Caribbean & Central America - August 2022

Panama’s environment ministry (MiAmbiente) has launched a new initiative to incorporate various sectors into its reforestation efforts and meet its commitment outlined in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change to restore 50,000 hectares (ha) of forest by 2025 in line with carbon emissions reduction targets. This comes amid other claims by the Partido Revolucionario Democrático (PRD) government led by President Laurentino Cortizo that it is taking efforts to tackle deforestation seriously.

According to a 9 June MiAmbiente statement, the initiative, dubbed ‘Club Nacional de Restauradores’, aims to introduce a certification stamp for reforestation work carried out by private companies, NGOs and other groups. The certification scheme is in line with Panama’s national forest restoration programme (PNRF) 2021-2025 which launched in 2021 and is committed to focus reforestation efforts.

This follows various measures by the Cortizo government (which claims forest coverage increased by 3% in 2021, bringing the total national coverage to 68%), to stem forest losses and combat the resulting climate impacts as part of efforts to maintain Panama’s position as carbon negative. The country is currently one of three globally to claim that status, along with Bhutan and Suriname. In his 2019 manifesto, President Cortizo pledged to “prevent illegal logging” and in his first year in office, the legislature convened an investigating committee on illegal logging and deforestation in the Darién Gap, Darién province, to streamline protection efforts. In September 2019, two months after the Cortizo government took office, Environment Minister Milciades Concepción stated that between 2012 and August 2019, 20,784.5ha of forest had been lost in the Darién province alone. At the time he was cited by the media as saying that 90% of this loss was due to illegal logging, an issue which, according to specialist website Insight Crime, has been increasing thanks to a growing market in China for cocobolo, a tropical hard wood (see sidebar). In September 2019, MiAmbiente introduced an “electronic tracing system using chips to store origin information … of the forest product being transported” with the goal of improving forest management.

The forestry sector has also been included in other general initiatives such as a national carbon footprint government programme branded “Sustainable Panama: Reduce Your Footprint” launched in June 2020, the overall objective of which is to encourage public and private organisations to cut their carbon emissions - for example through energy efficiency programmes and the use of renewable energy resources such as wind or solar power – and to support them in doing so. As well as covering the forestry sector, the programme is designed to cover government ministries, the Panama Canal, organisations in the logistics, construction, agriculture, tourism and hospitality industries among others. More recently, in February 2022 Cortizo signed into law an initiative recognising the rights of nature and the obligations of the state to protect those rights.

Yet local environmental groups and indigenous communities have voiced concerns over perceived contradictions in the government’s reforestation policies. During the COP26 climate change conference in Scotland in November 2021, a local NGO Fundación Panamá Sostenible (Pasos), accused the government of hypocrisy, pointing to metal mining contracts that it was continuing to negotiate, including one which “would destroy more than 13,000 hectares of forest” in the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC), a regional conservation programme established to protect endangered species, seas, forests and rivers and address issues of sustainable development.

•  Illegal timber trade

Despite a 2013 government resolution that only cocobolo that has fallen naturally can be exported, local media outlets have reported that Interpol and national police have repeatedly intercepted containers filled with cocobolo logs at Panama’s ports. National daily Crítica reported one such case in March 2022 where Panamanian police seized two containers at ports in the city of Colón, Colón province, which harbours the Atlantic opening of the Panama Canal, with US$700m of cocobolo wood destined for Shanghai, China.