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.

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.