Saving the Gran Chaco

In recent decades, the unfettered felling of the forest has been compounded by the expansion of agricultural lands for cattle ranching and soybean farming. In fact, various environmental organizations estimate that 80 percent of Argentina's deforestation today is occurring in the Chaco region alone. Poaching, fires, and urban development add to the ever-growing list of threats.

However, not all is lost for this vast and enigmatic region. As the window of opportunity to tackle climate change narrows, the appetite for new approaches to sustainable development is growing worldwide—and local communities are demonstrating that the solution to the Gran Chaco’s environmental challenges may lie in nature itself, especially when it comes to food production.

“One of the biggest problems we face also holds the solution. The way we produce and consume food can help to protect and restore nature,” says Gustavo Marino, The Nature Conservancy’s (TNC) Regenerative Agriculture Coordinator in Argentina's Gran Chaco. He adds, “Chaco comes from the word chaku, which in an Indigenous language means ‘hunting grounds.’ All of us are looking for something in this land, but we have to do it with a new outlook, based on systemic transformation that integrates conservation with development.”

Nature-Based Solutions

As emphasized at the UN climate conference (COP26) in Glasgow, humanity is facing  a triple challenge. For one thing, there is scientific consensus that we must keep global temperature rise below 1.5°C if we are to avoid a climate collapse and ensuing catastrophic consequences. But at the same time, we must find a sustainable way to supply healthy food to more than nine billion people by 2050. And along the way, we desperately need to turn the tide on rising biodiversity loss.

Solving this dilemma, arguably the most pressing today, requires bringing together some of the world's brightest minds. While there’s value in innovative tech solutions…simply working with nature could provide one-third of the emissions reductions we need by 2030, in addition to co-benefits for food production and biodiversity.

That is precisely what is happening in the Gran Chaco. Confronted with deteriorating soil quality, depleted by successive harvests and excessive use of synthetic fertilizers, local producers are returning to a form of sustainable agriculture that was used by Indigenous communities more than a century ago. This practice of regenerative agriculture is based on restoring to nature the essential resources it needs to continue producing year after year.

“Regenerative agriculture is a conservation and restoration-based approach in farming systems that prioritizes soil health, increased biodiversity, improvements to the water cycle, and carbon sequestration from the atmosphere, which in turn increases climate resilience and promotes sustainable livelihoods,” explains Marino. For instance, soybean farmers are planting rows of small native plants between their crops. These are species that will not be harvested or generate immediate income, but they infuse minerals into the soil that prevent erosion and boost overall productivity.

Despite the fact that large-scale deforestation has decreased in El Impenetrable in the last decade—particularly since a forestry law was enacted— small-scale deforestation continues to spread outside the boundaries of the Impenetrable National Park. This protected area was created in 2014 to preserve some 130,000 hectares of almost virgin forest with emblematic species such as the red and white quebracho, palo borracho, palo santo, mistol, chañar, and several types of carob trees.

Nearly 8 million hectares have been lost in the Gran Chaco region in the last thirty years. That is about 400 times the size of the city of Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital. “In terms of infrastructure, timber from the Chaco historically, for Argentina, represented something akin to what steel did for other countries. Railroad ties, old road bridges, pilings in port, everything was built with the hardwood of trees such as carob or quebracho. We owe a great debt to Gran Chaco. We have to give back everything it gave us,” Marino says.

What’s more, this globally rare dry forest plays a key role in the fight against climate change. Recent research found that the carbon stored here is 19 times greater than previously estimated, [AG1] making it one of the largest carbon sinks on the planet. Healthy forests also reduce the impact of floods during torrential summer rains, and help provide much of the water that flows through Argentina’s La Plata Basin, which services much of the population and its industries.

Beyond degrading the soil, turning fertile pastures and lush forests into almost desert-like lands, unchecked development in the Gran Chaco is also hastening cultural erosion—a phenomenon characterized by the loss of local values and knowledge, as community members move away in search of a better future due to the lack of opportunities in their homelands.