High Equatorial Andean Forests and Their Socioecological Problems

Abstract

The so-called Tropical Forests, in the case of Colombia, which is located biogeographically in the Intertropical Convergence Zone, that is, in the Equatorial Zone, are really equatorial forests. The high Andean forests that correspond to those above 2500 m above sea level are ecosystems of high ecological importance, due to their location on the border of temperate zones, known as coffee climates that are between 1200 and 2200 m above sea level and the cold zones corresponding to the Andean subpáramos and moors above 3200 m above sea level. In these ecosystems, there is great biodiversity that configures them as ecotones of great importance for the survival and conservation of species that have been adapting to difficult exploitation conditions, which have them at high risk of extinction, due to the expansion of the agricultural frontier and climatic factors such as torrential rains and extreme droughts exacerbated in recent decades. Due to the climate variability that currently characterizes global warming processes. In recent years, peasant resistance movements have emerged for the defense of the territory, which configures it as a scenario of active and growing socio-ecological conflicts.

1. Introduction

This chapter develops a vision of the current situation of the equatorial high Andean forests of Colombia and the socio-ecological conflicts that define their current situation. It begins with a proposal to approach its biogeographic context, the processes of occupation that have been transforming the natural landscape during the last 70 years, the processes that have defined these changes until its current situation of profound transformations that lead it to define it as an ecosystem in danger of extinction since only less than 5% of the original coverage remains.

Faced with this situation, environmental planning and management approach to date, as well as public policies, have been inefficient in guaranteeing their conservation and sustainability. As a result of the above, the last 10 years have been emerging processes of peasant resistance from mobilizations, strikes, and social organizations such as committees for the defense of water and forests, community action boards in towns and villages, and increasingly strong community aqueduct boards that demand participation in the decision on delimitation and conservation of areas of ecological importance such as the high Andean forests. Wetlands and water recharge areas. On the situation and balances of these social processes, an exhaustive investigation has been carried out that has been based on the participation of the author either as a direct author or as a public official, as a social leader, or as a researcher from the university academy.

In response to this situation and in the search to propose a new analytical approach to address environmental conflicts in these territories, a geo-ecosystem approach is proposed as an option that has environmental governance as a dynamic axis based on the recognition of the role for this purpose, must be fulfilled by rural communities that have historically been playing the main role in knowledge processes, conservation, management and adaptive strategies in these ecosystems.

2. Methodology

The research presented on the current situation of the high Andean forests summarizes the research products carried out by the author in several periods on the equatorial high Andean ecosystems.

First period (1986–1995): As a public official of the National Institute of Renewable Natural Resources (INDERENA) I toured a large part of the Andean mountains attending aspects of conservation, management, and management of environmental conflicts in the Eastern and Central mountain ranges and in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta [1].

Second period (2002–2006). As an advisor to Non-Governmental Organizations and the Ministry of Environment, Housing and Territorial Development for the evaluation of the implementation of the National Policy on Ecosystems of the High Andean Mountain [2].

Third period (2006–2022). As an advisor and member of social organizations for the defense of water and moors against energy mining extractivism.

Throughout this investigative process following the parameters of the methodological approach of research, Acción Participativa (IAP), method proposed, by the sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, was recognized nationally and internationally as an appropriate method for this type of socioecological work [3]. This method basically consists of a dialog with the communities and local actors of a territory, known as a dialog of knowledge.

3. Definition and biogeographic contexts of high Andean forests in Colombia and their sociocultural aspects

3.1 Biogeographical aspects

It could be said that the high Andean forests are located in a strip that goes from 2400 m above sea level to 3800 m above sea level. They are called high Andean forests or high montane forest, which are:

Forests included in the strip between 2900 to 3800 meters above sea level that are characterized as a stratum of trees and shrubs between 3 and 8 m high, with a predominance of compounds. (Col) are representative of this category oak groves and cloud forests, the vast majority located in relictual areas in the Sinú-Caribe, Caquetá, Meta, Patía, Catatumbo River, Alto and Medio Magdalena, Medio Cauca, Río Atrato and Sabana de Bogotá basins. [4]

However, it should be noted that the Colombian high Andean zone, which bioclimatically would be between 2400 and 3200 m above sea level, is characterized as cold climate. The following factors would explain this.

There are three large mountain ranges that have their own biogeographical characteristics and with it, the location of these natural forest masses varies in the altitudinal strip from one mountain range to another.

