The bankruptcy of a logging company has changed the destiny of a unique area of the world and the people and wildlife who live there. It’s a reversal of fortune that ended up saving one of the world’s last large swathes of temperate rainforest, avoided the release of more than 500,000 tons of carbon emissions, and created a conservation-focused local economy complete with new jobs and opportunities.
The story of Chile’s Valdivian Coastal Reserve (VCR) begins back in 2003, when a lending institution forced bankruptcy proceedings against an industrial timber company. This triggered the public auction of a parcel of land along the Cordillera Pelada mountain range containing one of the largest remaining areas of Valdivian Temperate Forest.
While a forest investment group intended to buy the property’s debt, prior to auction, along with its legally-issued forest conversion permits -– and continue the century-long trend of converting native forest into eucalyptus plantations in this region of Chile – this is not how things played out. Instead, timber industry interests were outflanked by The Nature Conservancy which – with support from WWF and Conservation International – purchased the property’s debt prior to auction, allowing for the creation of a 50,000-hectare conservation area to protect and restore native forests and wildlife and build sustainable livelihoods for people in the surrounding communities.
By purchasing the land in 2003, TNC was able to stop the immediate threat of deforestation associated with the construction of a coastal highway through the property, which had been a major driver of native forest destruction in what became the Valdivian Coastal Reserve. And to halt the ongoing conversion of native forest to exotic plantations, TNC cancelled and permanently retired the legal and transferrable forest management and harvesting permits that had allowed forest conversion. In 2012, TNC donated 9,453 hectares of the property to the Chilean government to help create what is now the immediately adjacent Alerce Costero National Park, which protects the alerce tree species – including the 5,484-year-old “Alerce Milenario”, which may be the oldest tree on Earth.
ALERCE TREE IN CHILE A lone Alerce (Fitzroya cupressoides) tree stands under the sky at night with stars in the southern sky in the Alerce Coastal National Park, Los Rios, Chile.
An Innovative Way to Fund Conservation and Community Priorities
An innovative way to help fund conservation and community work in the region had been part of the project’s long-term financing plan, even prior to the parcel’s acquisition. Thanks to its old growth forests and dense biodiversity, the tree biomass in this area can store the equivalent of over 800 metric tons of climate changing carbon dioxide per hectare, one of the highest rates in the world. That made it the ideal candidate to become Chile’s first Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) forest carbon project, enhancing the potential of this amazing land to be a natural climate solution by avoiding the emissions associated with deforestation, while sequestering and storing carbon in its trees and soil.
The VCR forest carbon project – located in a 1,273-hectare area within the reserve – was third-party validated (certified) in 2014 and became the first REDD+ project in Chile to have its carbon credits verified by the globally-recognized Verified Carbon Standard organization (today known as Verra). In 2014, a Verified Carbon Standard audit confirmed that the project’s actions to prevent further deforestation had avoided at least 461,402 net tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions between 2003 and 2011. In 2015, a second verification audit confirmed an additional 72,252 net tons CO2e of avoided emissions between 2011 and 2014. In total, between 2003 and 2014, the greenhouse gas emissions avoided by the project are equivalent to taking about 114,000 passenger vehicles off the road for a year.
The Value of Natural Climate Solutions
Interventions like this are vital as we act to slow climate change. A recent assessment by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) names ecosystem restoration as one of the top five most cost-effective climate actions we can take by 2030, and deforestation is the single largest driver of emissions from land-use change. That’s why the Paris Climate Agreement states that countries should protect and enhance their forests to create carbon ‘sinks’, like the Valdivian Coastal Reserve, to limit global warming to no more than 1.5°C and avoid catastrophic climate change.
At this moment of climate crisis, we need every tool in the toolbox, including rapid decarbonization of energy and transportation systems, as well as harnessing the natural carbon storage power of forests and other carbon rich ecosystems. If scaled up now, natural climate solutions could provide up to a third of the emissions reductions needed to reach global climate goals by 2030. What’s certain is that we cannot achieve the 1.5°C target without nature – without both protecting our remaining forests and restoring our damaged land and seascapes.
The Forest’s Beating Heart
At its heart, the Valdivian Coastal Reserve is about the forest and the people living in and around it. People like local Indigenous leader Margarita Huala. She believes the biggest change brought about by the creation of the reserve is the influx of tourists visiting the landscape. But she says the most important benefit flows from the rural water project that brought clean, reliable drinking water to the nearby towns of Chaihuín and Huiro.
For local Indigenous leader Margarita Huala, the most important benefit of the Valdivian Coastal Reserve flows from the rural water project that brings clean drinking water to nearby towns.
The VCR project helped Margarita to set up a small business with other women in the community. They began by selling empanadas out of a wheelbarrow and gathering non-timber products from the forest, before opening a local restaurant that thrived until the Covid19 pandemic.
Faced with the tourism restrictions, Margarita’s family started a cooperative to develop alternative ways to generate income, and her husband and children have also found work in the reserve, fixing fences and improving the bridges, trails and walkways used by both the community and tourists. Margarita hopes to see even more local jobs generated, especially during the winter months – and to get the restaurant up and running again. But she already believes that the project has “helped us, as leaders, to defend things that we did not do before.”
“Without the reserve, I think it would be destroyed because before the forestry companies were just logging and logging. They cut down and burned the native forest. They did not even give firewood to hospitals or homes. It was all destruction. It is better to have The Nature Conservancy here because their word is to protect. They preserve what is left, or what they can save – animals, birds, everything.”
Source: nature.org
