Institute for Environmental Security
Horizon 21 — Advancing Global Environmental Security
Science · Diplomacy · Law · Finance · Education
Guiana Shield Initiative
Objective
The Guiana Shield Initiative (GSI) is an ambitious ecoregional project with the aim of setting up a sustainable financial mechanism to conserve the unique intact ecosystems of the Guiana Shield.
The premise is that without financial stability for conservation and sustainable development activities, the natural resources of one of the few remaining expansive tracts of primary forest will disappear due to exploitation for short-term financial gains via destructive activities, such as logging, mining, the advancing agricultural frontier and ill-planned infrastructure.
History
In November 1993, at the roundtable on European-Amazonian relations, organised by the European Working Group on Amazonia (EWGA) and held in the European Parliament in Brussels, the global importance of the Guiana Shield region was highlighted, and one of the key results of the meeting was to explore the feasibility of the integrated management of the regional ecology.
This decision, which was later termed the Guiana Shield Initiative, was carried out by Mr Hemmo Muntingh, former member of the European Parliament and now director of special projects at the International Fund of Animal Welfare, and by Mr Wouter Veening, as chairman of the EWGA. The chairmanship and secretariat of the EWGA and the Guiana Shield Initiative were housed at the Netherlands Committee of the IUCN - World Conservation Union.
The central idea of the Guiana Shield Initiative is that the ecological functions of the region and the (related) sociocultural contribution of the local indigenous peoples are of such global importance that they should be kept intact.
A system of international payments for these ecological services (in terms of carbon absorption and storage, biodiversity preservation and hydrological functions) should become one of the mainstays of the regional economy and should provide adequate income for the ecological 'managers' and treasuries.
A regional trust fund, operating through a regional sustainable development corporation with field corporations managing multiple use areas, could be seen as the institutional structure proposed by the Guiana Shield Initiative.
