Hello, and welcome to this latest edition of From a Climate Correspondent, a newsletter exploring the climate crisis around the globe.
We are four environmental journalists who will each week share our personal reflections and stories on the fight against climate change from the regions where we now live – Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and South Asia.
Thanks for reading!
From a Climate Correspondent team - India, Jocelyn, Lou and Mat
Drugs & forest degradation in Costa Rica
Letter no. 7 by Jocelyn Timperley in San José, Costa Rica
“If you need to hide drugs for two to three days, or you need to camp out and wait for the next person to come along to move the drugs North, the best place to go is a really remote place in these mangroves,” Andrew Davis from the Prisma Foundation tells me.
We’re discussing the environmental impact of the drug trade in Costa Rica, a place famed for its forest preservation, which researchers say is seeing increasing encroachment from traffickers.
The harmful social impact of the “war on drugs” in Central America, as well as the rest of Latin America, is well known. But the drug trade is not always strongly associated with deforestation and climate change - despite rising evidence of significant links.
The most comprehensive research to make the argument that drug trafficking and the war on drugs are major factors driving deforestation in Central America was a series of reports published last year by Fundación Neotropica and the Prisma Foundation.
“We would argue that drug trafficking is one of the largest contributors to deforestation in protected areas,” Jennifer Devine, one of the authors of the reports, told me at the time. For example, drug traffickers launder money through illegal cattle ranching in protected areas, the paper said.
Impacts are highest in Guatemala and Honduras, where “narco deforestation” is a major problem, and also exist to an extent Nicaragua and Panama, the study found.
But there are also newer environmental threats being seen here in Costa Rica, said Devine.
The researchers found in particular that the Osa Peninsula, on Costa Rica’s southpacific coast near the border with Panama, is increasingly being affected by the drug trade. It is used as a refuelling station for boats taking the maritime route to North America, as well as a warehousing location in drug trafficking networks, says the study.
This in turn is leading to the degradation of some of the country’s most ecologically sensitive mangroves and wetlands, the study found. For example, a park official that the authors interviewed said traffickers had made canals into the mangroves to be able to unload boats, causing huge damage in the process.
“They have all these nooks and crannies inside the mangroves, as well as these areas that do not have state presence there,” says Davis.
Others interviewed for the study said wetlands in the area were being drained in order to construct airstrips or store drugs in warehouses in the soft ground underneath them.
Land rights
Not surprisingly, the researchers argued more of the same “war on drugs” military approach is probably not the solution here. Instead, far more investment is needed in community land management, they said, as well as recognition of community land rights, in order to increase protection of forests from drug traffickers and other illegal activities they are associated with.
The importance of community land for mitigating climate change is now well established - and even acknowledged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Indigenous people hold over a third of the world’s intact forest landscapes, which tend to see far lower rates of forest loss than elsewhere. But land rights are often shifted to the bottom of the pile in policy discussions
In Costa Rica, a significant portion of the land allocated to indigenous people is thought to still be (illegally) occupied by non-indigenous people. An article from 2010 found forest regulators were frequently accepting bribes to allow people to log illicitly.
Bribri
Communities in Costa Rica are being affected by the drug trade in other ways too.
“[The drug problem] has grown a lot and it has made the social situation of the indigenous people worse,” a woman from the Bribri indigenous people in Talamanca, who wished to remain anonymous, tells me.
She says young people from her community are increasingly involved with the drug trade, in part due to a lack of other economic options in the area.
“The cocaine comes into the community; the marajuana often leaves the community,” she says, noting that marijuana is not grown by the Bribri people, but in the more remote Alto Telire region.
What’s needed, she says, is to provide these young people with alternatives, including education and better forms of employment:
“I think the government, the state, should bring them an incentive so the people can work for their own family, for their own community, and can generate their own development.”
The issue isn’t geographically confined.
Britain has close to the world’s highest per capita consumption of cocaine: around 2.3% of people in Scotland, England and Wales use it, a proportion similar to the US.
The war on drugs has been going on since well before I was born, but is widely understood to be a failure, and many are calling for a changed approach. Now it is becoming yet another example of how intertwined climate action is with other complex social issues.
Must reads from the region
How cocaine contributes to climate change and deforestation in Central America, AJ Dellinger, Mic “The illegal drug trade has many victims, and that includes the environment.” US-based reporter AJ Dellinger provides in in-depth coverage of the reports released last October by Fundación Neotropica and the Prisma Foundation.
Latin America’s environmental challenges in 2020, Mongabay This Mongabay series takes a look at the environmental challenges facing eight different Latin American countries in 2020 - Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela. It’s in Spanish, but even if you don’t speak it it’s still worth checking out using Google translate to get a general update of the key areas to look for this year.
Cop25 president Carolina Schmidt blames big emitters for low-ambition climate talks Francisco Parr, Climate Home News Chile’s environment minister Carolina Schmidt has blamed Brazil, Australia, China and the US for blocking tougher action at the UN climate talks, writes Chilean journalist Francisco Parra. “We are not satisfied, but it is not shame that we feel,” Schmidt told a two-hour session of the country’s Congress scrutinising her role in the December talks in Madrid.
For Latin American Environmentalists, Looming Threats of Violence, Martha Pskowski, Undark Foreign investments from mining and extraction companies have repeatedly been linked to deadly attacks on environmentalists in Latin America, writes freelance journalist Martha Pskowski. “Investors and companies in the US and Canada have done little to ensure that their money isn’t driving criminalization and attacks on local advocates,” she adds.
What else I've been listening to...
The Revolutions podcast, hosted by Mike Duncan, is currently making its way through the Russian Revolution, but Duncan has previously worked through the Spanish American Wars of Independence, as well as the Haitan and Mexican revolutions. It’s a great way to learn some of the background context to current events in these countries.