Venezuela’s Scenarios for Land Based Mitigation – A Summary for Policymakers
We’ve generated a list of three LMTs that we think have the best chance of mitigating climate change by sequestering carbon in Venezuala. Our LMT list is:
Integrated fire management in the tropical humid forest of Amazon Basin
Agroforestry of arid and semiarid lands
Agroforestry in dry forest lands
The full scenario analysis for Venezuela can be found here, with key messages summarized in the sections below.
Integrated fire management
For Venezuela, fire management is a major focus, given the escalating number of fires in the country that pose threats to natural areas, local communities, and protected regions. The integrated fire management practices we recommend for Venezuela include integrating indigenous fire management practices – dating back to long before the arrival of Europeans in South America -- with more modern approaches to prevent runaway wildfires. Initially tested in Canaima National Park, efforts are now underway to implement these strategies at a national scale, with NGOs collaborating with farmers and producers.
Adopting this LMT at scale would likely lead to the sequestration of a significant (but as yet unquantified) amount of carbon, by preventing forest fires. And forest fires are a highly significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. Between 1997 and 2016, biomass burning generated CO2 emissions equivalent to 23% of the total CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel in 2014.
Additional benefits include reducing or eliminating the costs of other more expensive and less efficient fire-control methods, providing economic opportunities to indigenous communities, preserving Venezuela’s abundant biodiversity, and promoting the country’s cultural heritage.
Potential barriers to adopting it at scale include a lack of trust between, on the one hand, park administrators, firefighting institutions, some private landowners, and the media, and indigenous communities on the other, which may make attempts to pool knowledge and resources more difficult. Another issue is that Venezuela is a vast country with a high diversity of ecosystems, topographies, geographical accidents, and remote areas of difficult access. Implementing this approach extensively and simultaneously in diverse regions would be a significant challenge.
Agroforestry of arid and semiarid lands
One of the major issues in Venezuela’s arid and semiarid regions in the country’s north-west, is land degradation caused by continuous extraction and overexploitation of resources. In this context, we recommend a combination of a number of different agroforestry practices. You can find more details about the full extent of these practices in the full report, but, to give one example, they include planting local, traditional, low-water demand crops like aloe, agave or cacti, under tree cover. This can avoid deforestation and soil degradation, reduce the irrigation requirements, and provide regular medium-term incomes to the farmers.
Under adequate conservation and management conditions, semiarid tropical lands like those in Venezuelea have a significant biomass CO2 fixation potential of up to 8.236,39 Kg ha-1 year (including photorespiration and respiration losses).
But whether or not agroforestry can succeed arid and semiarid lands depends on its capacity to provide food and useful resources to the farmers and the inhabitants of rural areas. This makes it crucial that the correct species is selected when establishing a particular agroforestry system.
The most significant possible barriers that policymakers should be aware of for this LMT at scale are climate risks. These include include droughts and high temperatures, but also increased weather variability, especially during El Niño-La Niña cycles, where droughts can be swiftly followed by severe flooding.
Agroforestry in dry forest lands
The next LMT involves agroforestry in dry forest lands, the second most important ecosystem in Venezuela. Rapid deforestation is a big issue in these areas, due to logging, burning, and agricultural practices that have led to soil erosion and biodiversity loss.
Agroforestry, incorporating silvopastoral systems, is a highly promising alternative approach that could has good carbon sequestration potential, and could also potentially promote climate-smart agriculture, address food security and climate challenges.
The proespects of scaling up this particular LMT in Venezuela, are good, largely as a result of efforts from the DANAC Foundation, a non-profit focussed on food security and sustainable agricultural development.
The DANAC Foundation, through its organizational policy, has been implementing nature-based strategies for mitigating greenhouses gases in Venezuela for 24 years. Agroforestry is a major focus of theirs; for the next few decades (2030 – 2050), it is projected to be one of the main drivers of technological innovation in agricultural production and agroforestry systems in the country. Our recommendations for agroforestry in dry forest lands (which you can read about in the full report) were informed by the DANAC Foundation’s work, and the prospects for them being implemented at scale are good, given the influence the DANAC Foundation has in Venezuela.
