The environmental impact of the armed conflict in Colombia

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Viviana Quiroga Angel, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia

Background/Question/Methods
Almost all armed conflicts worldwide have occurred in biodiversity hotspots and nearly 50% of those conflicts have occurred in forested regions. The effects of war on forests are varied, complex and intense and occur across landscapes and at all stages of conflict. In Colombia, the armed conflict has a history of more than 50 years and has implied the clearing of large forest areas for the establishment of illicit crops. Given the importance of Colombian forests as biodiversity hotspots, and in the current context of the implementation of the peace agreements with the former FARC guerrilla, there is a pressing need to elucidate the role that armed conflict has played in deforestation dynamics in Colombia. The aim of this study was to assess the role that armed conflict has played in deforestation dynamics in Colombia between the years 2000 and 2014.
A panel database that included 1120 municipalities of the continental land of Colombia, the deforestation rates between 2000 and 2014 for these areas, and nine explanatory variables was built. The explanatory variables included the area cultivated with illicit crops (coca and poppy crops), the area eradicated from illicit crops (manually or by aerial fumigation), forced displacement (the number of people displaced from a municipality by illegal armed groups), population density and gold mining. This dataset was used to build fixed effects models that take spatial autocorrelation into account. The best model and the best set of regressors within than model were selected based on the Akaike information criterion.
Results/Conclusions
The models that included coca and poppy crops, and forced displacement performed better that the ones that excluded these variables. According to these results, the armed conflict, in terms of coca crops, promoted deforestation in Colombia between 2000 and 2014. The negative effects of coca crops on forest cover were both direct (in the area where they are established) indirect (on nearby areas) and lagged (on other areas, a year or more after they have been established). On the contrary, poppy crops favored forest cover, probably by protecting some areas from being invaded with other, more extensive crops. Understanding the causes and mechanisms of deforestation in the framework of the armed conflict will help better prepare policymakers, state institutions and the society as a whole to face the new challenges that peace-building processes pose on ecosystems.