The diversity of the floristic composition according to scholars of this is due to the great variety of factors that have acted in its genesis and that is particularly associated since the geological origin of the Andes, which have been forming an extraordinary variety of geological formations that continues throughout the millennia and that constitutes the basis of the origin of the diverse and complex floristic and faunal diversities of the ecosystems of the high mountain equatorial. During the last great period of the Quaternary, due to climatic changes, the strip of forests throughout the Andean corridor has been changing and with its composition and structure due to migrations of some species from temperate zones to cold zones, this diversity in floristic composition in some especially wetter areas, Known as cloud forests have led to define these as areas of megabiodiversity or recognized as one of the main centers of diversity and speciation in the world [5, 6, 7].

In the northern Andean zone of the Cordillera Oriental, the most characteristic species on its eastern slope are the enennillo (Wenmania tomentosa) and on the western slope the oak (Quercus humboldtii).

There are relatively few in-depth studies of the forests of the equatorial high mountain despite the fact that these ecosystems have been under great pressure, especially due to the expansion of the agricultural frontier.

“Several estimates suggest that less than 10% of the original Andean forests remain in Colombia” (Henderson et al. 1991) and, probably, less than 5% of the high Andean forests. [8]

Recent studies have found that higher altitude forests are more heterogeneous, therefore not finding a dominant species [9].

There is also the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta as a set of ecosystems independent of the Andean mountain ranges and older than these, where the presence of equatorial forests at the heights mentioned for the high Andean forest, depends on its biogeographic characteristics of high complexity. Both the forests of the Andean areas and those of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta above 2400 m above sea level can be grouped as equatorial forests of the high mountains.

3.2 Occupation of the spaces of the high Andean forests and sociocultural aspects

3.2.1 Construction of mestizo peasant culture

The mestizo peasant culture of the high mountain or cold climate, which is characterized by the use of the ruana, the scarf or the blankets, as one of the main founding peoples of the Colombian nation of origin especially Muisca, Paez, and Pasto is located in these territories and for centuries has contributed to constitute the current territories in the high Andean mountains.

“The territory of the páramo” has been forged in the amalgam between settlers and high Andean nature, is the genesis of the crossing of their realities. Recognize that these ecosystems have been undergoing transformation processes mediated by human presence, to the extent that lagoons and their sacred environments since time immemorial had been treated as sacred sites by the Native Americans of the Chibcha civilization and others earlier and for 500 years by the Hispanic presence that displaced the indigenous cultures of the valleys and fertile slopes, The poor peasant, product of miscegenation and the indigenous peoples survivors of the humanitarian catastrophe of extermination took refuge in these natural scenarios and configured since then new environmental systems. Thus, peasant peoples or peasant indigenous peoples emerged who became the authentic environmental subjects of these territories to the extent that they chose as an action of resistance the defense of the land as a unifying element, not seen as circumscribed to private property, but closely linked to the concept of territory, nature, common good and the sacredness of it, while it is the giver of the benefits in food, water, work and rest. The mythical imaginary of the Chibcha ancestor, as the spirit of the current environmental subject, survives in the mestizo culture of the peasant of the region of the Cundiboyacense highlands, and in a similar way we can say that, in the Nariño and Cauca mountains, in the Serranía del Cocuy, in Perijá, the Central mountain range and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta [10, p. 199].

The high mountain ecosystems that until the mid-twentieth century was preserved almost intact, have been suffering a process of deterioration due to social and economic processes, related to the displacement or migration of populations from the mountain slopes or the high valleys and Andean plateaus, to higher areas, due to the deterioration of the soils, to the intensification of potato cultivation, propitiated by the green revolution, which advised the use of the soils of these ecosystems and those of the high Andean forest as the propitious ones for this crop. In this way, the high mountains became the last refuge of peasant and indigenous inhabitants who were also dragged there by the various political violence that occurred throughout the twentieth century. The peasant or the indigenous who had kept sacredness in front of these territories and their lagoons were surprised by the aforementioned social processes and through strategies of adaptation to the difficult climatic conditions of these lands, settled there hunting, fishing, and cultivating tubers and roots. Throughout this period of ancestral recognition, as of the occupation, the relationship of the inhabitants with nature has not differentiated the páramo itself, as a non-forested ecosystem, from the high forests that were established as limits between the areas of the high mountain and the lowlands of the mountain slopes in the cold land, traditionally occupied by peasants from the highlands and mountain ranges in Boyacá, Cundinamarca, Santanderes, Tolima, Cauca, Nariño, Valle, Antiguo Caldas, and Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. This differentiation did not occur because they constituted a set of habitats where the cultures of the cold lands developed and the highest areas were considered common properties, which could not be transformed into the regime of private property that characterized the other Andean territories during the Colony and the Republic.

