I like to tell fellow motorcyclists that if they don’t like the climate or landscape, they should just keep riding. It is bound to change drastically, and very quickly. As the nation with the most geographical diversity on the planet, Colombia has an astounding 314 types of ecosystems, including Amazon rainforests, dry forests, high alpine Andean ecosystems called el páramo, tropical coastlines, and arid deserts.

As the nation with the most geographical diversity on the planet, Colombia has an astounding 314 types of ecosystems.

In the North, you can stand with your feet in the Caribbean and gaze upon snow-capped mountains, the Sierra Nevadas del Santa Marta, within them the highest mountain closest to the sea in the world, a pyramid made of granite, containing all the ecosystems within itself.

It seems there is a fork in the road for the wild lands of Colombia; their resources could be logged, mined, and poached, stripped away for short-term profit. Alternatively, they could be protected, drawing visitors in for their natural beauty, creating value for locals with ecotourism, and invaluable plant products sustainably harvested. Scientists report that a third of all Colombia’s plant life has economic value, particularly in the development of pharmaceuticals. Of course, these wild lands also have inherent value through natural services like clean air, water, and nutrient rich earth.

In collaboration with the Colombia Bio Project, scientists, universities, and the environmental ministry are racing to inventory the poorly studied or completely unexplored regions that make up the territories once occupied by the FARC. They must assess and protect the biodiverse regions and important corridors for conservation and sustainable development before they are stripped of their natural resources.

The objective is to catalogue not just the species of birds, mammals, insects, and plants, but even the microbes present in the soil. With so much of Colombia inaccessible due to past violent conflict, many of the species within them are still unknown to science. With growing access to these regions, deforestation is on the rise, despite the country’s global pledge for the opposite.

A project to monitor the changes in forest cover by connecting data from satellites and monitoring systems has been launched by the Platform for Ecological Analyses on Colombian Ecosystems (PEACE). Eighty-four percent of the country’s deforestation has taken place in areas under the protection of the government, such as in national parks.

Eighty-four percent of the country’s deforestation has taken place in areas under the protection of the government, such as in national parks.

In 2016, the year of the peace accord signing, deforestation in Colombia increased by 44 percent from the previous year. The satellite images from PEACE, in collaboration with NASA, are therefore essential for monitoring how these infractions take place in real time. This data stands in stark contrast to Colombia’s promise of reaching zero deforestation by 2020, a goal they will likely have to push back to 2025. Norway, Germany, and the U.K. have committed to giving Colombia nearly $300M USD to help them attain their goals, through results-based payments for reaching their reduced deforestation benchmarks.

Large-scale deforestation was observed by drones over Tinigua National Park in the beginning of 2018. This park is extremely important, as it is the only area in the country that connects the Orinoco high plains with the Andean mountain forests and the rainforests of the Amazon.

Forested corridors for jaguars, ocelots, monkeys, and other wildlife that require canopy cover to move through landscapes (such as the woolly monkey, which travels from branch to branch but never on the ground), have been replaced by illicit cultivation (mainly coca), pastures, and small-scale land grabs. Residents say that former FARC members have redistributed the territory, thus complicating the security situation of the park itself and forcing park officials to leave. This case demonstrates some aspects of Colombia’s failure to enforce what existing environmental laws it already has in place.

Without knowledge of the extent of biological richness existing in its vastly different landscapes, Colombia cannot make informed decisions about conservation and sustainable development.