Regional Rain Forests: "Guiana Shield"

What and Where is the Guiana Shield?

The Guiana Shield is that portion of South American tropical forest that covers much of Guyana, Surinam and French Guiana, as well as eastern and southern Venezuela, and northeast Brazil.

The Guiana Shield is one of only four relatively unharmed tropical forests left in the world. Several features distinguish the Guiana Shield frontier forests from other tropical forests. Pressures on natural resources have historically been relatively low. This is caused by low human population densities, low agricultural potential of the highly weathered forest soils, low commercial timber volumes and growth, and relative inaccessibility.

These features mean that Guiana Shield frontier forest ecosystems represent one of the highest per capita forested areas in the world and one of the largest well preserved landscapes.

Status of the Guiana Shield

Current developments in the region include growing pressures on national governments to attract large-scale investments for the natural resource exploitation of gold, timber, diamonds, and bauxite. This large-scale resource exploitation is often associated with increasing road access to new areas. At the same time, economic shifts have caused local livelihood strategies to move toward dispersed extractive commercial enterprises including small-scale gold mining, chain saw logging, and wildlife trading.

Recent declines in world market prices for the region's commodities, including gold, bauxite, timber, diamonds, sugar and rice, have exacerbated existing debt burdens and reduced national income that could be directed towards development. These economic and social changes increase pressures on the relatively well-conserved Guiana Shield forest ecosystems. Unfortunately, national natural resource management systems have also weakened as human and financial resource bases have dwindled over the last 30 years.

The Guiana Shield forest ecosystems therefore offer numerous opportunities for developing effective resource management systems because of their presently well- preserved nature. Growing threats at local and national levels and severe human and financial resource constraints to developing effective natural resource management systems also exist. The challenge for Guiana Shield countries is to develop management approaches, within human and financial resource constraints, that can capture the full range of forest values and consequently reduce the threats to these values.