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Climate change includes the change of the long-term average values and the change of the tails of probability density functions, where the extreme events are located. However, obtaining average values are more straightforward than the high temporal resolution information necessary to catch the extreme events on those tails. Such information is difficult to get in areas lacking sufficient rain stations. Thanks to the development of Satellite Precipitation Estimates with a daily resolution, this problem has been overcome, so Extreme Precipitation Indices (EPI) can be calculated for the entire Colombian territory. However, Colombia is strongly affected by the ENSO (El Niño—Southern Oscillation) phenomenon. Therefore, it is pertinent to ask if the EPI’s long-term change due to climate change is more critical than the anomalies due to climate variability induced by the warm and cold phases of ENSO (El Niño and La Niña, respectively). In this work, we built EPI annual time series at each grid-point of the selected Satellite Precipitation Estimate (CHIRPSv2) over Colombia to answer the previous question. Then, the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon test was used to compare the samples drawn in each case (i.e., change tests due to both long-term and climatic variability). After performing the analyses, we realized that the importance of the change depends on the region analyzed and the considered EPI. However, some general conclusions became evident: during El Niño years (La Niña), EPI’s anomaly follows the general trend of reduction -drier conditions- (increase; -wetter conditions-) observed in Colombian annual precipitation amount, but only on the Pacific, the Caribbean, and the Andean region. In the Eastern plains of Colombia (Orinoquía and Amazonian region), EPI show a certain insensitivity to change due to climatic variability. On the other hand, EPI’s long-term changes in the Pacific, the Caribbean, and the Andean region are spatially scattered. Still, long-term changes in the eastern plains have a moderate spatial consistency with statistical significance.
The post-conflict setting in Colombia resulted after the signing of the peace agreement between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the national Government at the end of 2016, faces two main problems. On one hand, the environmental degradation and the pressure over the ecosystems now exposed to the economic and socio-demographic dynamics of the country; and on the other hand, the increase of violence in rural areas characterized by the abundance of natural resources. These two problems can be linked through the complex dynamics of natural resources appropriation. Among the natural resources affecting the course of the post-conflict in Colombia, gold appears as one of the most relevant sources of violence and environmental degradation. This condition makes it crucial to understand the complex local dynamics of mining regions in order to propose alternatives for consolidating a sustaining peace. The armed groups, the state, the private companies, and traditional gold mining communities are all stakeholders involved in gold mining and the conflicts around this activity. Nevertheless, communities have been denied as a formal actor.
This work aims to give voice to those communities, understanding them as a key actor for peacebuilding. This research seeks to understand the relationship between gold mining and the social-armed conflict in Colombia, to identify which are the drivers for the increasing of this activity during the post-conflict, as well as which strategies developed by traditional gold mining communities can contribute to peacebuilding. Thus, an integrative analytical framework is developed. This theoretical framework integrates 1) environmental peacebuilding to evaluate the possibilities of natural resources to becoming tools for cooperation, and 2) political ecology to clarify, from a multi-scalar approach, the socio-political context in which the conflict takes place. Hence, from a qualitative approach that involves several ethnographic methods is found that artisanal-ancestral miners and traditional miners organized to remain in their territories in a context of dispossession, have developed socio-ecological systems and natural resources management strategies relevant to implement initiatives of environmental peacebuilding that can be sustained over time and aimed to overcome the structural causes of violence and environmental degradation.