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Provincial technicians from the Ministry of Environment (MAE), the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (MAG) and the Comprehensive Amazon Program for Forest Conservation and Sustainable Production (PROAmazonía) met on February 17, in the city of Nueva Loja, with technical personnel from the Decentralized Autonomous Governments (GAD) of the cantons of Cascales, Lago Agrio, Shushufindi, Putumayo, the GAD of the parish of Limoncocha, and the GAD of the Province of Sucumbíos, in order to review specific criteria for updating their Development and Land Use Plans (PDOT) and Land Use and Management Plans (PUGS).
PDOTs are planning instruments that guide and determine actions by local public and private sectors, the fulfillment of which allows sustainable development in the province. Their purpose is to articulate a vision of the territory in the short, medium and long term, based on specific interventions.
The Comprehensive Amazon Program for Forest Conservation and Sustainable Production, PROAmazonía, is an initiative of the Ministry of Environment (MAE), the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (MAG) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), financed by the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF).
PROAmazonía seeks to link national efforts at reducing greenhouse gas emissions with the country’s priority agendas and productive sector policies to reduce the causes and agents of deforestation, and promote sustainable and integrated management of natural resources with a landscape approach, within the framework of Ecuador’s REDD+ Action Plan “Forests for Good Living” 2016-2025.
The approaches implemented by MAE and MAG, with the guidance of PROAmazonía in this first analysis, were: interculturality, gender, conservation, climate change, and sustainable, deforestation-free production.
The meeting, which employed multilevel Working Groups, began with an assessment to identify the situation of the territory in order to analyze land use planning problems and opportunities, and a reading of the reality of each canton of the Province of Sucumbíos. One of these readings identified possible scenarios associated with climate change, and analyzed the magnitude of the physical effects of increased rainfall in the province, and the direct impact it would have on human settlements.
Darwin Chango, PDOT technician of the biophysical component of the Provincial Government of Sucumbíos, said: “The expectation was to examine with PROAmazonía the information we had as Autonomous Governments and articulate and align ourselves so that we could ground our proposals with regard to the problems we have in the territory, and begin working on these projects so that they are directed toward international assistance, such as green funds or climate funds, which require different types of formats.”
With this background, specific approaches were reviewed and analyzed, which will contribute to the PDOT and PUGS update processes with environmental and climate change measures. These measures were considered given the recognition of the role that local governments play as a fundamental part of the climate change adaptation process.
Climate change measures are aligned with the Ecuadorian legal system, which considers them national policy. This alignment to national priorities allows climate change adaptation and mitigation actions to be integrated into GAD programs and projects. By implementing these measures, it is hoped that the impact of the climate threat on planned programs or projects can be reduced.
Regarding the approaches that were analyzed, Alba Bernal, PDTO technician of the socio-cultural component of the Government of the Province of Sucumbíos, noted: “the idea of this meeting was to study ways of strengthening the assessment that we are already making, and include proposals for accessing resources that they are trying to provide to governments that use these approaches. Therefore, what has been achieved in this workshop is an exchange of information to strengthen the assessment and have more accurate indicators based on actual data.”
Contributions were collected during the workshop and can be included in the PDOT in accordance with the Organic Environmental Code and regulations of the Organic Land Use, Use and Land Management Law (LOOTUGS), which provide general guidelines about responsibilities for land use planning, and the use and management of urban and rural land.
The meeting followed the initiative of the GAD of Sucumbíos in providing spaces for citizen participation in the development, socialization, feedback and validation of the PDOT, in which institutional, social and community organization representatives and indigenous nationalities participated, linked to the development of its jurisdiction. During one of these meetings, the Second Meeting of the Territorial Platform of the Province of Sucumbíos, the importance of economic and productive development for the region was highlighted.
“We had good expectations regarding the PROAmazonía team; there have been good exchanges of information on the issues. We have seen that a real assessment is being carried out with a sample from each of the communities of the six parishes in Putumayo Canton, which ensures a margin of acceptance and reality. The objective proposed by the Mayor is that it be participatory, that stakeholders from Putumayo Canton, presidents of communities, associations, government agencies, health and education provide the basis for the assessment,” said Jorge Cisneros, Head of the Unit for Follow-up, Monitoring and Evaluation of the Putumayo Canton Development Plan.
In summary, the work of the multilevel Roundtables ensured that information related to the five approaches could be presented to the technical teams responsible for updating each PDOT. This information was given feedback and complemented by each technical area that participated in the event, and there was also an opportunity to present concerns and request specific information.
In addition to spaces for citizen participation and multi-level Working Groups, the initiatives implemented during the first quarter of the year to update Development and Land Management Plans continue to be carried out despite restrictions on movement due to the health situation of the country.
Virtual workshops were planned with each of the ten teams responsible for updating the PDOTs in order to continue developing the management model and specific projects for inclusion in the PDOTs based on agreements with the GADs.
In these workshops with each of the GADs, information on the conservation and sustainable production components and the three transverse axes have been adjusted: climate change, gender and interculturality, and the vision, strategic objectives, problems and potentialities of the PDOTs were analyzed.
Adjustments were also made to the draft projects submitted, considering the responsibilities of the parish, municipal and provincial GADs, their links to government plans, contributions of citizen workshops, an analysis of the Life Plans of the Indigenous Nationalities of the Amazon and the presentation of proposals for inclusion in the PDOTs.
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