Along Honduras’ Coasts, a Key to Conservation Success

With more than 600 miles of shoreline on its Caribbean and Pacific coasts, Honduras is home to abundant mangrove forests and seagrass meadows—two types of coastal wetlands that provide enormous benefits for nature, wildlife, and people.

Many of these areas are also sites for conservation and research projects, which are yielding valuable data that could help the government counter the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss. But Honduras has no centralized agency or other entity to house and analyze this key information.

To help resolve that, The Pew Charitable Trusts has partnered with Centro de Estudios Marinos, a Honduran marine conservation NGO, to improve national-level coordination in support of coastal wetland conservation in the country.

This partnership is part of a much broader strategy: Worldwide, Pew’s advancing coastal wetlands conservation project works with countries to include mangrove, seagrass, and salt marsh ecosystems in their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to the Paris Agreement, the landmark 2015 climate deal agreed under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Coastal wetlands sequester and store massive amounts of carbon and, when healthy, can help countries combat the effects of a changing climate. That said, cutting greenhouse gas emissions is the clearest and most effective path to limiting climate change, but coastal wetland protections and other nature-based solutions can help.

Pew supports NDC efforts with technical policy and science, where needed, and works to ensure transparency and alignment on national goals in our partner countries.

Honduras has two national bodies that are key to this effort:

1. The National Biological Monitoring Board, which is tasked via a 2018 agreement to carry out national-level actions for knowledge management on environmental resources.
2. The National Wetlands Technical Committee, which was created out of a 2016 agreement to support implementation of Honduras’ National Wetlands Policy and to promote wetland conservation and management.

Central to the mandate of the Wetlands Technical Committee are the country’s extensive coastal wetland ecosystems—which span 12,300 square kilometers, enough to cover 2.5 million football fields.

Mangrove ecosystems in Honduras provide key habitat for many marine and terrestrial species on both coasts. While the precise extent of seagrass is unknown in the country, mangroves and seagrass in Honduras not only function to mitigate global climate change impacts by sequestering and storing carbon in their plant structures and soils, they also provide essential climate adaptation and resilience benefits to the country’s inhabitants by protecting and stabilizing shorelines.

Despite the importance of the two national bodies in Honduras, both were deactivated and reactivated in recent years because of unfinished regulations, as well as a lack of self-sustaining financial support for their operations. This means that government bodies would be able to operate and conduct activities based on pre-allocated government budgets rather than funders giving one-off support.

These coordinating bodies must be able to operate consistently and transparently to set ambitious national climate goals, which include protections for climate-mitigating coastal ecosystems such as mangroves and seagrass. This would enable continued coordination among government departments, academic universities, and nonprofit stakeholders and help the country set and meet ambitious climate goals.

In just one example, the National Biological Monitoring Board convened in October to initiate a three-month process to develop long-term and sustainable governing principles for the board.

Clear mandates and governing principles for the National Biological Monitoring Board and Wetlands Technical Committee are important because they would help:

1. Develop a shared and complete understanding of existing data and in turn inform the development of national-level conservation targets (as well as track progress toward these targets).
2. Provide a platform for coordination among government agencies that will need various data sources to report to international conventions (such as the UNFCCC, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and Ramsar, the international convention on wetlands) and to ensure alignment on this reporting.
3. Track current and proposed research projects, which will feed existing data pools (especially for mangroves and seagrass), and ensure scientific methodology is consistent with national standards.
4. Ensure long-term stability of the national bodies, thereby reducing loss of institutional knowledge and allowing for constant support throughout changing presidential administrations.

The Biological Monitoring Board is concurrently reviewing proposals to determine national methodologies for mangrove and seagrass monitoring for the first time. Establishing national standard methods would enhance coordination across projects and make it easier to apply research results and data to national-level targets. It’s this key link between science and policy that will enable the development of ambitious climate goals for international conventions.

Announcements of benchmark conservation goals and outcomes make headlines far more often than do efforts to improve inter-institutional coordination for developing and implementing policy. But the work Honduras is doing now—and the importance of sustaining that work far into the future—deserves attention, as it likely will prove crucial for the country to develop and meet meaningful climate targets for coastal wetlands in 2025 and beyond.

Kate Meyer works on The Pew Charitable Trusts’ advancing coastal wetlands conservation project.