The Yaque River basin restoration project has reduced soil degradation by 18%, although gentrification and climate change remain threats. Carlos Rodríguez has spent “his entire life” taking care of Don Franklin’s farm. In a small corner of the municipality of La Pelada in the heart of the Dominican Republic the 53-year-old farmer knows the “two-thousand-odd” acres of land like the back of his hand. Today, with his hands behind his back and his gaze full of pride, he admires the land that he has tended for decades. From the neighboring sandy terrain of the El Negro estate, you can see the hill covered by thousands of interspersed cedars, Creole pines, and cypresses that expose nothing of the soil beneath them. He looks at it like a father looks at his grown children. We can no longer even guess the paths that Dulce María Fabián and Yakaira Rodríguez traced 15 years ago, when they set out to revive this terrain that was at that time a wasteland.

The two mountain estates have faced each other for centuries. At some point, Don Franklin and El Negro — who did not want to repopulate his estate with trees — had pristine land. It remained untouched until the 15th century, when hundreds of Dominicans began to live off the mountains without knowing very well how to do it. The exodus to the countryside was desperate. People were in a rush to live off what the land produced, in a country more accustomed to the sea than the forest. Dominicans know it as the “slash and burn” era. Thus began a “use” of the land that ended up squeezing the every last benefit out of the territory. Population growth and uncontroled tourism made maintaining biodiversity in the the Dominican Republic unsustainable. That is why, in 2015, almost half of the Caribbean country’s land had been degraded and hundreds of families were forced to move again. But now Dominicans also migrated overseas.
Between 2016 and 2019, 21.89% (about 934 million acres) of land in Latin America had been degraded; a proportion that is approximately equivalent to three times the size of Colombia. For Andrea Meza, Deputy Executive Secretary of UNCCD, the Dominican Republic’s achievement is “impressive”: “It is an example that soil degradation can be reversed without it implying economic decline, as many would have us believe.” In 2010, the country had generated almost $54 billion; In 2019, its GDP reached $89 billion. “The most cost-effective thing is to have a healthy environment and make nature a great friend and ally”.READ further from the source