Significant inconsistencies and gaps in governmental policies for peatland science and protection in Peru’s Imiría Regional Conservation Area have impacted the livelihoods of Indigenous Shipibo residents, according to a new study. The authors say these issues are hindering the effectiveness of efforts to conserve the area’s peatlands.

The study identifies policies that inadvertently impact Indigenous livelihoods and sovereignty — therefore exacerbating tensions and mistrust between the Imiría authorities and communities — and lack of mention of peatlands in the protected area’s master plan. This means locals and policymakers alike are unaware of the importance of the critical ecosystem, according to the study.

Shipibo residents who live inside the regional conservation area, or ACR as it’s known in Spanish, say they recognize the need to protect the area’s vital natural resources, but feel they’ve been unfairly targeted by some of the government’s environmental policies. For example, there’s a ban on commercial fishing, which means families can only fish for consumption, but not to sell.

“At the moment, local fishing is healthy fishing,” Samuel Cauper, an Indigenous Shipibo who heads the Imiría ACR, told Mongabay by phone. “The local inhabitants of this area do not have the capacity for large-scale exploitation of fishing.” While Cauper said he sees the problems in the conservation area, he has little power to address it.

Indigenous residents have protested against the protected area and submitted formal complaints. They’re demanding that authorities annul the supreme decree used to establish the protected area, which they argue was done without their free, prior and informed consent, and hand over its protection to the communities to manage.

Despite promises in the ACR’s master plan to promote and implement alternative income sources for families to compensate them for lost income opportunities, “there is a notable absence” of these initiatives, study co-author Melissa Felipe Cadillo, the coordinator of a research program at the University of Oxford, told Mongabay. Without them, some residents have been fined as much as 1,500 soles ($400) for selling a single 15-kilogram (33-pound) fish, while others have been arrested or had their products confiscated.

Conservation gone wrong

The Imiría ACR was created by the government of Peru’s Ucayali department in 2010 to conserve 135,737 hectares (335,413 acres) of Amazonian wetland threatened by illegal logging and fishing. The area contains two lakes, Imiría and Chauya, which are home to species like the paiche (Arapaima gigas) — one of the world’s largest freshwater fish, and a staple for locals — and the Amazonian manatee (Trichechus inunguis) and yellow-spotted river turtle (Podocnemis unifilis).

The ACR overlaps with six titled Shipibo communities, as well as nine small, untitled villages, known as caseríos, populated predominantly by people of mixed ethnicity. According to Felipe Cadillo and her co-authors, Imiría’s conservation strategy, focused primarily on conserving the area’s rich flora and fauna from the threat of overextraction, has significant implications for the Shipibo communities. By limiting their use of resources, it inadvertently hinders the livelihoods of the Indigenous communities, they said.

“This situation has created a perception among community members that local authorities pose a threat to their way of life, exacerbating existing tensions and mistrust between the [ACR] and the Shipibo people,” Felipe Cadillo said in an email.

At the same time, large-scale destruction caused by Mennonite colonies, coca growers, drug traffickers, and companies operating illegally in the area continues to expand unabated, adding greater pressure to the natural resources and the communities who reside there.

“All of the habitat, aquatic plants or palm trees or non-timber species, they are really destroyed,” Cauper said. “They are contaminated. Not only the soil and wetlands, but also the rivers and streams.”

In 2021, Mongabay published an investigation that showed how officials from the Ucayali agriculture agency illegally sold titled lands belonging to Shipibo communities to German Mennonites from Bolivia. The latter went on to clear more than 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) of primary forests around Lake Imiría. That same year, the Ucayali government fined a Mennonite colony settled in Shipibo territory 11 million soles ($2.8 million) for deforestation.

“This overlapping, corrupt and haphazard distribution of rights for land uses that are not conducive to environmental conservation nor local Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples is a major issue, together with the lack of effective responses to increasingly large areas of illicit crop areas,” study co-author Aoife Bennett, a lecturer at the University of Oxford, told Mongabay in an email.

