Climate Change and forest preservation in El Salvador

Pollution and the deterioration of El Salvador's natural resources, to date, have not taken relevance on the list of national priorities, both for legislators, politicians and Salvadoran citizens in general. The execution of the plans and projects do not currently occupy the arena of the most relevant issues or national interest.

El Salvador is one of the four most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change. Its small area – 20 thousand km2 – and its more than 6.3 million inhabitants, expose it to extreme impacts between hurricanes, tropical storms and droughts. In addition to these, the cause of the high vulnerability is the accumulated effects of highly degrading agricultural practices in more than 70% of the territory, causing the loss of biodiversity, soil and water.

El Salvador is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, since the latter affects a wide range of areas of life, among which we can mention: health, the quality of life of each citizen, agricultural production, construction, road connectivity, among others. Adapting to these events is urgent for El Salvador, if it intends, not only to seek to reduce the risks associated with climate change, but also to reverse the environmental degradation suffered by most of the territory and the ecosystems that comprise it.

The current global goal is to prevent the global temperature from increasing by 2 degrees. But El Salvador and the rest of the Central American countries have little to contribute to this objective. Yes, the country is one of the most impacted by the consequences of Climate Change, it needs to adapt, but this cannot and should not be its only environmental priority.

At the national level we have several goals that could be considered priorities. One of them is the care of forest resources. In El Salvador there is only about 26% of forest resources left and that includes coffee plantations. This means that there is 70% deforestation, which is a critical environmental condition compared to other countries. After Haiti, El Salvador is the country with the highest level of environmental damage.

In order to reverse environmental degradation and reduce the country's vulnerability to climate change, a restoration proposal has been proposed at the national level with initial actions that involve not only the Ministry of the Environment but also other actors of the State and society in In general, taking as action criteria, water management, wildlife conservation, soil management, adaptation to extreme weather events and regulation of the microclimate.

 The activities to be carried out have been divided into four major components:

1. Restoration and reforestation of critical ecosystems; in order to recover the capacity to provide services, mainly recreation; water supply; microclimate regulation; erosion control; and decreased vulnerability to disasters associated with natural events. In addition to also recovering natural and gallery forests.
2. Restoration of degraded soils; which is intended to be implemented through the adoption of climate-resilient Agroforestry Systems. This is a series of activities that allow the productive capacity of our soils to be recovered, restoring its lost functionality, its capacity to infiltrate water, its natural fertility and its value as a support for biological diversity.
3. Synergistic development of physical infrastructure and natural infrastructure; It refers to a series of activities that allow the combination of physical infrastructure (grey) with natural infrastructure (green) in order to improve resilience capacity; above all, against the effects of extreme hydrometeorological events, such as storms and hurricanes.
4. A new act;  joint implementation of the Institutions and local actors to promote the Governance of Natural Resources. This is a special component that seeks the definition of agreements between all the relevant actors of the landscapes to be restored. It supposes, therefore, a social process that considers culture, education and communication processes as key elements of the work, which allows the creation of a social monitoring platform.

El Salvador has the basic institutions to implement the plan developed by the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources, however it is important to consider that in order to have the desired effects, the intervention of all existing local institutions and actors in a territory is necessary. and specific landscape, and achieve the institutional arrangements that allow the coordination of activities, since it is one thing for the institutions to exist and another thing is for them to function for what they exist.

Taken from the Study "Towards the restoration and reforestation of ecosystems" 2017 Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources of El Salvador.