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Go DeeperThe Nature Conservancy in Nicaragua |
Viewed from above, Bosawas Biosphere Reserve in northern Nicaragua appears as a blanket of green, a vast rainforest bound by the threads of several silver rivers. This landscape is the lifeblood for 21,000 indigenous people, the Mayangna and Miskitu, and new research finds that the relationship is reciprocal: Without the indigenous people, this forested blanket would be in tatters.
Unwittingly, the government set into play a vast experiment in Bosawas in the 1990s, pitting the indigenous communities against a flood of poor farmers, former soldiers and other colonistas lured by the promise of land. For more than a decade, researchers have tracked the development patterns of the two communities, and the findings are like night and day: While the homesteaders have cleared many forests around their settlements, logging around indigenous communities has declined.
“How extraordinary when much of the Atlantic coast of Central America is being cut down, here the agricultural frontier hasn’t advanced,” says Karen Luz, who directed The Nature Conservancy’s work in Nicaragua in the 1990s. “It’s an absolute success story,” says Luz, who left the Conservancy to work for the World Bank’s environment program.
In the 1980s, Bosawas was caught up in the Nicaraguan civil war, which forced the Mayangna and Miskitu to flee their homelands. At the war’s end in 1990, the Nicaraguan government encouraged former combatants to settle south of the new Bosawas Biosphere Reserve. Returning home, indigenous people found themselves vying for their traditional lands with ex-combatants and homesteaders.
As of 1996, homesteaders had cleared 4 acres per person, while indigenous people had cleared only 0.6 acres each, according to the research, published in the journal Conservation Biology. By 2002, the homesteaders had cleared 6.2 acres per person, while the indigenous population had reduced its footprint to 0.4 acres per person.
“[Indigenous] people who use the forest and need the forest are logical allies for conservation,” says Anthony Stocks, an anthropologist at Idaho State University and author of the study. “For them, habitat survival and cultural survival go hand in hand.”
In 1993 the Conservancy began helping Nicaraguan indigenous groups gain legal title to their lands, as part of a strategy to preserve the species-rich forests of the Bosawas region. The Conservancy helped train locals to use satellite technology to map their traditional lands, as well as lobby the government to create a legal basis for granting the communities’ land titles.
A breakthrough came when the Nicaraguan government petitioned the United Nations to register Bosawas as a biosphere reserve. The U.N. requested that the government recognize indigenous land rights, which it did.
Today, six indigenous territories span about 80 percent of the reserve’s 8,000 square kilometers. The communities regularly patrol their territorial boundaries, a practice that has halted the advance of deforestation and the agricultural frontier.
—Rebecca Clarren
Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © Anthony Stocks (Nicaragua); Maps reprinted with permission from Blackwell Publishing. Source: Stocks, McMahan, and Taber. Indigenous, Colonist, and Government Impacts on Nicaragua's Bosawas Reserve. Conservation Biology, in publication.
