Earth Today | Cockpit Country boundary submission in the works
Published:Thursday | February 18, 2021 | 12:17 AM
WITH PERMANENT markers now in place for some 275 kilometres of ground to be included as part of the official boundary for the Cockpit Country, the Forestry Department is completing its report to inform final decision-making by the Government.
“The ground truth was completed towards the end of 2020. So we have done the boundary verification and will provide the documentation, and the Government will use the information to decide exactly how and what they intend to do there,” said Ainsley Henry, chief executive officer and conservator of forests with the Forestry Department.
The Forestry Department led the ground truth,which was ordered by Prime Minister (PM) Andrew Holness, who in 2017 announced a boundary for the Cockpit Country. The PM said at that time that “a detailed description of the boundary of the Cockpit Country and the Cockpit Country Protected Area, as recognised by the State, will be provided by the Forestry Department after consultations with the relevant public-sector agencies and the necessary ground truthing – a term used in various fields to refer to information provided by direct observation as opposed to information provided by reference – has been undertaken”.
Cockpit Country is one of the island’s few remaining forest-cover gems. The Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund’s Ecosystem Profile: Caribbean Islands Biodiversity Hotspot 2010 report notes that the area is “the source for fresh water used by 40 per cent of Jamaicans” and “essential in moderating the flow and preventing flooding of a number of western Jamaica’s rivers”. It also supports “the largest number of globally threatened species of any key biodiversity area in the Caribbean islands ‘hotspots’, including 11 amphibians and 40 plant species”.
These attributes have fuelled the long lobby by environmental stakeholders and others to prevent mining in the area by affording it legal protection. The delimitation of a boundary, informed by the ground truth, is anticipated to help yield that protection.
Not enough
However, some stakeholders feel the area covered by the Forestry Department may not go far enough.
“From where I sit, and the other concerned residents of Cockpit Country, that is not the Cockpit Country we were told by the research and the study done by the commissioned team and closed off by Professor Dale Webber’s report,” said Southern Trelawny Environmental Agency boss Hugh Dixon.
“It being completed provides the PM with an opportunity to gazette something in Parliament that would have gone against the protests and the advocacy of the large cross section of Jamaicans, here and in the diaspora, who have been clamouring for the recommended boundary of the Cockpit Country Stakeholders Group with a transition zone and a core to be recognised as the Cockpit Country,” he added.
To settle on protection of only the area covered by the ground truth, Dixon maintained, “would effectively annex large tracts of Cockpit Country to be made available to mining companies”.
He is hoping for more.
“It would seem to me that it could be declared the core of the Cockpit Country, and now what would be left is to effectively identify the transition zone and the buffer zone. That would begin to meet the expectations of that being officially declared the landscaped boundary of the Cockpit Country,” Dixon said.