3.2.2 Occupation of spaces in the Colombian high Andean mountains and the use of forests, consolidation of a peasant economy

The areas of the greatest presence of the forests of the high equatorial mountains correspond to the Cauca-Nariño mountain massif, better known as the Colombian Massif, where several of the main rivers of Colombia are born, such as the Cauca and the Magdalena, which in turn constitute the Magdalena-Cauca hydrological system, the most important for the development of the Colombian territory; there is also born the Patía River that drains toward the slope of the Choco Biogeográfico; and the Caquetá and Putumayo rivers that go to the Amazon region.

These spaces were occupied for millennia by peoples who possibly, for the most part, came from the Caribbean, who would constitute the ancestral indigenous peoples and in the most recent centuries by the Afro-descendant peoples who arrived in Colombian territory as a result of slavery during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.

With the Hispanic occupation, a new indigenous mestizo-Hispanic peasant was consolidated in the areas of the high equatorial mountain, which with different degrees of intensity has populated the high mountains of the former departments of Caldas, Antioquia, Valle del Cauca, in the Western and Central mountain ranges and the highlands of Cundiboyacense and Santander in the Eastern mountain range of Colombia. It should be noted that, during the second half of the nineteenth century, German migration arrived in Colombia, which was located in part of the mountains of Santander and Boyacá and Arab immigration in part of the Antioquia mountain, contributing to enrich the variety of peasant miscegenations.

This process of occupation was accompanied by the use of countless species for the manufacture of utensils such as baskets, backpacks, crafts, sieves, and other objects to facilitate the daily work of the people, who collected the indigenous heritage and perfected it for centuries with the skill of the artisans, who in each subregion were and still are elements of cultural identity in Antioquia. the Coffee Axis, Boyacá, Santander, Tolima, Cauca and Nariño. Species such as the enennillo (Wenmania tomentosa) was used until well into the 1960s to extract from its bark substances for tanning hides and countless vines and pastures for crafts.

3.2.3 From peasant agriculture to wheat-barley monocultures fourteenth and twentieth centuries

Prior to the arrival of the Hispanic occupation, the most characteristic indigenous peoples of the high equatorial mountains were the various peoples of the Cauca River, the Patía and the Putumayo, the Quimbaya peoples of the Central Mountain Range, the Pijao people in Tolima, the great Muisca people in the Cundiboyacense highlands and the Arawak peoples. Tairona, kogi, arsarios, and others in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.

From these peoples and their miscegenation with the Hispanic element, a mestizo peasant people emerged that today characterizes the majority of the Colombian population in the highlands.

From the sixteenth century with the Hispanic occupation, cereal crops such as wheat and barley and deciduous fruit trees were introduced, which displaced, either by intensity or by express prohibition of the Spanish crown to indigenous crops. Cattle and sheep also entered, which became an element of high importance for peasant life, due to its milk, meat and wool products, the latter replacing cotton in blankets throughout the highlands of Cundiboyacense and Santander mainly. In this way what brought the Hispanic invasion to the Colombian Andean zone was not its culture but its Mediterranean nature forged by long centuries of Roman, Mongolic and Arab occupation.

Throughout the period from the sixteenth century until the first half of the twentieth century, the occupation of these peoples was made in the areas of the equatorial forests of high mountain. During the Colony, it was these forests that provided wood inputs for the nascent and flourishing peoples during this period and the first phase of the birth of the Republic between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The occupation of species such as oak encenillo, tuno, cucharo el cedar, and guayacán stands out.

Peasant agriculture in these high mountain areas was characterized by crop rotation between corn, potatoes, quinoa, and legumes typical of the area and others brought from the old continent such as barley, wheat, and oats.

In particular, these last two crops formed the basis of peasant economies that provided for a long period of inputs for bread and beverages in urban areas of towns and cities. Whole wheat bread, soups of various varieties of wheat and barley were staples of families in the cold lands and especially in cities such as Bogotá, Tunja, and Popayán. The peasant arepa based on corn and its multiple forms of preparation is today one of the staple foods of the Colombian population.

