The question that hangs over the Santurbán páramo is not whether its ecosystem is fragile—that has been established for decades—but whether the institutions charged with protecting it are capable of acting before the damage becomes irreversible. The evidence from this weekend in Bucaramanga suggests they are not.
On Saturday, the second round of participatory delimitation talks for the páramo ended without agreement 1. This was not a surprise; stakeholders have been deadlocked for years over mining interests versus conservation. What was surprising was the timing of the outgoing government’s response. The Ministry of Environment published Resolution 863, adopting a national methodology for progressive delimitation 1. This is a procedural document, not a protective one. It establishes how to delimit, not what to protect, and it arrives as the administration of Gustavo Petro prepares to leave office.
The contrast between this administrative maneuver and the incoming government’s data is stark. The transition team of President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella has reported that deforestation in Colombia’s national parks surged 146.5% between 2023 and 2024, from 4,682 to 11,544 hectares 4. The incoming Environment Minister Fabio Arjona added that between 2022 and 2025, 48,125 hectares within the national park system were lost 4. These are not projections; they are measured losses. They represent a failure of enforcement during the very period when the outgoing government was developing its methodology.
The editorial judgment here is that Resolution 863 functions as a procedural placeholder—a document that allows the outgoing administration to claim progress on a framework while the incoming administration inherits a crisis of implementation. The unresolved uncertainty is whether the new government will adopt this methodology or discard it, and whether the delay in delimitation has already allowed mining interests to consolidate their position within the páramo’s boundaries.
The tradeoff that matters most to the reader is this: every year spent negotiating the method of protection is a year in which the páramo’s water systems, which supply millions of people, are being degraded by unregulated activity. The Santurbán talks did not fail because the science is unclear; they failed because the political will to act on that science was absent. Resolution 863 is not a solution. It is an accounting trick—a way to record the work of meetings without recording the cost of inaction.