Posted on July, 15 2014

The South American Network of Technical Cooperation for Protected Areas RedParques, with the support of WWF, brought together government delegates from Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Brazil to the Ecuadorian capital to exchange experiences about methodologies for assessment of the state of the Amazon biome on the face of climate change.

Tarsicio Granizo, director of the protected areas strategy at the Living Amazon Initiative, explained that “with a surface area of 6.7 million km2 and over 10% of the world’s biodiversity, the Amazon, if managed effectively, can be a natural solution to climate change”. The Amazon, he added, can be “beneficial to its inhabitants and to the biodiversity and ecosystem services, as long as it is robust enough to withstand the changes in the climate without modifying its natural state, what is known as ‘resilience’”.

The workshop was a regional effort to strengthen protected areas systems so that these systems can contribute to building resilience of the Amazon in the framework of the project ‘Amazon Biome as a natural solution to climate change’ developed by RedParques and the WWF Living Amazon Initiative.

The project, funded by the German ministry of environment, will carry out a supranational assessment of the health of the Amazon ecosystems and physical processes and will influence the development of measures to strengthen the role of the biome in fighting climate change, both at a macro level and at pilot sites in the Eastern Cordillera Real of the Andes of Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. The results of this exercise will be consolidated by 2016 as part of the Amazon Conservation Vision of the convention on biological diversity of the United Nations, CBD.