The state of Quintana Roo is located in the eastern part of the Mexican Republic, with its boundary to the east with the Caribbean Sea, to the north with the Gulf of Mexico and the state of Yucatan, to the west with the state of Campeche and to the south with Belize and Guatemala along a border of just over 180 km. The territory is approximately 5 million hectares occupying the 19th place in territorial extension in Mexico, although there is a territorial dispute with Campeche for just over 1/2 million hectares. The state has approximately 1000 km of coastline and 10 municipalities. Of the little more than 5 million hectares of state territory, around 4,160,000 hectares are currently covered by dense vegetation.
The three states of the Yucatan Peninsula (Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatán) share similar ecological and social characteristics, which allows us to analyze certain dynamics jointly. In the Yucatan Peninsula, most of the natural forest is tropical (mainly of medium height and lowlands, with very few areas of the mountain forest) and parts of this area are high meadows (secondary or replacement forest, which is part of a long rotation of the milpa farming system). Currently there are different estimates of the evaluation of deforestation rates due to the different forest definitions, methods, time periods studied and scales of analysis (Rueda, 2010). Most of the studies focus on the loss and partial recovery of forest cover, paying attention to the central and southern regions of the Peninsula (Turner et al., 2004; Bray and Klepeis, 2005; Vester et al., 2007; Ellis and Porter-Bolland, 2008), probably related to the fact that this part of the Peninsula is designated a biological corridor.
For the period from 1993 to 2002, the predominant process in Quintana Roo was the degradation of the perennial tropical forests. Quintana Roo registered a higher rate of degradation than deforestation. Between 2002 and 2007 there was a significant trend toward human settlements and infrastructure, which was an important factor in deforestation.
More information can be found in the Impact Platform of the GCF.