Salvador Nieto, Executive Secretary of CCAD: “With COVID19, it is essential to maintain ecosystem equilibrium to ensure the provision of our environmental goods and services".
In view of the global emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Council of Ministers of the Central American Commission on Environment and Development (CCAD) stated that it is essential to maintain ecosystem equilibrium in order to ensure the provision of their environmental goods and services, since their degradation and deterioration has repercussions on the emergence of new threats and risks to human security.
In a public statement on April 24, 2020 and virtually, officials also indicated that overexploitation of natural resources, land use change, degradation, pollution of air, soil and water, are added to extreme hydrometeorological phenomena resulting from climate variability and change that deteriorate the natural resource base, wildlife and thus the quality of life of all living beings.
Today more than ever, strengthening and recovering the region's economy will require close coordination with environmental management in order to provide an integrated response, which is precisely what will be promoted in the coming months.
In an interview with Salvador Nieto, Executive Secretary of the Central American Commission on Environment and Development (CCAD), he addressed some of the justifications that gave rise to the declaration of the Ministers of Environment of Central America and the Dominican Republic.
Secretary, the Declaration indicated that it will be fundamental to generate an articulation with environmental management to ensure an integral response to the COVID19 problem. Was this the issue that brought the ministers together in an extraordinary meeting?
Indeed. The meeting held by the ministers on April 17 had as one of its objectives to make a regional balance of the general status of the operations of the environmental authorities of the whole region, the seven countries of Central America and the Dominican Republic. On this occasion, they all had an opportunity to review the main impacts, which could be summarised in three types of impact:
The first impact has to do with the daily performance of one's own activities as a result of the social distancing measures that have been employed in all the countries of the region. As a result of these measures, the ministers noted that their operational activity has been limited, which has had a strong impact, since the regular scheduling of activities that were planned is not only postponed but some of them are probably not going to be carried out.
The second impact that is also very important and worrying is the issue of financial impact. There are cases of (environmental) ministries in which an important source of the financing with which they carry out activities for protection, sustainable use, natural resource conservation, climate change mitigation and adaptation measures, come from the different activities that the ministries carry out; for example, with the administration of national park systems or protected natural areas and wildlife protected areas. So, not having national tourists, much less foreign ones, means not generating the resources that were previously obtained by charging entrance fees to such places. These resources helped to carry out various activities of the ministries; it is expected that this decrease in income will affect to some extent the capacity to implement measures in environmental matters.
The third impact has to do with future impact. It is clear that there will be measures in the future - in the medium and long term - for environmental and climate change programmes, and there too it is important to start thinking about the post-emergency impacts of COVID 19.
The bet is that governments can plan a return to a "new normal" where the role of environment ministries would be key. The link with environmental management must become strategic within the economic recovery programme that the countries will have to promote.
Does this statement place more emphasis on the post-emergency stage than on the current stage in facing the COVID19 crisis?
In fact, what the Council of Ministers is visualising is that after this situation of social distancing and lockdown due to a substantial reduction in the regular activities of the societies in the region, there will also come a significant process of reactivation, rehabilitation and recovery of the systems and economies of the entire region.
And it is precisely the role of the environmental ministries that the Council is envisioning. How the ministries are going to accompany an effective economic recovery that does not undermine environmental management and the commitments that have been acquired in recent times. I am referring above all to those processes that are being promoted in matters of climate change and for multilateral environmental agreements on biodiversity, desertification, those related to protected species, among others that each ministry or region has acquired.
What we have to think about here is as Ms. Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, pointed out when she said: “...it is important that what we rebuild, what we build again, is built better.” In other words, we have to think that this is an opportunity to correct some things that probably need correction, to make societies more resilient, cities more resilient, economies more resilient, more sustainable and above all, to lower the intensity of the use of carbon-based sources.
I believe that these types of realities motivated the Ministers of the region to make an emphasis on strategically visualising the post-COVID19 phase as the phase where an effective and permanent accompaniment of the environmental authorities will be required. What the ministers are doing is calling for it to be done in this way, and also to put themselves at the disposal of the countries and of the other integration systems in order to accompany this reactivation.
The European Union has expressed its support for the recovery of the region, by redirecting funds to support the emergency phase and the recovery and rehabilitation processes. In particular, the CCAD has a European Union project within the framework of the EUROCLIMA+ programme on Flood and Drought Risk Management. How can this project support this post-COVID19 stage and these plans to boost the economies under an environmental framework?
In fact, the programmes and projects that are implemented in the realm of the CCAD and in the area of climate change and environment, by definition, are programmes that are going to help in the post-COVID19 phase.
The project we have with EUROCLIMA+, which is based on increasing resilience to drought and flooding in the region, is a project that promotes intersectoriality in the Central American Integration System (SICA). In this project we are participating with two other agencies of the System; the Coordination Centre for the Prevention of Disasters in Central America and the Dominican Republic (CEPREDENAC), and the Regional Hydraulic Resources Committee (CRRH).
For example, CEPREDENAC's activities have played a very active role in the contingency plan phase that SICA has prepared together with the Executive Secretariat of the Council of Health Ministers. In CEPREDENAC, its activities are aimed at strengthening risk management information systems.
These information systems, which in fact have already been strengthened by the EUROCLIMA+ project, are systems that are being used not only for droughts and floods, but in general for the risk management systems of the region. This is an added value that is already being generated, the same happens with CRRH. It is betting on a regional system for droughts and floods that will actually give us key information in matters of agriculture and energy, which in fact will be key in the reconstruction phase and everything that has to do with food security.
We have already seen that one of the first tasks that must be guaranteed, in the unprecedented emergency that we are living with, is food security. In that sense, climate information is very important in our case as is the drought, one of the fundamental issues of CCAD's intervention. We have a pilot project for water conservation works that are going to ensure the water supply, the first measure taken against COVID19 requires water in the homes but also water in the communities. The physical works projects underway for water conservation are projects that we are going to continue to execute and that are going to contribute greatly.