3.3 Industrialization of the countryside and extractivism

3.3.1 Industrial potato monoculture and its impact on high Andean ecosystems

Since pre-Hispanic times, the peoples of the highlands of the Andes and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta cultivated potatoes as one of their most precious products along with corn and arracacha. Until the early twentieth century in Boyacá, various varieties of wild potatoes were collected, which were born spontaneously in the clearings of the high Andean forests. Due to the population growth of urban areas after the 1950s, the demand for this tuber grew and with it research on new varieties. Prior to the Green Revolution that emerged strongly in the 1960s, potato crops were fertilized with organic materials resulting from the composting of livestock and poultry manure, as well as ash from the burning of firewood as fuel in peasant homes. At this time, potato crops were made in the area of Andean forests up to 3000 m above sea level. The introduction of new varieties of potato dependent on agrochemicals for fertilization and control of pests and diseases, generated during the Green Revolution, was propitiating the occupation of moors and areas of high Andean forest, encouraging the monopolization of land in fewer and fewer smallholder owners or tenants of peasant plots, which altered the mosaic of high Andean mountain ecosystems where the main victim was the forest. In this way, the large forest masses have been disappearing at the expense of the agricultural frontier for potato planting with rotation with semi-extensive livestock that today characterizes much of the territory. During the 1990s, especially in the Central mountain range, poppy crops proliferated in these areas. One of the great socio-environmental problems of today is the uncontrollable growth of industrial potato crops, with high consumption of biocides that affect the recharge areas and birth of water resources of thousands of streams and hundreds of rivers. During this process, the peasant went from small smallholder with his plot of multi-stratum crops to day laborer in potato crops and cattle farms in these mountainous regions.

3.3.2 Second half of the twentieth century: coal mining, iron, other mining: ecosystem fragmentation, paralysis and destruction of peasant territories, and planting of eucalyptus and pines

During the 1950s, a process of industrialization in Colombia began, which led to the expansion in the exploitation of coal that had been used since the nineteenth century to feed domestic stoves and was now required to feed the hydroelectric plants of Paipa, Zipaquirá in the highlands of Cundiboyacense and others in Valle del Cauca. In the same way, the development of the steel industry in Paz del Río Boyacá required large tons of this energy mineral. Toward the 1980s and up to the present, this mineral nourishes cement and other steel companies. Due to this, the exploitation of sinkhole coal in these departments increased during the following decades until today in areas of the high Andean mountains, seriously affecting aquifers and water currents, until they led to their contamination or disappearance. To stabilize the mine sinkholes, during the decade of 1960–1970, the secretaries of agriculture increased the planting of eucalyptus forests (Eucalyptus globulus) as a timber input for this exploitation work and with them were replaced from native forests by forests planted with this exotic species. Today, the landscape of the Cundiboyacense highlands at the forest level is mostly covered by this type of forest community. The damage to plant and animal biodiversity is considerable, expressed in the disappearance of several species of birds such as eagles and other raptors and mammals such as spectacled bears and deer.

4. Current situation: environmental conflicts and an ecosystem in danger of extinction

The dynamics of the expansion in the occupation of spaces during the last 80 years in the equatorial high mountain areas of Colombia have brought as a consequence and dramatic decrease of forests in these regions and taking into account the figure of less than 5% of existence of the original Andean forests we could affirm that this ecosystem vital for the regulation of biogeochemical cycles and ecological corridors of fauna and the flora that it lends to the whole of the Main Ecological Structure of the nation, is today in danger of extinction [8].

The following environmental problems, which have become real socio-ecological conflicts, which are at the root of this worrying situation are:

1. Expansion of agricultural frontiers to affirm the post-Thispánicos settlements in the mountain ranges, which were constituted during the time of La Colonia (1530–1819) as a basis for the creation of the Republic of Colombia from the War of Independence, which although it brought contributions from European Modernity and gave birth to a mestizo people with the peasantry, It was carried ahead with its demographic catastrophe product of violence and diseases and until the near extinction of indigenous cultures such as the Muisca, the Tairona, and others cornered them in the depths of the jungles and mountains. During this period and for the construction of nascent cities such as the cities of Popayán, Santafé de Antioquia, Cali, Popayán, Bogotá, Tunja and Pamplona, Villa de Leyva, and Guaduas among the main colonial settlements of the Andean mountain, the wood of the equatorial high Andean forests was used and use of the fauna was made that was intense until the second half of the twentieth century and still continues hunting and Illicit trade in the fauna and flora of these ecosystems. The Conquest and the Colony with its disastrous traces of destruction of nature and ancestral peoples and the peasant people, the main victim of all the violence of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after the birth of the Republic, has not yet ended in these territories. However, despite the destruction of important forest masses during this period, until the late 1950s when the Agustín Codazzi Geographic Institute generated the cartography of Colombia to support Law 2 of 1959 that created the Zones of Forest Reserve of the Nation, large areas of high Andean forests existed throughout the country.

