Maya Forest Corridor (Belize)

Maya Forest Corridor | Photo credit: © Steve Winter

In December 2021, Re:wild and its partners in Belize permanently protected 30,000 acres of the Maya Forest Corridor—the first and most critical step toward preventing one of Central and South America’s five great forests from being severed in two. By protecting these lands in trust for the people of Belize (and the world), the Maya Forest Corridor gives animals room to move and reinforces Belize’s commitment to take meaningful actions to mitigate the threats of climate change and to increase the nation’s natural resilience in the face of a warming world.

Located in central Belize, the Maya Forest Corridor connects the massive Belize Maya Forest in the country’s northwest with the Maya Mountains Massif network of protected areas in southern Belize. It will also connect these areas of Belize with adjacent protected areas of La Selva Maya in Guatemala and Mexico, and become the largest rainforest preserve north of the Amazon. Now constrained to a mere five-mile stretch, the Corridor is one of the last remaining squeeze points for jaguars to enter the Selva Maya to the north and to move south to the rest of Central and South America. Losing the genetic connectivity of the Maya Forest Corridor would be a step toward extinction for the jaguar and many other terrestrial wildlife species with ecological and cultural significance in Belize, including Baird’s Tapirs, Central American River Turtles, pumas, and White-lipped Peccaries, which have disappeared across eighty-seven percent of their range in Mesoamerica. The wetlands of the Maya Forest Corridor also have an important role to play as a climate change refuge and flood retention zone.

The Maya Forest Corridor is critically imperiled without protections, having already been reduced by more than sixty-five percent over the past decade due largely to deforestation for large-scale agricultural developments, including sugarcane. Since 2011, the Corridor has faced deforestation rates almost four times the national average, and major clearings in the last few years indicate that without action, Central America’s largest forest block would have been fragmented in two.

By permanently protecting the Maya Forest Corridor, Re:wild, the Government of Belize, and Belize’s people have made another critical contribution to the global effort to safeguard biodiversity and help stop the worst impacts of climate change. This conservation success was made possible through the generous support of a coalition of donors, including the Wyss Foundation, which provided a $900,000 grant to support the acquisition and legal protection of the Maya Forest Corridor property, and on-the-ground partners. In 2022, the Wyss Foundation committed an additional $5.2 million to protect up to 23,000 acres in the Maya Forest Corridor.