** The current policy series features profiles of countries with national-level policies for promoting ecological connectivity. This month’s focus is Ecuador, where many decades of connectivity conservation have recently coalesced into legislation which formally allows the government to designate connectivity corridors. **
Ecuador is one of the world’s most biodiverse countries. Species richness on the eastern slope of the Andes and western Amazon basin is quite likely the highest ever documented. To lend some perspective, just one hectare of Yasuní National Park hosts 655 different tree species, more than all tree species in the continental U.S. and Canada combined.
Along this Andes-Amazon interface lies Ecuador’s first formally designated corridor, dubbed the Sangay-Podocarpus Connectivity Corridor (Corredor de Conectividad Sangay Podocarpus, CCSP). The CCSP is home to thousands of endemic plant and animal species, along with threatened or endangered species such as the Andean ‘spectacled’ bear, jaguar, mountain tapir, and Andean condor. Given this immense biological richness and a mosaic of land tenures and land uses – paired with threats of mining, unregulated deforestation, and road construction—a coalition of NGO, academic, and government institutions is working to maintain, enhance and restore ecological connectivity through robust national-level legislation and policy.
While informal corridors have existed in Ecuador since 1992, these antecedents have been non-governmental initiatives promoted by NGOs such as Conservation International and World Wildlife Fund. A decade long process involving numerous organizations and research groups culminated in the Ministry of the Environment, Water, and Ecological Transition (Ministerio del Ambiente, Agua y Transición Ecológica; MAATE), adopting guidelines and technical criteria for the design, establishment, and management of connectivity corridors. In July 2020, the CCSP became the first corridor officially recognized by Ecuadorian law.
The formal genesis of the CCSP began in 2010 when MAATE, with support from Nature and Culture International (NCI) and financing from the German Agency for International Cooperation, first elaborated the need for the CCSP. In the years that followed, MAATE and NCI partnered with governments at several jurisdictional levels to establish a patchwork of various conservation lands. These included four areas within the National Protected Areas System, one provincial conservation area and 10 municipal conservation areas. At the time there was no legal or governing framework that unified these parcels into a broader conservation initiative.
The legal development of corridors in Ecuador followed a parallel track. The lineage of corridor law in Ecuador can be traced back as far as 2001, when the country adopted its national strategy for biodiversity. In 2008 Ecuador adopted its new Constitution, making international headlines for granting legal rights to Nature. In 2017, the nation’s Environmental Code came into effect, which recognized connectivity corridors as a Special Area for Conservation of Biodiversity. This granted MAATE the authority to adopt formal guidelines and technical criteria for corridors, which it did in 2020.
From a practical standpoint, most of the connectivity conservation activities will take legal form at the local level. In Ecuador, authority over land-use planning has largely been left to Decentralized Autonomous Governments representing each province, municipality, and district. Decisions regarding zoning, rural and urban development, and resource extraction are made when governments update their Land Use and Management Plan (Plan de Uso y Gestion de Suelo, PUGS) and Development and Territorial Organization Plan (Plan de Desarrollo y Ordenamiento Territorial, PDOT). A high priority for proponents of the CCSP (and future corridors) is to integrate the CCSP into each of the PUGS and PDOTs of the corridor’s many jurisdictions, which requires the involvement of dozens of elected officials and bureaucrats. While implementing conservation actions in and around newly established corridors is a work in progress, Ecuador now has the legal tools to more fully harness the potential of corridors in support of the nation’s vast biodiversity.
Update: On December 27, 2022, Ecuador’s second connectivity corridor was officially recognized by the MAATE. The Llanganates-Sangay Connectivity Corridor (CELS) spans over 90,000 hectares and connects two national parks in the country’s Andes-Amazon interface, further enhancing the effectiveness of the CCSP and other protected and conserved areas in this hyper diverse region. Both corridors are key to supporting the National System of Protected Areas and provide the legal mechanisms for incorporating connectivity conservation criteria into territorial planning and land use management.
Please note: This digest is intended to provide up-to-date information on policy development from a neutral, unaffiliated position as it relates to connectivity and corridor science and management.
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