Three nations sign agreement to protect 14 million acres of Mayan forest

Story: 2025 C.E.  |  Last updated: April 20, 2026

On August 15, 2025 C.E., the leaders of Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize stood together in the ancient city of Calakmul and signed a commitment to protect more than 14 million acres of tropical forest — one of the largest conservation agreements in the history of the Americas. The Great Mayan Jungle Biocultural Corridor, as it is called, stretches across all three countries and links some of the most biologically rich and culturally significant land in the Western Hemisphere.

At a glance

• Mayan forest protection: The Selva Maya — sometimes called the Maya Forest — is the largest continuous tropical forest in the Americas north of the Amazon, spanning southern Mexico, northern Guatemala, and western Belize.
• Biocultural corridor: The agreement goes beyond standard conservation law by formally integrating Indigenous cultural governance into oversight of the protected zone, giving Maya communities and environmental representatives seats at the table.
• Bladen Nature Reserve: This 99,796-acre crown jewel of Belize’s protected areas system is one of the anchor blocks of the corridor — a biodiversity hotspot harboring rare and endemic species and protecting the upper watershed of the Monkey River.

A forest shaped by deep time

The Maya Forest did not emerge from wilderness. It was shaped over millennia by the Maya civilization and by the communities who came after them. That history is written into the land itself.

In Belize, Bladen Nature Reserve anchors the southern end of the Maya Mountains — a karst and granite landscape of caves, sinkholes, old-growth rainforest, and river systems that have remained largely undisturbed for centuries. At its most sheltered points, west of the rugged limestone hills, Bladen is shielded from the destructive storms that regularly hit the Caribbean coast. The result is a forest of tall, ancient trees with intact ecosystems that scientists describe as among the most biodiversity-rich environments in Mesoamerica.

Bladen forms a crucial link between the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary to its northeast and the Columbia River Forest Reserve to its southwest. To the northwest, Chiquibul National Park connects to Guatemala’s protected area system. Together, these reserves form the Belizean backbone of the Selva Maya — the same forest block that the three-nation corridor agreement is designed to protect.

The forest provides habitat for jaguars, scarlet macaws, harpy eagles, tapirs, and white-lipped peccaries — all species that require large, unbroken stretches of forest to maintain viable populations. More than 200 mammal species and 500 bird species live within the broader Maya Forest. Many depend on the ability to move freely across what are now three national borders.

What the three governments agreed to do

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo, and Belizean Prime Minister Johnny Briceño each described the August 15 announcement as historic. The area covered — roughly 14 million acres — is larger than the entire country of Costa Rica.

Under the corridor agreement, the three governments committed to strengthening enforcement against illegal logging and land encroachment. They pledged to reject development projects that cannot demonstrate environmental compatibility and to fund sustainable economic alternatives — including eco-tourism, sustainable agriculture, and community-based forestry programs — for communities living inside the corridor.

Any future infrastructure project within the protected zone must pass a rigorous environmental review. That commitment carries specific weight given ongoing criticism of Mexico’s Maya Train rail project, which required significant forest clearing in southern Mexico and drew objections from environmental groups and some Maya communities. The corridor agreement represents a public, binding political commitment to prevent similar decisions from advancing without scrutiny.

Bladen itself offers a model for what community-integrated conservation can look like. The reserve is co-managed by the Government of Belize and the Ya’axché Conservation Trust, an Indigenous-led organization that took over day-to-day management in December 2008 C.E. Ya’axché — whose name means “ceiba tree” in Yucatec Maya — works with the surrounding Maya communities that have traditionally relied on the forest for food, water, and cultural continuity.

Why Indigenous governance matters

The corridor’s formal integration of Indigenous oversight is not a symbolic gesture. Research consistently shows that Indigenous-managed lands protect biodiversity more effectively than many government-designated reserves alone. The Maya communities that buffer Bladen, for instance, have long relied on the forest’s “spillover effect” — game species that grow in population inside the reserve and move outward into community lands, providing a sustainable source of protein without depleting the core ecosystem.

Bladen also functions as a carbon sink, a rainfall generator, and a watershed protector for the coastal plain communities that depend on the Monkey River system. Its watershed drains into the Caribbean Sea, where the Belize Barrier Reef — the second largest barrier reef in the world — lies offshore. The health of the reef depends directly on the quality of the water flowing from the Maya Mountains.

The corridor’s biocultural framing — treating ecological protection and cultural preservation as inseparable — is a meaningful departure from older conservation models that positioned Indigenous communities as problems to be managed. Conservation International and other organizations working in the region have noted that community buy-in is among the strongest predictors of long-term conservation success.

Real challenges remain

The agreement is a beginning, not an outcome. Drug trafficking organizations operate in parts of the Maya Forest, using remote corridors for movement and land laundering. Illegal logging continues. And the political will of three governments — each facing its own domestic pressures — will need to hold across multiple election cycles.

WWF’s Maya Forest program has called for transparent, independent monitoring of corridor commitments rather than self-reporting by governments alone. That accountability mechanism will be essential if the agreement is to translate from declaration to measurable protection on the ground.

The Maya Forest survived the collapse of the Classic Maya civilization, colonization, and a century of industrial logging. Whether it survives the 21st century may depend on whether agreements like this one are kept — and on whether the communities who have always lived there are genuinely empowered to help keep them.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — Bladen Nature Reserve

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Ghana creates a new marine protected area at Cape Three Points
• Indigenous land rights and 160 million hectares at COP30
• The Good News for Humankind archive on conservation

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