Because local residents are leading conservation efforts, the Maya Biosphere Reserve's forest cover is expanding rather than contracting as a result.
Tikal National Park, which is located in Guatemala, is a portion of the Maya Forest.
Mariana Diaz/WCS
In Guatemala, a community-led conservation programme has halted and begun to reverse two decades of deforestation in an area that was badly threatened by the land grabs of cattle ranchers and drug traffickers. The area was located in a region that was located in the western highlands of Guatemala.
Large tracts of the Maya Biosphere Reserve have been unlawfully removed over the past 13 years, but now life is beginning to return to those areas. As a result of the forest's regeneration, its area covered 25 square kilometres more ground in 2020 than it did in 2019, and it expanded by an additional 3.5 square kilometres the following year. What were once standardised pastures…
