The Río Copán watershed in western Honduras is not unlike many agricultural landscapes throughout the developing world. A journey through this 600 square kilometer watershed reveals a mixture of small and mid-sized farms producing cattle, coffee, and subsistence crops. Residents here face many challenges: recent population growth has led to deforestation and water pollution, while agricultural productivity is generally low and poverty levels remain high, especially among the indigenous Mayan population.

 

Environmental degradation is both a cause and a consequence of these problems. Poverty has driven many local people to cut wood in the vanishing native pine-oak forests or to cultivate or graze hillsides that are too steep for these purposes. Such practices, in turn, contribute to silted rivers unsuitable for human or livestock consumption and to landslides that routinely close roads and isolate villages from needed goods and services for weeks or months at a time. To meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the Río Copán watershed will require not just new schools, new health centers, and new crop varieties; it will require a suite of coordinated activities, many of them focused on environmental restoration and natural resource management.

 

Fortunately, unlike many rural communities that address poverty issues piecemeal at the household or village level, Copán’s communities have recognized that these challenges grow from—and, in turn, influence—key dynamics and ecosystem processes operating at the scale of the entire watershed, and sometimes beyond. For local leaders, the wake-up call that spurred this landscape-level thinking arrived suddenly, drenching them, quite literally, like a bucket of cold water from above. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch tore through the region, wreaking havoc not just on de-vegetated hillsides but on the farms, villages, waterways, and infrastructure below.

 

After taking stock of the extensive damage, the four municipalities in the watershed decided to band together to form a regional coalition aimed at preventing such devastation in the future, and at finding solutions to shared problems such as erosion, water pollution, and poor human health. They created a vision and plan for the watershed’s future and, for the past several years, have been using this plan to target and guide externally-funded rural development activities. The problems and challenges in the watershed are not solved, but their root causes and interactions are now better understood. This knowledge encourages leaders to find solutions that do not trade off one landowner’s wellbeing for another’s, or one development objective for another, but that seek to maintain and restore the landscape’s natural and human capital for the benefit of all.

 

 

The Río Copán watershed lies in extreme western Honduras, on the border with Guatemala. The 617 square mile landscape contains diverse topography and vegetation, with elevations ranging from 600-1600 meters. Native habitats include pine-oak forest, which is a globally threatened ecosystem, as well as dry and moist broadleaf forests.

 

Honduras currently has the highest poverty rate in Central America (70%) and ranks 115 out of 170 countries globally in the index of human development (Programa Estado de la Nación 2008). The Copán region is somewhat insulated from the worst poverty due to the significant tourism revenue associated with local Mayan ruins. Ironically, however, the most impoverished landscape residents remain the Chorti Maya, whose ancestors built these temples. As such, the landscape contains a diverse mix of stakeholders, ranging from wealthier landowners concentrated around the colonial town of Copán Ruinas—whose income is principally drawn from ecological and cultural tourism—to coffee and cattle farmers and the campesinos they hire to work their lands, to the Chorti Maya, who are largely segregated from the Mestizo majority and work as farm laborers or depend on subsistence agriculture.

 

The majority of families in the region rely heavily on natural resources for food and fuel. Land is cleared for agriculture, and the remaining forest fragments are heavily influenced by the extraction of fuelwood, and by the grazing of cattle, particularly during the dry season. Over-exploitation of the natural resource base has eroded the capacity of the landscape to provide critical hydrological services, and has exacerbated the fragmentation of the pine-oak woodlands that once dominated the landscape. The dominant land uses in the landscape are cattle ranching, milpas (small plots of corn, beans and squash), and coffee in the higher elevations.

 

The Copán watershed has been the focus of two important projects in which CATIE (Center for Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education) has been active. FOCUENCAS II[1] has been working with local institutions for over four years to promote the participatory and collaborative management of the watershed with a particular focus paid to hydrological services, agricultural productivity, biodiversity conservation and institutional sustainability.  The goals were identified by local institutions represented by a regional umbrella organization entitled the MANCOSARIC[2]. CATIE also has been conducting a World Bank financed project entitled BNPP[3] aimed at understanding and evaluating the impacts of silvopastoral systems on the conservation of biodiversity in the watershed.