Mesoamerican Biological Corridor

The Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC) is a region that consists of Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, and some southern states of Mexico.

[1][2][3] The corridor was originally proposed in the 1990s to facilitate animal movements along the Americas without interfering with human development and land use, while promoting ecological sustainability.

With the increasing conversion of natural tropical ecosystems to agricultural farms and for other human use, comes growing concern over conservation of local species.

[7] The MBC began in the late 1990s, by funding from the World Bank in order to promote wildlife conservation, particularly endemic, threatened, and endangered species, and ways to use the land in a sustainable fashion.

[7] The Mesoamerican Biological Corridor incorporates multiple diverse biomes and is bordered by the Caribbean Sea to the east and the Pacific Ocean on the west.

[8] According to data from 2003, roughly 57% of the Mesoamerican biological corridor is natural vegetation, with the remaining land being used mostly for cattle and crop production.

[8] Their goal is to promote “regional scale connectivity of protected areas with sustainable development and improvement of human livelihoods.”[8] The purpose of the corridor is to emphasize the conservation movement as being a social and group effort.

[6] The stakeholders did not have a clear idea of what the exact functions of the MBC were, which led to anger and an increase in the time taken to implement the corridor.

The MBC was originally conceived as a way to protect threatened and endangered wildlife by connecting fragments of habitats and forming buffer zones to limit human land use.

[6] However, many of the interested stakeholders wanted to include common livelihood problems such as pollution, water and sanitation, pesticides contamination, firewood acquisition, zoonotic and infectious disease.

[1] It was finally decided that the main goals of the corridor would be to facilitate animal movements along the Americas without interfering with human development and land use, while promoting ecological sustainability.