Integration of Big Data Analytics and Social Research for monitoring of rainforest threats in the post-conflict settings of Colombia and Peru: supporting a more sustainable development agenda

Post-conflict phases can lead to growing environmental threats but also to open up greater conservation opportunities. Peace generally can enable forest exploitation since national reconstruction and development demand... [ view full abstract ]

Post-conflict phases can lead to growing environmental threats but also to open up greater conservation opportunities. Peace generally can enable forest exploitation since national reconstruction and development demand increasing amounts of natural resources (i.e timber exploitation). Additionally, the need to incentive foreign investment often reduces the political will to protect forests. Therefore, good governance in the forest sector should be established before opening it to post-conflict exploitation. Both Colombia and Peru represent countries (and case studies proposed by this research) where armed conflict has had played a remarkable role in land-use and migration dynamics within forested areas. Armed conflict in both countries has generated large flows of migration either from the countryside to urban centers, or to unexploited frontier lands. Additional to the threats to human rights, for the environmental conservation side, there is documented evidence of both “gunpoint conservation” and “gunpoint fragmentation” in these countries’ forests. In one hand, the presence of illegal armed groups actively hinder large-scale exploitation to protect the environment. On the other hand, due to violent conflict can disrupt local economies, it also encourages, specially in these two countries, the cultivation of illegal crops and the exploitation of natural resources. With the advance of peace and the rehabilitation of infrastructure, the Colombian and Peruvian forest, in particular their most pristine forested areas in the Amazon, will be under mounting pressure by vested interests and market forces. Additionally, beside the expansion of commercial crop plantations and others human land-use types, planned or unplanned (spontaneous) migration will potentially exacerbate existing land-titling tensions and thus trigger new conflicts. The main goal of this research is to inform peace building and forest conservation policies using Colombia and Peru as case studies. Specifically, we are interested in understand the links between migration and forest conservation in post-conflict settings. These two countries were selected as case in point because they face similar issues regarding migration, sustainable development in fragile ecosystems as the Amazon biome, and post-conflict recovery. We propose to combine the application of field based research with knowledge from Big earth-observation data analytics to maximize transdisciplinary analyses which support policy development and facilitate the intervention and vigilance of most of stakeholders (national and international) involved in the post-conflict agendas of target countries. We expect that the research moves towards to a land-cover change monitoring tool dedicated for informing decision makers on the rates, locations and characterisation of proximate drivers of deforestation events in the post-conflict regions of study. Such a tool coupled with the field work will allow to determine the current state of the rainforest in the regions of study and might serve as a reference level for preparing payment schemes for forest conservation such as REDD+. These results might be exploited by other teams in a wide range of studies. Last but not least, this research will support the achievement of the sustainable development goals in Colombia and Peru and will reinforce the international development collaboration.