About the project

The Cinturón Verde is a 96,500-hectare (ha) landscape restoration initiative in the watershed that supports Honduras’ capital city, Tegucigalpa. In this landscape, Eden Reforestation Projects (Eden) collaborates with community water boards, government stakeholders, and farming communities to protect water resources, fight forest fires, restore landscape connectivity, and improve climate resilience. The initiative provides a nature-based solution to Tegucigalpa’s urgent water crisis, complementing urban infrastructure improvements to play a critical role in urban climate resilience while creating co-benefits for biodiversity and livelihoods.

Forests play an important role in regulating the water cycle, as they impact weather patterns, groundwater availability, erosion, and other factors that contribute to the movement, quality, and availability of water. At scale, the impact of degraded forest landscapes can significantly alter the landscape’s ability to provide these life-giving ecosystem services. In Tegucigalpa, 100% of the urban water supply is drawn from the hills and forests that create the Choluteca River. Tegucigalpa’s residents are reliant on a network of dams, wells, and highland water recharge zones for their water. However, in recent years, the city’s water supply has become increasingly unreliable, with many areas going without water for days at a time. The city schedules water availability, with some neighborhoods only receiving water for a few hours a week depending on the season. This water crisis is complex to manage and creates challenges for businesses, sanitation, hospitals, and homes. Additionally, it amplifies issues of equity, as not all households can afford water storage systems to adapt to shortages. The urgency of Tegucigalpa’s water crisis is deeply felt in the midst of climate change with some models anticipating a 20% reduction in rainfall and 41% reduction in water availability by 2100. Resolving this issue is an essential part of the area’s climate adaptation plans, and will require multiple pathways of action to achieve.

Restoration provides a clear pathway to improving water availability for Tegucigalpa. In spite of the critical role of forests in Tegucigalpa’s water supply, deforestation and degradation over the last 60 years have impacted the landscape’s ability to support the city. In the last two decades alone, an estimated 10,560 ha of tree cover have been lost within the AOI (16% of all tree cover in the AOI) across all forest types. In addition to tree cover loss, the invasive pine bark beetle has degraded over 14,000 hectares in the AOI’s pine-oak forests of specifically. Recent research on groundwater recharge in the area indicates that these pine-oak forests play a critical role in recharging urban wells. The impact of this deforestation and degradation is intensified by climate change and extreme weather events, threatening the security of water resources, forests, and biodiversity that communities depend upon.

The Cinturón Verde project’s Area of Interest (AOI) was developed to incorporate both the healthy and degraded recharge zones of Tegucigalpa’s three main water sources—Las Laureles Dam, La Concepción Dam, and La Tigra National Park. The area is a mosaic of three forest types, including protected areas, rural communities, urban edges, and agricultural zones. These areas are impacted by a number of drivers of deforestation and degradation, including uncontrolled fires resulting from agricultural practices, extensive grazing, illegal logging, and invasive pests (Dendroctonus frontalis).

Within the AOI, these drivers amplify each other, as many areas impacted by the pine bark beetle cannot regenerate naturally due to competition for degraded forest land. Additionally, deadwood in pine-oak forests increases the risk and intensity of forest fires, further impacting forest health and resilience. In Honduras, forest fires cause an estimated 80% of all forest loss, with the highest number of fires occurring in the AOI’s administrative department of Francisco Morazan. In response to these drivers and the urgency of Tegucigalpa’s water crisis, the Cinturón Verde project aims to protect and restore these important recharge zones.

In addition to securing water resources, the Cinturón Verde Restoration Project creates co-benefits for biodiversity and livelihoods. To achieve this, the project incorporates five protected areas, their buffer zones, and the biological corridors between them. These corridors, established by the government in 2013, are increasingly fragmented, reducing the potential for animal, plant, and water movement in the landscape. The AOI has many overlapping designations to signify its high conservation value, including Key Biodiversity Areas, Endemic, and Important Bird Areas. The protected areas included in the project support the health of three unique forest types, including highland cloud forests, pine-oak forest, and broadleaf deciduous forests. The habitats of the AOI are used by over 300 species of bird, including both migratory and endemic species, as well as pumas, ocelots, armadillos, and other animals.

Eden's Approach

Eden takes a holistic approach to landscape restoration, considering how activities on both protected and unprotected lands can improve landscape connectivity and function to the benefit of communities, climate, and biodiversity. Practically, this means that Eden designs restoration activities to support livelihoods through employment, supply chain development, and agroforestry interventions.

To this end, the Cinturón Verde Restoration Project works on public, private, and community land to address urgent environmental and community needs. Eden began working in this landscape in 2020, beginning in La Tigra National Park and its buffer zone. Here, Eden works with the community of Montaña Grande to restore pine-oak forests devastated by the pine bark beetle, illegal logging, and uncontrolled fires due to expanding agriculture. Through its programs, Eden plants and monitors indigenous tree species to restore forests and improve habitat for biodiversity.

Additionally, Eden manages an extensive fire monitoring and mitigation effort that brings communities together to prevent forest fires related to agricultural practices in the area. In the 2022-2023 fire season alone, Eden fought 73 forest fires and constructed over 100km of fire breaks. These measures led to less than 4% of Eden’s restoration sites impacted by forest fires last year—an incredible achievement.

Core Activities

• Reforestation and protection of key water recharge zones for Honduras’ Central District, with the goal of improving water availability for over 1 million people.
• Expansion of biological corridors between protected areas through agroforestry and regenerative agriculture on private and communally owned land.
• Promotion of forest-friendly, climate-resilient livelihood opportunities, co-developed with communities and other stakeholders.
• Protection of high biodiversity areas (including Key Biodiversity Areas, Endemic and Important Bird Areas).
• Forest fire monitoring and prevention, coordination of firefighting staff and volunteers.
• Monitoring and management activities for the invasive Pine Bark Beetle.
• Coordination, support, and implementation of protected area management plans.
• Collaboration with community water boards and other stakeholders toward restoration objectives.

Eden’s Landscape Restoration projects are funded in the early stages of project development, ensuring that donor funding contributes to the participatory processes that ensure the project’s sustainability. For this reason, the activities listed above will be further refined through comprehensive stakeholder engagement and project design.

Stage of development

The Cinturón Verde Restoration Project offers donors the opportunity to create tangible impacts on water resources, communities, biodiversity, and forests of Honduras. The project is ready to receive funding to support continued stakeholder engagement, detailed restoration planning, ongoing restoration and fire mitigation activities, and the development of supporting initiatives that will benefit communities and sustain restoration in the long-term.

Impact of Your Partnership

The anticipated impact of this project includes:
• A more connected, resilient forest landscape that can provide ecosystem services and biodiversity
• Reduced disturbance of natural fire regimes, improving forest health and resilience to disturbance.
• Increased water availability for urban and rural residents.
• Millions of trees planted and monitored across three forest types.
• Sustainable food systems.
• Forest-friendly and climate-resilient livelihoods, created through direct employment and seed collection, as well as complementary value chain development initiatives to be co-defined in the next phases of project development.

About Eden Reforestation Projects in Honduras

Eden operates in Francisco Morazan and Olancho departments of Honduras, restoring degraded landscapes through agroforestry, reforestation, and fires protection. For more information, please visit Eden’s website edenprojects.org.