2. With the establishment of Hispanic colonial capitals such as Villa de Leyva in Boyacá for the planting of wheat and barley, two clean crops, as they are called from modern agricultural systems, forests were destroyed and land was exhausted in the highlands of Cundiboyacense to generate a deep ecological crisis that has been narrated by Alexander von Humboldt in one of his visits to Colombia for the first decade of the nineteenth century noted that it was necessary to suspend the use of firewood as fuel due to the depletion of forests including those of the Eastern Hills of Bogotá and recommended replacing the source of domestic energy based on firewood with coal from Nemocón With this, in the following years the energy substitution would begin in Colombia, which would be the replacement of renewable energy sources by non-renewable ones, that is, by fossil fuels such as coal [11, 12].

3. This destruction of the Andean landscapes since the 1950s has continued in these Boyaca and Cundinamarca territories of the high Andean mountains with the proliferation of technified crops of flowers, tomatoes, legumes, and fruits.

4. With the depletion of native wood, either by the use or by expansion of the agricultural frontier throughout the twentieth century, particularly in the period between 1950 and 2010, pine (Pinus patula) and eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus) plantations have increased in the high equatorial mountains of departments of Boyacá, Santanderes, Cundinamarca, Antioquia, Caldas, Risaralda, Quindío, Tolima, Valle, Cauca, and Nariño, a situation that has brought a serious socioecological problem due to the depletion of water resources and the destruction of habitats of wild fauna and flora, introducing profound changes in the landscape that today barely hides in small refuges the native species still existing but threatened.

5. Potrerization, that is, the alteration of peasant and indigenous production systems by large pastures, is the main indicator in these ecosystems of the crisis of the agricultural sector and the violence of the periods of 1946–1958 and 1982 to the present. Large areas, which can be estimated at some 2 million hectares of peasant and indigenous productive systems, have been being made potrerized or technified with systems highly dependent on agrochemicals and biocides such as potatoes, onions, vegetables, deciduous fruits, and highly technical floriculture with greenhouses, affecting the subsistence economies of these peoples and introducing modernizing patterns of agriculture that are threatening the existence of Peasant peoples and small indigenous settlements, which still survive throughout the Colombian high equatorial mountains.

6. During the decades of 1980–1990, there were oil bonanzas in the Eastern Plains and piedmont areas of Arauca and Casanare and coal bonanzas in the departments of Guajira and Cesar. All of the above on warm climate ecosystems. From 1990 to the present, the exploration and exploitation of coal and oil have been located in the high Andean mountains on ecosystems of the high Andean forests of the mountain massifs of the moors of Pisba, Guerrero, Guacheneque [13] for coal extraction due to the high prices of this energy source in the international market and oil in the areas of high Andean forests of the Sogamoso valley in the municipalities to the northeast of this as are corrales, Beteitiva, Paz del Rio, and others. This has led to strong and dynamic socioenvironmental conflicts between the peasantry and foreign oil and coal companies favored by the prevailing extractivist policies [14, 15].

7. At present, new threats, due to the growth of large cities and the megalopolization of cities such as Bogotá D.C., Medellín, Cali, Bucaramanga, Pereira, Manizales, Pasto, and Popayán, loom over these ecosystems: courbanization, tourism, and the installation of solar energy parks. Foreign immigrants and urban dwellers with good economic resources have begun a process of buying peasant land at low costs, to establish country houses, generating a process of dispossession of their lands from poor peasants who normally end up being employed as semi-schooled servitude by their new employers and begins a strong trend of so-called ecotourism that although it constitutes a flow of economic resources that can favor the income of Peasant families also loom as a threat to the high Andean relict forest and páramos by altering the scarce habitats of wild species during bird watching and camping and altering peasant life and the extraction of wild species for urban gardens. In addition to this, the urban growth in the indicated cities and the corridor of the Sogamoso valley or Chicamocha river valley in the department of Boyacá between Tunja and Paz del Río, has been destroying the tutelary hills of urban areas, affecting the native species of the high Andean forest and with it the water resources by conversion of the streams into rainwater channels and waste deposit.

