Starting with little more than community meetings and a farm-by-farm persuasion campaign, the Dominican Republic reversed nearly two decades of land degradation — restoring 18% of its territory in just a decade. The Yaque River Basin Restoration Project, known as Plan Yaque, launched in 2009 C.E. as a coalition of 30 NGOs and government agencies with a deceptively simple idea: convince landowners that trees are worth keeping.
At a glance
- Plan Yaque: Launched in 2009 C.E., this Dominican coalition of 30 NGOs and government agencies set out to restore degraded land by working directly with individual landowners across the country.
- Land restoration rate: By 2019 C.E., the Dominican Republic had recovered 18% of its degraded land — the second-highest recovery rate in Latin America during that period.
- Community outreach: Project leaders traveled farm by farm across the country, running education campaigns that linked reforestation directly to water security and long-term agricultural income.
How the land was lost
The Dominican Republic’s mountainous interior was once densely forested. That changed after centuries of pressure.
Beginning in the 15th century C.E., population growth and the spread of slash-and-burn agriculture stripped hillsides of tree cover. Forests were cleared for short-term agricultural gain, leaving soil exposed to erosion and rainfall runoff. By 2015 C.E., nearly half the country’s land was classified as degraded, and water scarcity had become a growing threat to farmers and communities across the island.
The problem was not simply ecological. Deforestation disrupted the watersheds that supply water to both rural farms and urban centers. The Yaque del Norte — the country’s longest river — was among the most affected, its flows weakened and its banks eroded after generations of forest loss upstream.
A persuasion campaign, farm by farm
Plan Yaque’s founders understood that legal mandates alone wouldn’t reverse the damage. The forests had been cleared by people responding to real economic pressures, and restoring them required addressing those pressures directly.
Teams of community leaders fanned out across the country, meeting with individual landowners and explaining the practical case for reforestation — not as an environmental abstraction, but as a strategy for securing water, preventing soil loss, and protecting long-term farm income. Project leader Humberto Chaco described the approach as a kind of “evangelizing”: patient, relational, and grounded in lived experience.
The strategy worked in part because results became visible quickly. Landowner Carlos Rodríguez, whose neighbor’s barren hillside had transformed into a functioning forest within a few years, became one of many informal advocates for the project. Word spread through farming communities faster than any government decree could have managed.
What 18% looks like on the ground
By 2019 C.E., the Dominican Republic had restored roughly one-fifth of its territory — an area that represents one of the most significant land recovery achievements in the Western Hemisphere over that decade.
Restored hillsides now hold water in the soil instead of shedding it in floods. Streams that had slowed or run dry began flowing more reliably. Biodiversity returned to areas that had been agricultural monocultures or scrubland for years. The recovery also pushed back on a common assumption in development policy — that economic growth and environmental restoration are fundamentally in tension. The Dominican Republic achieved both during the same period.
The project’s model has drawn attention from conservationists across Latin America as a replicable framework for community-led land restoration. Its emphasis on education, local ownership, and direct economic framing offers a contrast to top-down reforestation mandates that often fail when enforcement lapses.
What still needs to happen
The gains are real but not yet secure. Unsustainable tourism development remains a pressure on restored areas, particularly as the Dominican Republic has grown into one of the Caribbean’s most-visited destinations. Land speculation in areas close to coastal and mountain resorts threatens to push development into zones that were carefully reforested over the past decade.
Plan Yaque’s leaders and allied environmental groups are pushing for stronger integrated land-use planning and legal frameworks that protect restored areas from conversion. Without those safeguards, some of the hard-won ecological recovery could erode as fast as it was built.
Still, the Dominican Republic’s experience offers something genuinely rare in environmental news: a story of large-scale degradation that was actually reversed, at speed, through community trust rather than enforcement. That makes it worth studying carefully — and worth building on.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Good News Round-Up — Plan Yaque
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Alzheimer’s risk cut in half by drug in landmark prevention trial
- Indigenous land rights win at COP30 covers 160 million hectares
- The Good News for Humankind archive on the Dominican Republic
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