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Among the different environmental problems that the department of Santa Cruz faces, deforestation and forest fires stand out. The Chiquitano Dry Forest is one of the ecosystems most affected by fires (1.3 million hectares burned in 2019). The Paragua basin was affected by 18% of its surface (486.000 Ha) that year. The San Martín basin was affected by 14.5% of its surface (480.000 Ha). Restoring an ecosystem means returning in time its structure, composition, diversity of species and functioning in the closest way to its initial state, working on secondary succession (CONAF, 2022). In order to assess whether passive restoration is a cost-effective option to recover specific ecosystem functions such as the regulation of water flow and erosion control, a cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is carried out. |