8. In recent years, in the department of Boyacá, favored by public policies to introduce solar energy as an energy source, projects for large solar energy parks have been proposed in areas of high Andean forests and páramos that threaten the supply and quality of water resources and the existence of native forest ecosystems. This has already manifested itself as an environmental conflict generating important mobilizations of peasants in the municipalities of Paipa and Sotaquirá against these projects, the fragility of public policies and the corruption of government entities in the face of initiatives of new and juicy businesses promoted by foreign investments in these projects has been evident [16].

9. This currently constitutes the basis of socio-environmental conflicts over water and in defense of forests and moors in the department of Boyacá which is one of the departments with the greatest presence of high Andean forests in Colombia, along with the departments of Cundinamarca, Cauca, Tolima, Santander, and the Coffee Axis.

4.1 Protected areas: overvaluation of the páramos and disregard of the high equatorial Andean forest

During the two decades of this century, the governments of Colombia have been implementing a public policy for the protection of the ecosystems of the high Andean mountains called “Delimitation of the páramos”, generating great environmental conflicts due to the way in which it has been built from a technical and scientific perspective that has ignored the territorial realities in the regions where these ecosystems exist. The strategy of delimitation of the páramos advanced by the Alexander von Humboldt Institute, entity in charge of the protection and conservation of biodiversity in Colombia, between 2012 and 2018 has ignored that the high Andean ecosystems, which include the páramos and the high Andean forests are complex sets of deeply dependent ecosystem mosaics, where, In addition, due to the processes of destruction of the high Andean forest in the last 80 years, a process of paramization has been propitiated, which consists of the fact that old areas of high Andean forest are now areas of páramos. In the expression of biologist Germán Márquez, what has happened is that many of the current páramos are degraded high Andean forests. A serious mistake is made, ignoring in the delimitation of high Andean ecosystems the importance of forests, which continue to be pressured by livestock processes and potato monocultures in large areas, without actions to protect these by environmental authorities. This is today the cause of one of the main socio-ecological conflicts in these regions. The equatorial high Andean forest is the main ecosystem barrier that favors water recharge zones and allows the regulation of wind currents and the regulation of water and soil resources, necessary for the existence with quality and quantity of peasant production systems, as well as the habitat of large mammal species such as the spectacled bear, deer and birds such as the eagle, Las Pavas de Monte, and Los Gavilanes.

5. Results: perspectives for its recovery from the Geoecosystems-territory-environment (GTA) model and environmental governance

Although since the 1990s, a policy was developed for the management and protection of high Andean ecosystems and páramos whose application was evaluated by the author of this writing as part of a team of researchers from the Ministry of the Environment. The actions developed for the protection of these areas, especially during the governments of President Santos (2010–2018) focused on the delimitation of the páramos, showing a contempt for the importance of the high Andean forests and their population. Aspects such as its importance in the regulation of water resources and as a bioclimatic barrier between temperate zones and high mountains were not taken into account despite the diagnoses about their critical situation in terms of depletion of the areas that characterize them. During the 20 consecutive years of this century, the exploitation of wood of species such as oak and cedar continues without making effective the application of laws that prohibit this practice and important areas of natural forests continue to be cut down for the planting of pine (P. patula) and eucalyptus (E. globulus) or more critically for the expansion of the livestock frontier and potato monoculture [2, 17].

The precarious situation of the peasants, due to the abandonment of part of the State, has favored the continuation of the destruction of these ecosystems and the increase of livestock breeding, an agricultural system of very low productivity and generation of employment. This socioeconomic factor is unknown or weakly addressed in government policies and programs for the conservation of high mountain ecosystems and has been the main cause for the emergence of socio-ecological conflicts in the last 10 years within which the movements for the defense of water against gold mining in the Santurban páramo in northeastern Colombia are mentioned. For the defense of water and territory against coal mining in the Pisba páramo in Boyacá and for the defense of peasant territories and micro-watersheds against the mining of construction materials and the construction of solar parks in the wetlands of the Chontales páramo in the villages of Sativa, The Stock Exchange and the Carrizal in the municipalities of Paipa and Sotaquirá.

