The Dry Corridor includes parts of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. It is characterized by long periods of drought alternating with periods of heavy rainfall that seriously affect the livelihoods and food security of its 10 million residents. People in arid areas of Panama and the Dominican Republic face similar threats.

For example, drought exacerbated by the “El Niño” climate phenomenon in 2015 caused estimated losses of up to 60 per cent of the corn crop in affected areas. By 2019, five years of drought had left 1.2 million people in the region needing food aid, and in 2021, communities in Honduras and Guatemala suffered serious crop losses from hurricanes Eta and Iota.

"(These countries) are in the same boat. We have the same needs, the same approach. So we need to act together," said Diego Recalde, FAO Representative in El Salvador.

Droughts are among the greatest threats to sustainable development globally, and acting together requires the involvement of all stakeholders, experts say. This year’s World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought on 17 June highlights the need to invest in women’s equal access to land as a key facet in global land restoration and drought resilience efforts.

For farmers in Central America’s “Dry Corridor”, extreme weather fanned by the climate crisis has turned the simple act of sowing crops into a gamble that could ruin them and even drive them from their land.

“The most difficult thing for us here is the drought. Sometimes too much water affects the crops, too,” said Ivan Azucena, a 25-year-old from Zacatecoluca, El Salvador. “People are scared to plant in case there is no harvest.”

The need for action is urgent, with poverty and the triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste feeding into the humanitarian and migration emergencies plaguing several Central American countries. Azucena is one of 50,000 farmers in El Salvador benefitting from an ambitious regional drive led by the Central American Integration System (SICA), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and partners, to halt and reverse land degradation, boost the resilience of rural communities, and improve food security for millions of people.

The initiative across the Dry Corridor aims to turbo-charge and replicate the restoration of entire landscapes through the building and sharing of resources, knowledge and climate-smart practices. This includes leaving cover crops on the soil, planting trees uphill of a field or mixing trees with agricultural plants.

This approach has prompted the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration to name the initiative among its first 10 World Restoration Flagships. The flagships showcase efforts with the vision and scale to bring human activities and ecosystems into balance and lift people and nature toward a sustainable future.

“Food security across Central America depends on enabling people like Ivan to keep on farming without fearing for their own future,” said Natalia Alekseeva, Coordinator of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. “Restoring landscapes in a way that helps communities to adapt and thrive in challenging conditions is the only way to achieve this.”

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