Conservation efforts and climate finance in South America are too focused on iconic biodiversity hot spots, like the Amazon rainforest, at the peril of crucial desert, wetland and other ecosystems, environmentalists and Indigenous leaders warn.
From the Atacama desert in Chile, to mountainous paramos in Colombia and Brazil’s tropical wetlands and savannas, more attention should be paid to other ecosystems, which are too often sidelined in nature policies, funding and climate talks.
Cecilia Morgaso, head of Chile’s Natural Laboratory of the Atacama Desert, said that as the world pushes for renewables, politicians, and even environmentalists, are not paying enough attention to the impact of the green energy transition on deserts and other ecosystems, such as savannas and grasslands.
When it comes to deserts, “usually people think they are not good for anything,” said Morgaso.
Chile has the world’s largest copper and lithium reserves, most of which are in the Atacama desert. But the desert is under increased pressure from mining for the metals, both vital for renewable energy, as well as from wind and solar farms.
Morgaso said such projects endangered the desert ecosystem.
“In the face of a global need for energy, it is difficult for a minority of people to say no,” said Morgaso. “The problem is: how can you value … the wealth of the desert’s biodiversity?”
The United Nations’ COP16 biodiversity summit in Colombia this month paid more attention to protecting tropical rainforests, in particular the Amazon, than other ecosystems where renewable energy projects are being ramped up.
The issue of energy transition is a key talking point this week at the COP29 climate conference in Baku where host Azerbaijan is urging countries to sign up to a pledge to increase global energy storage capacity six-fold to 1,500 gigawatts by 2030 to boost renewable power.
For countries to meet their pledges to reduce carbon emissions, the critical minerals market value, now worth around US$325 billion, should increase by 55 per cent by 2030, according to a report from the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organisation that provides recommendations on the energy sector.
Rising demand for minerals from gold to lithium means increased pressure on global biodiversity.
Ignored ecosystems
In Brazil, while much attention and donor funding has focused on stemming deforestation and protecting the Amazon rainforest, other biodiverse ecosystems have been largely ignored.
In the Northeast Region of Brazil, the Caatinga semi-arid tropical forest is grappling with the expansion of renewable energy projects, such as wind and solar farms.
“There’s a transmission line literally in the middle of my territory. This represents a long lasting impact,” said Cristiane Pankararu, an Indigenous leader and member of APIB,
Brazil’s largest umbrella organisation of Indigenous groups.
The Amazon rainforest enjoys greater legal protection compared to other biodiverse ecosystems in Brazil.
About 80 per cent of Brazil’s protected areas are in Brazil’s north, where the Amazon rainforest is located, according to Instituto Socioambiental, an environmental and Indigenous advocacy group.
Government regulation to protect natural areas from farm expansion is also stronger in the Amazon, where farmers are required to keep trees standing on 80 per cent of their land.
In other parts of Brazil that threshold is 20 per cent.
Yet other biodiverse regions of Brazil also face pressure from the expansion of agriculture and cattle ranching.
“The whole Midwest has turned to agribusiness … be it soy, corn or cattle production,” said Pankararu. “You have huge extensions of deforested areas without any real environmental impact assessment or projects to mitigate those impacts.”
International trade regulations also give more protection to the Amazon rainforest.
For example, the European Union will introduce a ban in 2026 on commodities linked to deforestation to protect forested areas, such as the Amazon, but other ecosystems like grasslands and savannas will not be included.
In Colombia, also home to vast swathes of Amazon rainforest, Indigenous leader Camilo Niño, said little climate finance was allocated to preserving ecosystems other than the Amazon.
“We see that finance and all of the (environmental) agreements are focused on forests … and not on other ecosystems,” said Niño, a member of Colombia’s Indigenous National Commission.
A leader of the Arhuaco Indigenous people, Niño highlighted that the snowy mountaintops and the paramo from the Sierra Nevada mountainous region where they live are vital to recharge the rivers that feed the Amazon forest.
“All the water that these areas produce … go to the Colombian Amazon, so protection must be whole”, he said.
Environmentalist Yana Gevorgyan said little was known about most non-forest ecosystems.
“There are certain ecosystems that aren’t even well understood yet, which lack sufficient data for us to be able to map their distribution globally,” said Gevorgyan, head of Group on Earth Observations, a partnership between governments and NGOs aimed at improving and promoting data about the earth.
While there are well-structured initiatives to detect global forest loss, such as the Global Forest Watch database, initiatives to track loss of less well-known ecosystems like savannas are still lacking, she said.
GEO launched a Global Ecosystems Atlas Initiative last month that aims to map all the world’s ecosystems by 2026, “not just mangroves, not just tropical forests, but in fact peatlands, salt marshes, savannas”, said Gevorgyan.
The idea is to gather data to keep track of the health of such often underrepresented and ignored natural areas.
“No natural space exists in isolation”, said Pankaruru.
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