According to “For example, when the formulation of the territorial planning plans of the municipalities at the national level was carried out in the 2000s, environmental sustainability became merely an instrument requirement to access economic resources, behaving as a polysemic concept and an empty signifier formulated (2000–2010 generally); situation that has not been corrected, since most of these plans to date have not been reformulated or updated” [18].

Due to the above and seeking to solve the crisis in the predominant environmental planning and management, collecting the proposals of the extensive research, arising mainly from the workshops with communities carried out in the processes of the evaluation of the Program of the research carried out by the Water, Health and Environment group on ecosystem services and water governance and the requests made by the communities in conflict against mining in the Paramo of Pisba (Bibliography) and in the villages of Sativa and La Bolsa of the municipality of Paipa has come within the framework of strengthening environmental governance by proposing the Geoecosystem, Territory, Environment, GTA approach, fed from geoecology and landscape theory. This model is based on considering that there are five major geoecosystems that manifest themselves in all territories: water, soil, biodiversity, climate, and social system [2, 15, 19].

Within this approach, the territory as a biogeographic and socioeconomic cultural space, in permanent transformation and construction by anthropic activities and the dynamics of nature, is the main object-subject of environmental analysis. This object-subject connotation refers to the fact that in this scenario the four great physical-biotic geoecosystems are interacting: water, soil, biodiversity, climate, and the social system that by its conscious nature serves as a transforming subject of the territorial environmental complex (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Geoecosystems-territory-environment model, GTA Fountain: [19].

Each of the four geoecosystems: water, soil, biodiversity, and social system nest in the climate geoecosystem, the most important of all and which is the ultimate determiner of the possibility of existence and/or sustainability of the other systems in the environment that constitutes the territory where they are located. Water, soil, and biodiversity systems in natural conditions, that is, not mediated by human action, have cyclical thermoecological exchanges that allow them to be sustainable and maintain their resilience. The social system differs from the previous ones to the extent that it generates more and more environmental demands, which are characterized by thermoecological-economic, non-cyclical exchanges, which, given the intensity of the magnitude of the spaces occupied and the intensity of the exploitation of natural resources, are affecting the environmental supply or ecosystem services in the territory, And the human ecological footprint grows continuously, due to an extractivist and consumerist development model that characterizes the current capitalist production system [19].

6. Final conclusions and reflections

1. The equatorial forest ecosystems of the high Andean mountains and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia are in a serious environmental crisis due to the devastation of recent decades that has reduced them to 5% of their original cover.

2. The centralist environmental management and ignorance of the environmental systems and the socio-ecological realities of the territories of the high equatorial mountains of Colombia has allowed great extractivist and predatory forces of these ecosystems to continue deepening the ecological crisis and the threat of extinction of the equatorial high Andean forests in Colombia looms.

3. In recent years, countless and growing environmental conflicts have arisen against extractivism and for the defense of territories based on the defense of water and forests as regulators of climate patterns, wildlife habitats, and water suppliers for thousands of inhabitants.

4. Corresponding to this socio-ecological problem, an increasingly strong movement has been emerging from civil society, especially from the peasant population that demands the implementation of environmental governance processes that recognize peasants as a population subject to rights to a healthy environment, water, and dignified life on their lands. A law recognizing the rights of the peasant population is currently being drafted in the Colombian parliament, an important step to facilitate the protection, recovery, and conservation of the equatorial high Andean forests in Colombia.

5. Environmental governance actions must be complemented by the change of focus of environmental management that is ignorant of socio-ecological realities toward management based on environmental governance and the geo-ecosystem approach proposed in this article, an approach that has been emerging and acquiring more purposeful force from social movements and academia.

7. Recognitions

I express my gratitude to the communities and social organizations of peasants and community aqueducts of the municipalities of Paipa and Sotaquirá in the departments of Boyacá, Cundinamarca, Santander, and Tolima, who have taught me many of their expressions, knowledge, and customs about life in the mountains, to my parents who educated me recognizing the peasant wisdom to the following universities: Universidad El Bosque, Universidad del Tolima, Universidad P edagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia, and Universidad de Cundinamarca, for having given me the opportunity to investigate with the research groups and with the students the environmental realities of the population of the high Andean equatorial mountains and Alegría Fonseca, Margarita Marino de Botero and Julio Carrizosa Umaña for opening spaces for me to investigate, publicize and publish the results of several investigations on the high Andean mountains in the last 30 years. To INDERENA, for having been the cradle for 10 years of my concerns as an environmental researcher.

Conflict of interest

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.