A million hectares under restoration: the ambitious goal for Chile to recover its landscapes and ecosystems by 2030
Environment Minister Maisa Rojas, Agriculture Minister Esteban Valenzuela and Housing and Urban Development Minister Carlos Montes announced today the launch of the National Landscape Restoration Plan at a ceremony in Santiago’s Metropolitan Park.
Fires, droughts, changes in land use, invasive alien species and a string of phenomena all exacerbated by climate change have put Chile’s ecosystems and biodiversity in jeopardy. Until recently, the country did not have a policy to bring together different organizations in the recovery of degraded landscapes. To do something about this, the government announced today the launch of the National Landscape Restoration Plan, whose goal is to start recovering one million hectares (2,471,054 acres) of landscapes and ecosystems by 2030.
Environment Minister Maisa Rojas, Agriculture Minister Esteban Valenzuela and Housing and Urban Development Minister Carlos Montes announced the launch of the plan at an activity in Santiago’s Metropolitan Park. It will have international financing from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), through a project to restore agricultural and forest landscapes and their natural environment called “Restoration of Forest and Agricultural Landscapes.” The goal of this project is to mitigate and reverse the phenomenon of biodiversity loss, one of the most complex problems facing Chile.
Environment Minister Maisa Rojas explained that “as a government, we are dedicated to the task of protecting and recovering our biodiversity. We are today facing a triple environmental crisis: climate change; biodiversity loss; and pollution. With the implementation of this plan, we are making progress towards the commitments we made in the last Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), in which we promised to incorporate one million hectares of vulnerable landscape into a restoration process by 2030.”
The Environment and Agriculture ministries agreed to formulate this plan in 2018, as a result of the consequences of the fires that affected Chile between 2016 and 2017. After a long process, which included regional and national workshops in which the public participated alongside public and private stakeholders, supported with guidance from the National Restoration Advisory Council, as well as a public consultation, a document was issued to establish the new landscape restoration policy.
Agriculture Minister Esteban Valenzuela explained, “this marvellous project came about following the megafires of 2017, in which a total of 700,000 hectares (1,729,738 acres) of forest were lost; not only plantations, but also native forest.” He added that they are working alongside the Housing and Urban Development Ministry: “during March, there will be dialogue about even stricter land use planning proposals, at the same time incorporating international standards, to care for the rural and urban landscape. President Boric has asked us that agriculture become ‘green agriculture,’ which implies providing food using less resources, as well as food sovereignty.”
The National Landscape Restoration Plan is an instrument designed to mitigate and confront the bioclimatic crisis through a new form of governance, generating positive impacts on the country’s biodiversity and ecosystem services, population and sustainable economic activities.
Housing and Urban Development Minister Carlos Montes positively assessed the plan. “We hope that the city will be a fair city, but also one where we can meet up more, live together better, experience nature more and live together better as human beings. Within this, we are committing to an amazing project in which restoring all the damage that human beings have done to nature can be another way to equip neighborhoods, the city and the country. In the case of the Housing and Urban Development Ministry, many lessons have arisen here that we have to incorporate into housing plans, standards for building complexes, and we can draw experiences from this,” he commented.
The implementation of the GEF project will be one of the main strategies to reach the ambitious goal of one million hectares under restoration by 2030. It will be promoted by the Environment Ministry, the National Forestry Corporation (CONAF) and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Christian Little, director of CONAF, explained that “we are working towards the environmental integrity of the whole of Chile, promoting actions that protect, conserve and restore. This public policy will therefore permanently improve people’s lives and recover the functionality of the vast expanse of the landscape.”
The project will be implemented in the Mediterranean Ecoregion, which stretches between the regions of Coquimbo and Biobío. This type of ecosystem is one of the most important and fragile in the world, given its valuable biodiversity, and is threatened by climate change and anthropogenic pressure.
The plan involves a US$5.7 million investment (one of the highest amounts for a GEF project), and will be rolled out across seven landscapes in the regions of Coquimbo, Valparaíso, O’Higgins, Maule, Ñuble and Biobío. It will cover a total area of close to 650,000 hectares (1,606,185 acres), benefiting 10,000 people.