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Government. The project was located in the centre of the water
crisis in a town that fully depends on groundwater for water
supply. CONAF established different soil and water conserva-
tion and rainwater harvesting works in a nearby catchment
to improve the water regime and the level of groundwater
in surrounding wells. These works included infiltration
trenches, check-dams and afforestation with appropriate
species, among other interventions. In this scenario, CONAF
also implemented the Sustainable Land Management in Chile
initiative to determine best practices based on territorial plan-
ning, in particular tree species appropriate for afforestation.
The typology of projects developed for this ecoregion aims
to improve carbon stocks and to restore degraded land, as a
strategy to foster the role of forests in rainfall processes such
as the provision of nuclei for cloud formation, air humidity
and change in albedo and local energy balance.
In the Mediterranean ecoregion, the Small Grant Programme
to Combat Desertification provided funding to the ‘La Aguada’
water harvesting project, located 100 km south-west of
Santiago city. In this area water also became very scarce to
people and ‘Navidad’ county administration had to provide
water by tank trucks. This community received funds to
install rainwater harvesting systems, roof water collectors and
cisterns to benefit from scarce rainfall for drinking water, the
production of vegetables under greenhouses, fodder for cattle
and trees for firewood. To address another relevant issue, the
‘Peñuelas’ Preventive Forestry for Forest Fires Project funded
by the international cooperation agency of the Government of
Switzerland addressed the burden of forest fires occurring in
the city-forest interface in 2014, which devastated 76 hectares
of urban area near Valparaiso city, the greatest forest fire in an
urban area ever recorded in Chile. CONAF deployed demon-
strative activities to explore forestry treatments for carbon
sequestration, management of distribution of combustible
material and control of fire dispersion, such as firewalls,
density management and mixed forests of species containing
extractable organic compounds with a lower fusion point.
The temperate ecoregion concentrated on application of
the supporting mechanisms of the Ministry of Agriculture
contained in PANCCD-Chile. Since 1931 Chile has enacted
several laws to establish incentives for afforestation as a
mechanism to restore degraded land. Examples of this are:
Decree No. 4363/1931 known as ‘The Forest Law’; Decree
Law No. 701/1974 on forest support; Law No. 20.283/2008 on
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Image: CONAF
The O’Higgins Glacier in the Bernardo O´Higgins National Park (austral ecoregion) has retreated 16 km during the last century, affecting ecosystems that depend on it