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. The area acts as a natural land bridge from South America to North America, which is important for species who use the bridge in migration. Due to the extensive unique habitat types, Mesoamerica contains somewhere between 7 and 10% of the world’s known species.

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. The Mesoamerican Biological Corridor is made of four parts: Core Zones, Buffer Zones, Corridor Zones, and Multiple-Use Zones, each with varying availability for human use.

With the increasing conversion of natural tropical ecosystems to agricultural farms and for other human use, comes growing concern over conservation of local species. Mesoamerica is considered one of many biodiversity hotspots where extinction is a significant threat. This area is the world’s third largest biodiversity hotspot. Some efforts have been made to protect organisms in the region, however, many of these protected sites are “small, fragmented, isolated, or poorly protected”

In the late 1980s, Archie Carr III envisioned a way to protect threatened and endangered wildlife native to the region by connecting fragmented patches of habitat, and to create buffer zones to allow different levels of land use near protected areas. The corridor that eventually came to be, originally called Paseo Pantera (Spanish for Path of the Panther), follows the Atlantic coastline.

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. It was developed by a team of biologists from the University of Florida and the Central American Commission on Environment and Development (CCAD), and was remapped by CCAD, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) for political reason. $4 million was invested in the corridor by United States Agency for International Development (USAID) from 1990 to 1995. In 1992, all of the countries that are part of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor joined the Central American System of Protected Areas (SICAP), which allows each country to “maintain its own ministries of the environment.” The corridor project has been successful in providing wildlife habitat; however, regional biota remained threatened due to fragmented areas and “unevenness of the region’s protected area system”

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