Protected areas in the Guatemala-Mexico border benefit from improved law enforcement, sustained binational collaboration, and increased economic opportunities for rural communities.
The Maya Forest is the second-largest continuous rainforest in Latin America after the Amazon. And like so many other tropical forests around the world, it’s disappearing.
Since 2000, the forest has shrunk by 15%. The good news is that there’s still a lot of forest left: the Maya Forest spans 35 million hectares of land sprawling across Belize, Guatemala, and southeastern Mexico. However, the size of the forest also makes it difficult for any one government agency or NGO to protect.
It’s hard to overstate how important forests are. They’re a critical part of mitigating climate change, developing new medicines, and protecting biodiversity and a vital source of employment for millions of people. We lost 4.2 million hectares of primary rainforest tree cover in 2020 according to data from the University of Maryland about the landmass of The Netherlands and 12% more than we lost in 2019. These staggering losses make protecting the vast amounts of forest that remain so important.