Basis
for biodiversity conservation within local land use planning
policies in Colombia
Presented by Brigitte (Luis Guillermo) Baptiste
Since
1997 the Colombian government required all municipalities
to prepare their “Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial”
(Land use plan) and to submit it to the environmental authorities.
Those plans are to be reviewed and adjusted every ten years.
While the planners considered different kind of approaches
to the ecological setting for land use allocation, the idea
of biodiversity conservation, a must in Colombia, was poorly
integrated into them because of different reasons: In many
cases, basic information about genetic, species, populations,
and other levels of biotic complexity was missing; in others
the subject was not of an economic, social or cultural priority
for the local government or the community. The absence of
clear guidelines to include biodiversity into local planning,
threatens not only biodiversity itself, but previous national
and regional decisions on conservation as well as international
agreements where the country has been acknowledged for its
leading efforts on preserving nature. Following a joint effort
among national level institutions, who have asked Universidad
Javeriana to prepare a guide to include biodiversity conservation
in local land use planning processes, the problems of knowledge,
perception and attitude are to be discussed, considering the
limited capacity of most Colombian municipalities to handle
even basic ecological information (which is already scarce
or non existent) and the apparently poor levels of local awareness
of the importance of biodiversity, being it economic, symbolic
or else. Case studies are being developed to guide the research
and the preparation of a first draft of a manual with guidelines
to include biodiversity criteria into municipal land use planning
in Colombia.
The
use of simulation tools in natural resources use problems:
A micro level perspective
Presented by Daniel Castillo
The
purpose of the presentation is to share some of the methods
and tools we have used in recent years at the School of Environmental
and Rural Studies at Javeriana University (Bogotá,
Colombia) to address the puzzle of individual decision making
and policy design in natural resources use. I will present
three case studies in which we have combined the tools of
dynamic modeling, experimental economics, rural appraisal
tools, and role games. The first is a case study in Providence
Island (Colombian Caribbean sea) with fishermen and crab hunters
(Castillo and Saysel, 2005). Second, a case of water management
in an Andean watershed, Fuquene Basin (Maya et al 2004). And
the third is a case study in the Colombian Amazonian forest
that intends to understand the decision making process underlying
land use change from forest to cattle plots using role games
and agent based modeling (Vieira, 2005). I will discuss some
methodological insights and future work.
