The Amazon rainforest is growing. Guyana offers a strange bright place Environmental News

This story was produced in collaboration with Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Georgetown, Guyana – The only English-speaking nation in South America has one of the best routes on the continent for Amazon jungle protection – and an ad hoc patrol group of indigenous farmers, teachers and hunters is part of the reason for the monitoring of woodcutters and forest miners.

At one point last year, a group of three people from the South Rupununi District Council (SRDC), a group of umbrellas Indigenous communities, was near on a regular jungle patrol Guyana Brazilian border.

They approached a group of gold miners and threatened them with automatic weapons, said Kid James, SRDC program coordinator, a Wapichan Indigenous council that manages conservation initiatives.

While his teammates escaped unharmed from the meeting, James said the incident highlights the threats that conservationists may face when trying to protect the world’s largest rainforest. “Mining activity was in an almost wild west,” James told Al Jazeera.

After threatening their members, the SRDC made formal complaints to mining regulators in Guyana. They received a serious response. James said he was visited by Guyana’s natural resources minister that same year, and public pressure from authorities and residents led to a sharp drop in the level of informal mining in the area for about eight months.

Part of the effectiveness of conservation patrols like SRDC is that they can have a more regular presence in governmental areas far away than government regulators, James said.

SRDC works with 18 part-time conservation officials with a camera, GPS technology, drones and satellite phones that know the rural terrain and can track deforestation. They conduct regular patrols on motorcycles, boats and even on foot, and pass on their findings to the police and other government regulators.

“Wapichan territory can still have a high level of biodiversity, we want to make sure that very clean forest, clean fresh water is maintained and that,” James said. “We have a program that is working, even if it’s not perfect.”

As deforestation rises in much of the Amazon, exacerbating climate change and damaging biodiversity, environmentalists say Guyana offers useful lessons for protecting the world’s largest forest.

High forest cover

About 82 percent of Guyana’s territory is covered by moist forests, said Liz Goldman, a Washington-based monitoring group at the World Resources Institute (WRI).

That’s the highest rate on the continent, in addition to neighboring Suriname and French Guiana, he told Al Jazeera, adding that it is between 35 and 52 percent of the land covered by other Amazonian nations. primary forest.

Meanwhile, trees generally cover more than 90 percent of Guyana’s territory, Goldman said, adding that “both the first forest loss and the loss of tree cover have been declining in Guyana in recent years.”

A local driver stops by to explore the ruined road in the jungle in 2017, before continuing on to drive through Bamboo Creek, a small village on the lower slopes of the Pakaraima Mountains in western Guyana. [File: Rustom Seegopaul/Al Jazeera]

Part of Guyana’s conservation success lies in simple demographics: the country is sparsely populated and much of the Amazon interior is underdeveloped.

With less than 800,000 inhabitants, Guyana is home to about four people per square kilometer of land, according to the World Bank, 25 inhabitants per square kilometer in Brazil, where deforestation has increased.

At a time known for its absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, deforestation and fires have turned Brazil’s Amazon into a net source of new carbon emissions, according to a study based on satellite data published in August. .

Brazil destroyed 13,235 square kilometers (5,110 square miles) of forest last year, a larger area than Lebanon, official data published in November.

This has dangerous consequences for global climate models, according to environmentalists, although the rest of the Amazon outside of Brazil remains a clean source of carbon dioxide.

Another element of Guyana’s conservation success comes from public procurement, residents of the capital said. Despite the significant divisions between ethnicities and classes, there seems to be a broad consensus that the country’s identity is tied to its natural beauty and deserves to be protected in the jungles, especially with the onslaught of new oil investments.

“If we take out all the oil and save the forests, it won’t be good in 30 years,” said hotel porter Nicholas Blair. “It’s a balance.”

An echo of that sentiment is Simeon Taylor, the capital’s security contractor. “Protecting our biodiversity is key,” he said as he grabbed a cold beer at a neighborhood pub last weekend.

For “strong verification” records

In terms of logging, Guyana also has a “strong verification system” to ensure that trees in illegally deforested lands are not easily exported or sold at home, said Aiesha Williams, head of the local branch of the World Wildlife Fund.

“Monitoring deforestation has been important,” Williams said in an interview with the Al Jazeera conservation group’s Georgetown office. “Most deforestation is related to gold mining.”

The Guyanese government is doing a good job of ensuring that illegally deforested trees do not enter the wider supply chain, according to environmentalists. [Chris Arsenault/Al Jazeera]

His team, along with James and SRDC, along with other remote indigenous communities, provides technical assistance on forest protection, including satellite phones and GIS kits used to track gold miners.

With large porous borders, miners from Brazil and other neighboring countries, along with home seekers, have been entering more and more areas like Rupinuni lately, he said.

“The threats to forests are growing and so are our efforts,” Williams said.

Gold mining has been the driving force behind deforestation in southern Guyana [File: Rustom Seegopaul/Al Jazeera]

The Forestry Commission of Guyana, the governing body responsible for protecting the forest, has not responded to several calls and emails asking for comments.

Land titles

One of the most effective strategies for protecting forests involves formal recognition of indigenous land rights, according to scientists. And part of Guyana’s relative success in defending forests lies with the land title system, James said.

“Guyana has one of the strongest laws in place to protect these land rights,” he said, though he would like to speed up the process. “When a title is given to a community, it is absolute and eternal, unlike in other countries.”

Foresters working with South Rupununi District Council patrol illegal logging in Amazon rainforest [File: SRDC via Al Jazeera]

Formally controlled forest lands by indigenous communities have the best results for conservation and biodiversity, according to two major studies on rainforest protection in Peru and Brazil, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In Peru, within two years of the granting of land title to an indigenous community, forest disturbances have dropped, on average, by about two-thirds, and clearing by more than three-quarters. A 2017 study was found.

Part of the reason for the deforestation it increased so rapidly in Brazil Scientists have said that the land rights of indigenous peoples have not been respected under the government of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro for the past two years.

Forest miners and lumberjacks have been secretly encouraged to join indigenous reserves, and deforestation in South America’s largest country has reached a 15-year high in November.

Guyana’s indigenous communities own about 13 percent of the country’s land, according to data from the UN Development Program. Local communities are pushing the government to expedite the issuance of formal titles to ancestral forest lands that cover larger rural areas of Guyana.

“If these traditional lands are recognized, they will be fully and permanently in the hands of local communities that can manage and control these areas – which would rule out threats like mining and illegal timber at the local level,” James said.