Trails and Wayfinding in Montes de María
Bolivar, Colombia
Category Community-driven
Date 2022
Collaborator Fundación Herencia Ambiental Caribe | Be+maarch
Sponsor The Communities of Montes de María and The National Government
Context
The dry tropical forest (DTF) is one of the most threatened and least known ecosystems worldwide. The DTF with the most well-preserved forest structure in Colombia, a megadiverse country, is found in Montes de Maria, a region well known as the scenario of some of the most violent events of the internal armed conflict that envelops the country causing widespread violence and displacement.
Guardians Agreements
Montes de Maria provides the perfect natural laboratory to show that peace and environmental sustainability are a possibility. Instead of displacing local families once more, this time for the sake of conservation, local communities, NGO ́s and environmental authorities have joined a decade long effort to establish socio-ecological corridors through voluntary agreements to conserve the DTF and its most critically endangered fauna, within private lands. Such agreements are holistic in nature, taking into consideration issues regarding food diversity and security, governance, and climate change adaptation.
The agreements can become an effective model that can deal with the complex realities of much of the developing world through continuous presence in the territory. Five organizations and 200 families covering an area of 5000 hectares have joined in efforts to create a collaborative and sustainable development model for a once calamitous territory.
With the onset of the peace process in Colombia, Montes de Maria became a priority for implementing an agrarian reform to help displaced peasant families return to their land. Within this scenario, various organizations partnered to implement a socio-ecological connectivity project in Montes de María, aimed at increasing the ecological connectivity of forests, as well as to guarantee the social well-being of the communities returning to the rural areas, using a working model based on farm planning, community participation, environmental preservation, and sustainable production (the 4Ps: planning, participation, preservation, and production).
Trail System
In order to consolidate the socio-ecological corridors a trail system was designed and built with the community. The trail system helps not only benefits the community directly but also brings economic opportunities from tourism that is already coming to the area.
Signage Design
Workshops
Construction Stage
Lessons for generating social-ecological processes have been extracted from this experience, regarding the increase of local capacities to participate in development processes, strengthening environmental governance, improving the quality of life of local communities, and increasing the quality of the natural habitat available for native species of flora and fauna. These lessons are considered key to the historic moment in the country's peacebuilding process and conservation efforts and constitute a model that is currently being replicated in other areas of the country or in other countries with similar situations; ecological degradation, biodiversity and social conflicts tend to go hand in hand.
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