The biodiversity of Barichara’s tropical and premontane dry forest ecosystems is unique in Colombia for its ecological characteristics. It is equally clear that they are degrading fast. What follows is a summary of the strategies the ecologist Irina Mendoza sets out for conserving and regenerating them, and the reason none of them works on its own.
Why they have to go together
Protecting and regenerating these ecosystems means prioritising strategies across several fronts at once. This is not a menu to choose from: it is a set in which each piece holds up the others. Restoration without education has nobody to carry it on; social participation without institutional backing runs out of energy; law without knowledge of the territory is applied blind.
1. Education, and education you can walk into
We can only care for what we know. That makes educating ourselves the first priority.
Educating ourselves means understanding how the ecosystems of this territory work, which requires studying the fauna, the flora and the ecological factors that shape the relationships between them. That knowledge does two things: it shows us what we actually have, and it shows why any disturbance of the natural balance can have negative and often irreversible effects. Knowing the biodiversity and its dynamics is also what makes it possible, afterwards, to design conservation strategies that accelerate regeneration.
The education has to be hands-on: learning in direct contact with nature is the best way to do it. Barichara already has processes like this, such as those at the Móncora Bioparque. What is missing is amplifying them and taking them to every rural hamlet in the municipality, so that children, young people and adults deepen their knowledge of their own ecosystems.
2. Ecological restoration and conservation areas
Ecological restoration is a scientific discipline: working from knowledge of the structure and function of ecosystems, it develops practical strategies for restoring them. Its two main routes are reforestation and natural regeneration.
Reforestation requires knowing which native trees suit each area. Hence the importance of building nurseries where those native trees and plants are propagated.
Natural regeneration is in some ways the simplest strategy: it consists of letting nature itself restore the ecosystem. It happens when the seeds already in the soil are allowed to germinate, when animals disperse seed and pollinate, and when the ecological web rebuilds the forest on its own. For it to succeed, eradicating invasive exotic plants is essential.
Both routes need scientific guidance: every area has particular characteristics that must be taken into account before anything is done to it.
And one instrument is missing altogether. The remaining fragments of forest need a formal protective designation that guarantees their preservation, especially since Barichara has few areas of continuous forest left in good condition, and since, unlike other municipalities with dry forest, it has no established reserve zones at all.
3. Social participation and sustainable production
The participation of the people who live in the hamlets and in the town is the decisive social factor. Without it, no conservation strategy holds.
In rural areas that means education in sustainable productive practices: forms of livestock keeping that minimise their impact on ecosystems, and agricultural practices such as agroecology and syntropic farming, which support conservation and regeneration at the same time.
In the town there is already a green belt declared part of the community’s heritage. Respecting it, caring for it and extending it is an enormous mechanism for conserving biodiversity.
Barichara already has notable social participation, with leaders and people from many disciplines committed to environmental care. What is still needed is for that work to connect more and more with the municipal administration and the environmental authorities, for the mechanisms of communication and outreach to improve, and for the projects to be properly funded.
4. Institutional participation
An engaged citizenry, on its own, is not enough. For the work to be genuinely effective, the institutions with environmental competence have to involve themselves fully in conservation and regeneration.
That, too, is partly a citizen’s job: educating ourselves about which municipal, regional and national bodies can support these strategies, and actively seeking them out to secure their participation.
5. Enforcing public policy and environmental law
Colombia has some of the best environmental legislation in the world. For the tropical dry forest biome there is the National Programme for the Conservation and Restoration of Tropical Dry Forest in Colombia, with an action plan running from 2020 to 2030 across several lines of work: knowledge management, preservation and protection, ecological restoration, sustainable use, risk and climate-change management, and governance.
There is also a concrete opportunity with a date on it. Barichara is in the middle of updating its territorial planning framework, and that process is a chance to prioritise the protection and restoration of natural ecosystems, and to design social and productive strategies aligned with that aim.
What remains is to review the regional management plans that bear on these ecosystems: river-basin plans, for instance, where coordination between municipalities is fundamental. And to enforce the specific environmental laws, such as the protection of riparian buffers and springs, which are what secure the water sources.
From awareness to commitment
All of these strategies are a way of genuinely fulfilling our role as guardians of a natural world that sustains us and makes it possible to live in this territory. How we put them into action will determine the wellbeing of these ecosystems and, at the same time, our own.
Recognising that the forest, the water and all of Barichara’s biodiversity are part of us feeds our sense of belonging and our love for the land we inhabit. Now more than ever it is time to take on that awareness and turn it into commitment. The time to regenerate and protect our home is now.
