Estrategias de incorporación de un banco de hábitat en la Reserva Forestal Regional Productora del Norte de Bogotá D.C. Thomas van der Hammen

Abstract

Habitat banks or biodiversity conservation are a novel way to achieve sustainable development, as they have the potential to become a significant tool in the development of ecosystem restoration, rehabilitation, recovery and conservation activities and the implementation of pooled offsets; in this way, they combine the protection and rehabilitation of strategic ecosystems with social and economic development. This instrument makes it possible to create or improve environmental values on land and then convert them into credits that can be acquired in the free market. The acquisition of these credits is intended to compensate for the irremediable, significant, and negative impact of projects obliged to balance environmental liabilities, in accordance with the principle of no net loss of biodiversity. However, the scarce and premature Colombian regulatory framework makes it necessary to analyze the potentialities and risks that may arise from its application in areas of high ecological importance such as the Reserva Forestal Regional Productora del Norte de Bogotá D.C. Thomas Van Der Hammen. The TVDH forest reserve, although it is in the rural area of the Capital District, withstands the constant pressure exerted by the urban area with a population of more than eight million inhabitants that shapes the dynamics of land use change. The reserve was created with the aim of rescuing the physical connection of the La Conejera wetland, the Bogotá River, the Cerro de La Conejera, the Guaymaral wetland and the Cerros Orientales through rehabilitation and ecological recovery treatments to strengthen the ecological function of these areas, which will make it the only sector in which the Eastern Hills are structurally linked with the Bogotá River. Currently, the TVDH forest reserve lacks financial and legal mechanisms to implement its current Management Plan (Agreement 21 of 2014 CAR), which includes measures for the restoration, preservation, and sustainable use of land, which have been poorly developed for different causes focused on political interests, power conflicts, planning instruments and land tenure by private parties. However, the reserve has intrinsic characteristics that allow it to have a viability in three fundamental thematic axes for the implementation of a habitat bank in the reserve: (1) environmental technical, (2) normative legal and (3) financial economic. Considering the need to guide the implementation of this mechanism by the different actors involved, strategies are proposed aimed at each of the thematic axes focused on the ecological potential of the reserve, current land use and land tenure, and opportunity cost of land for private landowners according to the environmental zoning of the reserve.