Honduras this year launched a plan to eliminate deforestation by 2029, with a special focus on recovering land used by criminal groups for timber trafficking. Officials have already carried out hundreds of operations and arrested dozens of people tied to organized crime. But some experts worry that the plan doesn’t go far enough. The “Zero Deforestation by 2029” plan, launched by the National Defense and Security Council in May, declared a state of emergency for the country’s forests and greenlit funds to retake control of protected areas where agriculture, livestock, mining and other illegal activities have been thriving, often with the involvement of powerful criminal groups. “It’s time to take decisive action and enforce the law against the devastation of our forests, to restore security in these vital areas and forge a new development paradigm that guarantees the protection of natural resources and human survival, especially for Indigenous people,” the country’s National Defense and Security Council said in the resolution outlining the plan. The council is headed by President Xiomara Castro and makes national security, defense and intelligence policy. The plan aims to evict groups living and working in protected areas and to “neutralize and establish control” of roads where timber is trafficked. It also asked the Public Ministry to investigate the logging industry and the land titling process, as titles are often granted illegally within protected and Indigenous territories. President Xiomara Castro during a meeting about protecting threatened protected areas. Photo courtesy of Sedena. Over $766 million has been…This article was originally published on Mongabay
Article by:
This story first appeared on Mongabay
South Africa Today – Environment
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
