 million people.

The area’s wealth lies in its vast forests, swamps that cover 1,670 sq km, and more than 165 migratory and autochthonous species, like the Cuban crocodile (Crocodylus rhombifer).

In 2000, UNESCO – the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation – declared the wetlands, which occupy the entire Zapata peninsula and surrounding areas, a biosphere reserve. A year later, the Ramsar Convention included it on its list of wetlands of international importance.

“The tourists who come here are nature lovers, and they feel happy when they see we love nature too,” said Roque, who serves his guests lionfish (Pterois antennata), an exotic invasive species that is damaging the peninsula’s marine ecosystem.

“Every day I have to dive deeper to find a lionfish,” he said proudly.

He feeds his guests eggs and rabbit meat from his own small livestock, as well as herbs, spices and vegetables that he grows in his ecological garden. On the rooftop terrace he has a solar water heater made out of recycled plastic bottles and cans. “I’ve been saving 500 pesos [20 dollars] a month since I installed it,” he said.

Almost without realising it, Roque has adopted adaptation measures to global warming, a phenomenon that could raise the water level in the sea here 85 cm by 2050, which would affect between 60 and 80 percent of the swamp, said geographer Ángel Alfonso.

The wetlands cover 9.3 percent of Cuba’s land surface, and are extremely vulnerable and at the same time crucial for mitigating the predicted rise in temperature, intrusion by the sea and increase in extreme weather events, he explained to IPS.

“They protect life inland,” he stressed, because they filter and purify contaminated water while serving as coastal barriers against high tides, hurricanes and the salinisation of fresh water. A full 25 percent of the net productivity of Cuba’s ecosystems and more than 40 percent of its environmental services depend on the wetlands.

The Ciénaga de Zapata, in the province of Matanzas, has weak points when it comes to weathering future threats, even though it is the best-preserved wetlands system in the Caribbean islands, Alfonso said.

Its surface and underwater water have been salinised, the swamp system has been fragmented, and there are imbalances in its ecological functioning, he said.

Nor have the felling of trees and poaching of protected or endangered species like the Cuban crocodile been completely eliminated, just as there are still illegal charcoal kilns that use wood from off-limits species such as mangroves.

“When you take a boat along the coast, you see crocodile hunters and charcoal ovens in the forest,” a biologist who spoke on condition of anonymity told IPS.

Leyaní Caballero with the science, technology and environment ministry’s delegation in the swamp said “there are laws and regulations that protect these resources, but they are not always enforced. Some people violate them out of ignorance or because it is the only way they know how to meet their needs.

“A management mechanism should be created so that people living in the reserve benefit from the forest, without being driven by the profit motive,” she said. “Nor is there an integral sustainable development plan, in line with the country’s general strategies.”

That and other problems were raised in the workshops organised by the project “Transformation for local development in small community groups in the Ciénaga de Zapata”, dedicated to training local leaders – 20 last year and 27 this year – most of whom were already running nature-friendly enterprises.

“We try to guide people a little towards a better kind of development,” one of the local leaders, Antonio Gutiérrez, told IPS. He combines his carpentry work with raising birds like cockatoos.

Gutiérrez is taking part in the project to get more people involved in his economic activity, “which creates awareness about taking care of birds.”

Once a month the project holds meetings with local craftspersons, people who raise livestock for family consumption, ecotourism promoters, and farmers who use agroecological techniques or grow ornamental plants, who have all come together with the hope of improving their own lives and those of their communities.

Together they assess the problems and learn about issues like leadership and marketing, to seek solutions.

“We don’t have to wait for all the food to be brought in from other parts of the country,” said Aliuska Labrada, a homemaker who rounds out her family’s diet with cassava, squash, guava, mango and other food grown in the rocky, saline soil of her garden, in Cayo Ramona (Ramona Key).

One of the most significant results of the project so far has been helping to create the first agricultural cooperative in the municipality, Caballero stressed. It joined the ranks of the 5,688 cooperatives operating in Cuba today.

The initiative was supported by the government’s local environmental delegation, with support from the Fundación Nicolás Guillén and the Swiss NGO Zunzún.

To strengthen the protection of the wetlands, the Cuban government made a submission to UNESCO in 2003 for the Ciénaga de Zapata to be declared a World Heritage Site.

Mauricio Cruz points to an area where he says tourism infrastructure will be built, in Cuche del Monte on the edge of the mangrove forest on Jiquilisco Bay. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
JIQUILISCO, El Salvador , Apr 29 2013 (IPS)

Community leaders in El Salvador are opposed to the government’s plans to use U.S. aid funds to develop the country’s Pacific coastline, on the grounds that it would threaten the environment in a vast area.

