Through CEPF, civil society and local governments will play an instrumental role in helping to ensure that the most important development and conservation initiatives and policies in Northern Mesoamerica have a long-term, positive impact on the region's most biologically rich areas.
These new initiatives, such as the Plan Puebla-Panama, Central America Free Trade Agreement, the Mundo Maya initiative and the Western Altiplano Natural Resource Management Project, put regional decisionmakers at a crossroads. If planned and implemented thoughtfully with meaningful participation of civil society and local communities, these initiatives promise to help attack the root causes and proximate threats of biodiversity loss. If, on the other hand, these schemes are implemented with little consideration for their environmental and social impacts, they risk perpetuating the root causes of resource degradation, exacerbating biodiversity loss and fueling the cycle of poverty. Given this reality, the recognition exists that these development schemes themselves must rely heavily on constructive engagement with civil society to achieve their own economic, social and environmental sustainability and success.
With this imperative in mind, the CEPF niche is designed to promote win-win solutions to achieve the critical regional goals of poverty alleviation and conservation by influencing select development investments and policies in the Selva Maya and the Selva Zoque and Chiapas/Guatemala Highlands corridors. More formally, the CEPF niche aims to:
Influence select development policies and investments to achieve biodiversity conservation outcomes in the Selva Maya and the Selva Zoque and Chiapas/Guatemala Highlands corridors through increased knowledge, capacity and coordination of civil society and local government.
The CEPF niche is designed with the understanding that a unique window of opportunity exists over the next five years for conserving the biological heritage of Northern Mesoamerica. If civil society has the strategic vision, appropriate capacity and desire to work collectively toward common goals, it will have the opportunity to influence the design and implementation of the $122 million of conservation related investments. Equally important, civil society will be able to proactively engage in the preparation of tens of billions of dollars to be invested through the Plan Puebla-Panama and related development initiatives in order to ensure that they have a long-term positive effect on biodiversity.
Through the adoption of four strategic directions, CEPF will take a multi-pronged approach to achieve this goal. First, CEPF will work at a corridor-level to encourage biodiversity friendly policies and investments within the Selva Maya and the Selva Zoque and Chiapas/Guatemala Highlands corridors. The aim will be to ensure that civil society develops the capacity to participate in the decision-making process related to high priority investments and policies. The second strategic direction is designed to complement the first strategic direction by serving as the field component of the policy and investment strategies pursued. It will target the eight most biologically important key biodiversity areas in the region to ensure that these priority sites achieve their conservation objectives through CEPF and partner funding. CEPF will work to help coordinate and build capacity of civil society and local governments in ways that allow them to successfully support conservation in the field. The third strategic direction funds priority actions in the three key biodiversity areas where basic conservation needs are likely to be underfunded in the next five years. The fourth strategic direction supports conservation activities that focus on saving the region's critically endangered species from extinction.
Guiding principles that underpin this strategy rest on the need for CEPF to focus on those investments and policies that have the greatest impact on conservation in Northern Mesoamerica. CEPF will fund activities that support viable alternatives to resource degradation and that mitigate potential threats, such as the case for infrastructure projects. Furthermore, the strategy will consider actions where civil society and local governments, independently and jointly, have a meaningful and often unique role to play.
| Strategic Directions |
Investment Priorities |
| 1. Foster civil society participation in regional decisionmaking on select policies and investments to promote the conservation and sustainable development of the Selva Maya and the Selva Zoque and Chiapas/Guatemala Highlands corridors |
1.1 Promote policy reforms that integrate biodiversity conservation in agriculture, infrastructure development, forest fires and tourism |
| 1.2 Develop and strengthen collaborative networks that enable civil society to influence investments with corridor-wide impacts (such as Mundo Maya, PPP, CAFTA) and to foster coordination of current activities |
| 1.3 Build and support action-oriented associations focused on conservation-based enterprises to identify and share lessons learned and to facilitate their growth |
| 1.4 Promote the introduction and use of new sustainable conservation financing mechanisms, focusing on payments for environmental services. *CEPF will not provide funding for the actual payments, but will fund analysis and promotion of different models |
| 1.5 Support corridor-level biological and environmental management monitoring relevant for understanding the state of biodiversity conservation for decisionmaking |
| 2. Collaborate with other donor-funded projects to facilitate and operationalize successful conservation activities in Northern Mesoamerica's eight most important key biodiversity areas |
2.1 Increase coordination of key stakeholder groups to plan and implement initiatives in the eight priority key biodiversity areas |
| 2.2 Increase local government and NGO capacity for forest fire prevention and control, enforcement of land tenure laws and the prevention of illegal hunting and timber harvesting |
| 2.3 Build civil society capacity to support the mitigation of impacts of proposed infrastructure projects on biodiversity, focusing on roads and dams |
| 2.4 Assess the adequacy of coverage of protected areas, and lay the groundwork for declaration of new private and public reserves |
| 3. Support priority conservation actions in three priority key biodiversity areas |
3.1 Strengthen management of Sierra de las Minas in areas such as facilitating payments for watershed services, stakeholder coordination, and reduction in timber harvesting |
| 3.2 Strengthen management of Laguna del Tigre in areas such as fire management, conflict resolution and economic alternatives to deforestation |
| 3.3 Strengthen management of Chiquibul/Montañas Mayas in areas such as xate harvesting and the protection of the Macal River valley |
| 4. Support efforts to prevent the extinction of Northern Mesoamerica’s 106 Critically Endangered species |
4.1 Improve protection of Critically Endangered species through enhanced knowledge of their conservation needs, increased local capacity to conserve these species and investments in field conservation and protection projects |
| 4.2 Increase coordination of efforts to improve the protection of critically endangered species through the exchange and consolidation of data and information |
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