Colombia ranks first in its income group, where China ranks last.
Colombia has always been proud of its immensely rich wildlife. The nation has the world's greatest number of bird species (1,885), the second highest number of amphibians (697) and the seventh largest area of tropical wilderness. On Earth Day, the government celebrated by beginning to create 11 new national parks and expanding protected areas to nearly 11.7 million hectares, or more than 10 percent of the country. "We are putting our soul into protecting our patrimony," says Environment Minister Juan Lozano.
Could this be the same Colombia that's been fighting a guerrilla war over the manufacture of illegal drugs? Paradoxically, the war has in some ways helped the green cause by scaring developers away from rural areas and making it easier to put aside land for wildlife. Yale and Columbia's Environmental Performance Index ranks Colombia ninth overall, with exceptional grades in biodiversity and habitat—a 75, compared with an average of 43 for the region and 54 for its income group.
What stands out in particular in the rankings is Colombia's score on the effectiveness of its conservation efforts (it gets a 94 out of 100, compared with 38 for its neighbors on average). This is clearly no country of paper parks, as recent initiatives show. Fending off pressure from developers to allow construction of a massive container port in the rain forests of the Pacific, the Ministry of the Environment began creating a national park in Málaga Bay, the world's most important breeding and calving ground for humpback whales. After naturalists recently discovered a new species of finch in the cloud forests, the bird got its own park in the Yariguíes mountain range. Conservationists even won a new sanctuary for leatherback and hawksbill turtles.
Environment Minister Lozano, a former political adviser to the president, has pushed the environment to the forefront of the national agenda. Ambitious government programs promoting reforestation and sustainable farming techniques have restored regions that had turned to desert through slash-and-burn agriculture and pumped life into degraded high-mountain bogs and grasslands that supply much of the nation's water. A habitat restoration program has targeted the endangered spectacled bear. Captive-breeding and release programs coordinated by the San Diego Zoo over more than a decade have brought the Andean condor, the world's largest raptor, back from fewer than 10 individuals in the mid-1980s to more than 130 today. Lozano has laid down policies prohibiting any development project—be it mining, ranching or agriculture—from cutting into a natural forest. "You cannot touch a millimeter of national forest here. There are no exceptions," he says.
The prospect of an end to the drug war puts Colombia's wilderness at a crossroads. On the one hand, four decades of war have inflicted a heavy toll on the environment. Peasant farmers have cleared an estimated 2.2 million hectares of forest for coca plants and fouled rivers with cocaine-processing chemicals like kerosene and sulfuric acid. On the other hand, war may have spared the country tough decisions by keeping much of the wilderness out of development's reach. "Though illegal armies have hurt the ecology with things like coca, important areas of wilderness would have unquestionably been lost to development if it were not for the war," says Luis Germán Naranjo, director of conservation for the environmental group WWF in Colombia. As the government continues to win the drug war, will it sustain its green policies?
There's reason to worry. Colombia has tended to coddle its gold and coal miners, and oil companies, at the expense of ecosystems, say environmentalists. Large swaths of jungle have already been felled in a massive drive to produce African palms for biofuels.
In a land where even the poorest people dream of a small place in the countryside, there is a patriotic pride in the country's vast outdoors. Having survived the war, it remains to be seen whether the wildlife can survive a much-hoped-for peace.