YUCATAN PENINSULA ASSESSMENT
Mexico defined a formal objective for restoration at the sub-national level for the Yucatán peninsula. The focus has been in improving both the net economic return of land use, increasing landscape productivity through economically-viable mixed agro-forestry models, and its functionality through improved biodiversity habitat fragmentation, carbon sequestration, and soil conservation.
The opportunity for restoration was identified within the landscape which is currently under a certain level of degradation (between medium and very high) considering 3 different functions:
- Provisioning function to productive land use (livestock, agriculture, forestry)
- Habitat function for biodiversity
- Carbon sequestration
Take a look at the opportunity map for the Yucatan Peninsula:
Within these degraded areas, landscape restoration potential was identified only where the net economic return of implementing restoration models and its carbon mitigation/sequestration potential were both higher than those of current land use in that specific area, and applying environmental safeguards criteria defined during the ROAM assessment which identified different sets of potential transitions. For the States of Campeche and Yucatan, the potential is higher than the areas pledged for restoration under the Bonn Challenge, while for the State of Quintana Roo the pledge resulted higher than the areas that are economically viable for restoration, implying that the difference could be implemented only under a filantropic scheme. However, it must be noticed that only the production of commodities and the ecosystem service of carbon sequestration are taking into account, underestimating the value of improved flow of other ecosystem services related to restoration.

[1] 0.95 million ha to 2020 and 2 million ha to 2030 for the Yucatán peninsula (states of Campeche, Yucatan, Quintana Roo) contributing to the 8.5 million pledge at the national level fro 2020.


From the 3,350,900 ha of economically-viable restoration potential a subset of areas with the highest economic value of restoration was selected in each State up to the extent of their respective Bonn Challenge pledge (with a lower value for Quintana Roo), generating the priority map for restoration meeting the Bonn Challenge subnational targets (100% for Campeche and Yucatan, 72% for Quintana Roo).
Take a look at the priority map generated for Yucatan: