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OPENING THE CANOPY: CENTRAL AMERICAN FORESTS FACE THREATS OF GLOBALIZATION AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT.

Article Excerpt
By Jill Replogle, Inforpress Centroamericana

[The author is a staff writer for Inforpress Centroamericana, published in Guatemala]

The narrow land corridor connecting the northern and southern halves of the American continent has always played a crucial role as both a barrier to biological diffusion and a unique bioregion made up of diverse, species-rich ecosystems. The UN Environmental Program's recently released report, Global Environmental Outlook 3 (GEO-3): State of the Environment and Policy Retrospective 1972-2002, says that Meso-America (defined as Central America and Mexico) had 73 million hectares of forested land in 2000, around 7.5% of the total forested area in Latin America and the Caribbean. While this is a fairly small percentage of the region's total forests, it holds a wealth of biological diversity and stands vulnerable to exploitation because of its key geopolitical location.

The GEO-3 report says the average rate of deforestation in Latin America is 0.48% annually, one of the highest in the world, but the rate in the Meso-American subregion is even higher at 1.2% per year. Of the 83.7 million ha of forest covering Central America and southern Mexico in 1990, 9.7 million ha were deforested between that year and 2000, according to the report. Now, Meso-America's remaining forests, covering 30.2% of total...

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