Jorge Watanabe, a consultant for the Imiría ACR’s management committee, told Mongabay in a video call that conservation efforts so far have been unsuccessful. “The management of Imiría has not been able to stop these anthropogenic activities that have affected important areas of peatlands in Imiría,” he said. “The transformation of the land continues to develop for agricultural use.”

Watanabe also said some Indigenous leaders have been involved in facilitating the illegal exchange of titled lands to Mennonites. Cauper said separately he’d heard of Indigenous authorities selling lands illegally, but added he hasn’t seen any official proof of this. Mongabay was unable to find evidence corroborating this allegation.

Gaps in research

According to the authors and park management, a lack of scientific data on the area’s peatlands, such as maps and deforestation data, has hindered the effectiveness of peatland conservation efforts, as the ACR’s managers have no way of measuring how much of the ecosystem has been destroyed.

“We know where they are, but they are not formally mapped,” Watanabe said. This is because peatlands, which aren’t even mentioned in the ACR master plan, “have not been prioritized” by management. Cauper said there’s been very little interest in the peatlands, not only from the government but also researchers and NGOs, partly due to a lack of funding.

“In other words, there is no line of action for peatlands,” he said.

Ucayali is home to the second-largest expanse of peatland in the Peruvian Amazon, covering an area of 1.11 million hectares (2.75 million acres), or about the size of Jamaica. The department is also home to the largest percentage of deforested palm swamp peatlands in the Peruvian Amazon. But Kristell Hergoualc’h, a senior scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), told Mongabay in an email that she’s uncertain about the accuracy of this data, as there’s been very little biophysical data collected in the region, such as maps, inventories of vegetation and soil, and monitoring of deforestation and degradation.

“There is an important need for scientific data to ensure that policies are properly informed,” she said.

On Nov. 4, the Peruvian government published technical guidelines for the identification of peatlands in the country. In 2021, it issued a supreme decree on multisectoral and decentralized management of wetlands, with specific sections on peatlands. The Ministry of Environment also proposed a national mitigation measure last year aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions by protecting Amazonian peatlands.

Cauper told Mongabay that the Shipibo families and communities he works with don’t recognize the economic value of the peatlands. “They do not have this information, they are not aware of peatlands as a resource,” he said. “But they do have local knowledge, and they know [peatlands] by another name, using other concepts.”

According to the study, there are gaps in understanding between Indigenous and Western values of peatlands in the Imiría ACR. For the Shipibo peoples, peatlands don’t have a direct value or use, such as for carbon storage and climate mitigation. However, they do hold significant importance for the community’s livelihoods and cultural beliefs. They’re classified based on their key ecological characteristics, such as abundant species, and their various uses, such as for fishing, hunting and fruit collection.

Bennett told Mongabay the “lack of local and international mutual understanding is a huge missed opportunity for the environment and for local people in the case where they can gain paid work collaborating in identification and conservation.”

For Felipe Cadillo, it’s essential to bridge the gap between Indigenous communities and government authorities.

“Creating participatory and effective governance frameworks that incorporate Indigenous perspectives is crucial, as it allows for the recognition of their land rights and livelihoods beyond mere ecological conservation,” she said.

Conservation managers are currently working on updating the Imiría ACR master plan to include peatlands and consultation with communities, which Cauper said he hopes will make a difference.

Banner image: A Shipibo woman does the Shipibo-Konibo traditional embroitery art. Image by Juan Carlos Huayllapuma/CIFOR via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Shipibo communities create Indigenous guard to protect Peruvian Amazon from deforestation

Citation:

Felipe Cadillo, M. M., & Bennett, A. (2024). Navigating socio-political threats to Amazonian peatland conservation: Insights from the Imiria region, Peru. Sustainability, 16(16), 6967. doi:10.3390/su16166967

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