**5. Results: perspectives for its recovery from the Geoecosystemsterritory-environment (GTA) model and environmental governance**

Although since the 1990s, a policy was developed for the management and protection of high Andean ecosystems and páramos whose application was evaluated by the author of this writing as part of a team of researchers from the Ministry of the Environment. The actions developed for the protection of these areas, especially during the governments of President Santos (2010–2018) focused on the delimitation of the páramos, showing a contempt for the importance of the high Andean forests and their population. Aspects such as its importance in the regulation of water resources and as a bioclimatic barrier between temperate zones and high mountains were not taken into account despite the diagnoses about their critical situation in terms of depletion of the areas that characterize them. During the 20 consecutive years of this century, the exploitation of wood of species such as oak and cedar continues without making effective the application of laws that prohibit this practice and important areas of natural forests continue to be cut down for the planting of pine (*P. patula*) and eucalyptus (*E. globulus*) or more critically for the expansion of the livestock frontier and potato monoculture [2, 17].

The precarious situation of the peasants, due to the abandonment of part of the State, has favored the continuation of the destruction of these ecosystems and the increase of livestock breeding, an agricultural system of very low productivity and generation of employment. This socioeconomic factor is unknown or weakly addressed in government policies and programs for the conservation of high mountain ecosystems and has been the main cause for the emergence of socio-ecological conflicts in the last 10 years within which the movements for the defense of water against gold mining in the Santurban páramo in northeastern Colombia are mentioned. For the defense of water and territory against coal mining in the Pisba páramo in Boyacá and for the defense of peasant territories and micro-watersheds against the mining of construction materials and the construction of solar parks in the wetlands of the Chontales páramo in the villages of Sativa, The Stock Exchange and the Carrizal in the municipalities of Paipa and Sotaquirá.

#### *High Equatorial Andean Forests and Their Socioecological Problems DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.109776*

According to "For example, when the formulation of the territorial planning plans of the municipalities at the national level was carried out in the 2000s, environmental sustainability became merely an instrument requirement to access economic resources, behaving as a polysemic concept and an empty signifier formulated (2000–2010 generally); situation that has not been corrected, since most of these plans to date have not been reformulated or updated" [18].

Due to the above and seeking to solve the crisis in the predominant environmental planning and management, collecting the proposals of the extensive research, arising mainly from the workshops with communities carried out in the processes of the evaluation of the Program of the research carried out by the Water, Health and Environment group on ecosystem services and water governance and the requests made by the communities in conflict against mining in the Paramo of Pisba (Bibliography) and in the villages of Sativa and La Bolsa of the municipality of Paipa has come within the framework of strengthening environmental governance by proposing the Geoecosystem, Territory, Environment, GTA approach, fed from geoecology and landscape theory. This model is based on considering that there are five major geoecosystems that manifest themselves in all territories: water, soil, biodiversity, climate, and social system [2, 15, 19].

Within this approach, the territory as a biogeographic and socioeconomic cultural space, in permanent transformation and construction by anthropic activities and the dynamics of nature, is the main object-subject of environmental analysis.

#### **Figure 1.** *Geoecosystems-territory-environment model, GTA Fountain: [19].*

This object-subject connotation refers to the fact that in this scenario the four great physical-biotic geoecosystems are interacting: water, soil, biodiversity, climate, and the social system that by its conscious nature serves as a transforming subject of the territorial environmental complex (**Figure 1**).

Each of the four geoecosystems: water, soil, biodiversity, and social system nest in the climate geoecosystem, the most important of all and which is the ultimate determiner of the possibility of existence and/or sustainability of the other systems in the environment that constitutes the territory where they are located. Water, soil, and biodiversity systems in natural conditions, that is, not mediated by human action, have cyclical thermoecological exchanges that allow them to be sustainable and maintain their resilience. The social system differs from the previous ones to the extent that it generates more and more environmental demands, which are characterized by thermoecological-economic, non-cyclical exchanges, which, given the intensity of the magnitude of the spaces occupied and the intensity of the exploitation of natural resources, are affecting the environmental supply or ecosystem services in the territory, And the human ecological footprint grows continuously, due to an extractivist and consumerist development model that characterizes the current capitalist production system [19].
