Santo Domingo.- Environment minister Jaime David Fernandez Mirabal on Thursday asked the international cooperation to reduce the seminars and workshops and increases practical actions in the communities to halt deforestation, especially in the river basins.

The official’s request coincidentally came during the operative planning workshop of the program to reduce the degradation of forests (REDD) in Central America and the Dominican Republic, in which Germany provides 12 million euros in eight countries.

“We need to see results which really become concrete actions for the developed countries to continue contributing and increasing the funds to those constructions to generate jobs in the deforested river basins and reduce the level of risk and degradation,” he said.

Fernandez Mirabal, citing the Quisqueya Verde reforestation program through which thousands seedlings were planted in degraded zones such as the border, warned that those initiatives materialize only with persistence, for which the political class must provide continuity to sustainable projects, “otherwise there’ll be many workshops, seminars and few results, and later the donor countries are going to question those poor results.”

He stressed that while Quisqueya Verde managed to reduce the country’s deforestation, degradation and deforestation still strongly impacts the zones of high migratory flow and those with high tourism development, such as La Altagracia, Puerto Plata, Santo Domingo and San Pedro. “More action and less workshops is what we need now.”

REDD and the region

REDD, a mechanism for clean development via which the countries can obtain funds by retaining carbon through the forest cover and mitigate climatic change, works under the management of the Central American Environment and Development Commission (CCAD), environmental agency of the Central American Integration System (SICA) and the German Cooperation Technical (GTZ),  whose representative. Hans Peter, stressed that the region’s countries have many opportunities to develop the initiative.