COS 111-5 - Participatory forest conservation, restoration and sanitation in a resilient and resistant social-ecological system in Mexico

Background/Question/Methods

The world continues the search for effective mechanisms to protect the natural heritage of inhabited forested landscapes. The recognition of coupling between social and ecological subsystems is helping to describe and analyze historical and contemporary scenarios where biodiversity and humans are successfully coexisting. Mexico is among the most important forested and mega-biodiverse countries, with some 60% (62.6 million ha) of forests owned by around 17,586 communities (social property), which operate as forest social-ecological systems (SES). Mexican forests are under varying natural and anthropic threats, but community collective action around forest management is the most important response for facing them. This research documented experiences in community forests where participatory-adaptive forest management is practiced for landscape conservation and restoration and for forest sanitation of bark beetle pests. Combined methods were used, included: document review, participatory mapping, forest cover analysis, field data, community workshops, key actor interviews and participant observation.

Results/Conclusions

In Mexican community forests, participatory forest management strategies include investing of local physical resources (tools, vehicles and infrastructure), economic resources (government subsidies and community earnings) and social resources (labor, cultural values, local knowledge, social learning and governance institutions). These investments are used to: 1) protect habitat and biodiversity, 2) restore forests and 3) contribute to forest health. The hundreds of “voluntary conservation areas” (VCA) with government recognition resulted always from community assemblies, and in some cases, VCA have improved collective action and social learnings among rural farmers around biodiversity conservation (e.g. the participatory wildlife camera-trap monitoring), which is still little recognized. In addition, hundreds of successful participatory forest restorations are happened, mainly when they are based on cultural motivations and concerns for environmental legacies for descendants. Also, despite the growing bark beetle threat in temperate forests, the participatory community sanitation logging, in some regions frequently may stay maintaining the forest health. Thus, a better understanding of approaches that improve the local resistance and adaptive capacity in forest SES, may help to ecologists to support and strengthen grassroots initiatives in Mexico and beyond. Lessons from bottom-up collective action examples can help to build a more sustainable future in comparable inhabited forests.