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CHILE: Ice Fields Could Become Biggest Natural Heritage Site

Daniela Estrada

SANTIAGO, Mar 23 2007 (IPS) - The Chilean government will nominate six parks and reserves in the extreme south of the country, including Torres del Paine, for the UNESCO World Natural Heritage list in February 2008. The total area covers 7.2 million hectares, and it is unequalled for sheer size in this category.

The tentative name for the listing is Patagonian Ice Fields of Chile, Andrés Meza, head of protected areas and the environment for the government National Forest Corporation (CONAF), which is responsible for the initiative, told IPS.

The complete site includes ice fields, glaciers and snow-capped peaks in the Laguna San Rafael, Bernardo O’Higgins and Torres del Paine national parks and the Las Guaitecas, Katalalixar and Alacalufes national reserves, located in the Aysén and Magallanes regions, over 2,000 kilometres south of Santiago.

“This nomination is very important, because it will be the largest land site on the World Natural Heritage list. It’s also the third largest extension of continental ice in the world, after Antarctica and Greenland,” the director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) World Heritage Centre, Francesco Bandarin, told IPS.

The Italian expert visited the Chilean capital on Mar. 12-15 to chair the follow-up meeting to the Periodic World Heritage Report for Latin America, which was attended by authorities and experts from 10 countries in the region.

The government of socialist President Michelle Bachelet has practically completed the file with technical information supporting the Patagonian Ice Fields nomination to the list, Meza said. “There are only a few formal revisions to make, especially regarding the boundaries” of the huge site, he said.

“These are unexplored, hard to reach, remote areas on which little information exists. Putting a dossier like this one together is a technical challenge. For instance, we still don’t really know what the ice fields contain. It’s a mystery,” said Meza.

The North and South Ice Fields are located in the Laguna San Rafael National Park, declared a biosphere reserve by UNESCO in 1979, and the Bernardo O’Higgins National Park, at 3.5 million hectares the largest in the country, respectively. Together, they are one of the world’s major fresh water reserves.

The Bernardo O’Higgins Park’s fauna includes penguins, cormorants, ducks, the huemul or South Andean deer (Hippocamelus bisulcus) and sea lions.

Torres del Paine (Paine Towers), with an area of 181,414 hectares, is the most internationally renowned of all the parks and reserves mentioned.

Bordering on the Argentine Glaciers National Park, Torres del Paine shares large numbers of visitors, mainly foreigners keen on ecotourism, who come to enjoy the unrivalled natural Patagonian scenery in both countries.

The park, which was designated a biosphere reserve in 1978, owes its name to three spectacular peaks with altitudes of between 2,250 and 2,500 metres. It contains mountain pathways and rivers and lakes, sandwiched between the Andes mountain range and the Patagonian steppe.

Inhabiting its waterways and forests of South American and Chilean beech are guanacos, foxes, the ñandú or common rhea, condors and water fowl, such as black-necked swans and coots.

The national reserves also contain valuable native tree species, like Chiloé beech (Nothofagus nitida), prickly-leaved moñío (Podocarpus nubigena) and tepú (Tepualia stipularis).

“This is not a minor or marginal site. We’re talking about a global pillar of nature,” Bandarin said.

But he stressed that in the nomination process, “not only is it important to document the value of the site, but also to indicate whether it is protected, how tourism is managed, and what impacts local and planetary phenomena, like climate change, can be expected to have.”

Although Bandarin said the Chilean government’s nomination file was “very professional,” he foresaw two hurdles for the site’s inscription on the UNESCO list, which in 2006 included a total of 830 properties, some of them cultural, some natural and some mixed.

“It will be difficult to delineate the buffer zones, because there are always processes going on in parallel that will have an effect, like fishing and urbanisation. And a lot of resources will be required for legal protection and site conservation practices, since the site is very large,” he said.

If the site is nominated in 2008 as planned, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee will decide whether to include it in the list in 2009, Bandarin said.

During this project, CONAF has worked closely with the government National Monuments Council, which spearheaded the nomination of the five cultural heritage sites that Chile already possesses.

The listed sites are the Rapa Nui National Park on Easter Island (1995), the churches on the Chiloé Archipelago (2000), the historic quarter of Valparaíso (2003), the abandoned saltpetre mining towns of Humberstone and Santa Laura (2005) and the Sewell mining camp (2006).

The Patagonian Ice Fields, if listed, would be the first Chilean site on the natural heritage list.

“Being designated a world nature heritage site doesn’t mean that things will change overnight, but we do know that it utterly changes the perception that people, and the authorities themselves, have of the place. It means, for instance, that funding for conservation work is much easier to obtain,” Meza concluded.