“The natural areas we have protected for so long will be seriously affected if tourism investments are made in these coastal zones,” as the government intends, within the framework of the United States Millennium Challenge Fund (FOMILENIO) programme, activist Amílcar Cruz García, secretary of the Asociación Mangle (Mangrove Association), a community organisation in the Lower Lempa area in the southeastern department or province of Usulután, told IPS.

The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), the U.S. government foreign aid agency funding FOMILENIO, offered El Salvador a second package of 277 million dollars of non-refundable aid in December 2011, to develop the coastal region. Final approval could occur late this year.

The first FOMILENIO programme in El Salvador was rolled out in 2007-2012, injecting 460 million dollars in investment in the northern region of the country.

The MCC was created in 2004 by the U.S. Congress to help poor countries overcome poverty. Since then it has devoted 8.4 billion dollars in aid worldwide, according to its web page.

“We are in favour of the good things that FOMILENIO could bring, such as schools, roads and health clinics, but we are worried about private tourism investment,” said Cruz García.

The Asociación Mangle and other NGOs have been working in the area known as the Lower Lempa ever since these lands in the south of Usulután were distributed to former army soldiers and former guerrillas demobilised after a peace agreement put an end to the country’s bloody 12-year civil war in 1992.

The parcelled out farm land borders on the nature reserve of Jiquilisco Bay, where these organisations have carried out major environmental and social projects.

Jiquilisco Bay and the Jaltepeque estuary together form the most important ecological corridor in the country, with an area of over 112,000 hectares.

Because of the fragility of the ecosystem and its status as a nesting area for endangered species, the bay was declared a protected site by the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance Especially as Waterfowl Habitat (Ramsar Convention) in October 2005, and the estuary was similarly protected in February 2011.

Some 300 female hawksbill turtles (Eretmochelys imbricata) continue to nest on the beaches of the Pacific coast between Mexico and Peru, and half of them lay their eggs on the 37 kilometres of beach in Jiquilisco Bay, according to studies by the Eastern Pacific Hawksbill Initiative and the Southwest Fisheries Science Centre, abranch of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Jiquilisco Bay was declared a biosphere reserve by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in 2007.

However, the declaration of protected status still allows for fishing and the harvesting of marine products in the area, as well as the construction of infrastructure, in line with local zoning regulations, said Álvaro Moisés, the head of Salvanatura, a conservation organisation.

This could be the legal loophole that tourism investments could take advantage of.

Under FOMILENIO II, the leftwing government of President Mauricio Funes aims at increasing education and training for young people in the area so that they can take up jobs created by private investors, while basic infrastructure like roads, piped water and electricity is put in.

But “frankly, we see this as a threat,” said Mauricio Cruz, the president of the Sara y Ana aquaculture cooperative, in the small town of Salinas El Potrero in the municipality of Jiquilisco.

The community leader told IPS that the members of seven local cooperatives fear that tourism projects will pollute the estuary, whose waters fill their shrimp farming tanks.

“We are very well organised and we won’t let a huge hotel be built next to our tanks,” he said.

So far, the government has received 62 proposals from investors, pending MCC approval, for a total of 450 million dollars.

Interest has been expressed, for example, by the Association of Coastal Marine Tourism Developers (PROMAR). Their proposals total 208 million dollars, including luxury hotels and even a regional airport in the nearby province of La Unión.

The head of PROMAR, Marco Guirola, told IPS that it is understandable that there is mistrust among the people living in the coastal communities, because they have historically been marginalised.

But the former approach of doing business in ways that violate the environment and the rights of local residents “is no longer sustainable, or even possible, even if one wanted to, because the level of organisation in the area is enough to exert the necessary pressure,” Guirola said. He added that it is possible to reconcile large tourism investments even with areas as fragile as a nature reserve.

“We should give up opposing (investments) just for fun,” he said.

For his part, Tourism Minister José Napoleón Duarte told IPS that he would not back any tourist project that did not meet minimum environmental requirements.

But a third party should audit the investments, experts say. Salvanatura’s Moisés regretted that neither the government nor the MCC have explicitly established that investment projects should be certified by external institutions.

These external assessments, Moisés said, are much more thorough than the environmental impact studies required by Salvadoran law, and would enable projects to be evaluated comprehensively in environmental and social terms, according to international standards.

“The FOMILENIO project should be an opportunity for El Salvador, which is one of the countries in the region most vulnerable to extreme meteorological events, to adapt to the impacts already being caused by climate change,” the activist said.

The Lower Lempa is particularly susceptible to these effects, suffering from floods during the rainy season that cost many lives and cause heavy damages to crops and infrastructure.

“What guarantees that investments will respect the environment and the social fabric of the area is not the government nor the business sector, but people organising themselves,” Emilio Espín, a manager at the Association for Cooperation and Community Development (CORDES), an NGO with 25 years’ standing in the area, told IPS.