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# Three countries put their names to one forest
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/calakmul-declaration/
- Published: 2026-08-22T21:56:22.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-22T21:59:26.000Z
- Description: In the far south of Mexico, the largest tropical forest reserve in the country is held together by the villages living inside it.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Conservation, All stories, Rewilding

Calakmul sits in Campeche, hard against the Guatemalan border, in a place where the Maya built a city and the jungle grew back over the top of it. Climb one of the pyramids at first light and you come out above an unbroken green canopy with howler monkeys roaring somewhere underneath. Eighty six mammal species and three hundred and fifty eight bird species have been recorded here, and because the reserve joins onto neighbouring protected land the big cats can move between them freely. Since the government widened the decree in 2023 the protected area has run to more than one and a half million hectares, the second largest block of tropical forest in the Americas after the Amazon, and the wider region is thought to hold around five hundred jaguars. Local guides have been filming them lately, walking the roadsides in daylight.

What holds it together is agreements rather than fences. Village lands here are held in common, and a conservation fund pays those communities to keep the habitat intact, with the villagers themselves doing the monitoring that shows it is working. Then this year the three countries that share this forest, Mexico, Belize and Guatemala, signed the Calakmul Declaration for the Gran Selva Maya Biocultural Corridor, which is the first time all three have put their names to one plan for the whole thing. Jose Roberto Sanchez, the deputy director of the Calakmul reserve, is the one who has to make it work on the ground. A forest that crosses three borders and a hundred village boundaries only stays whole if everybody keeps their end of it, year after year, long after the signing.

Our short take: from **WWF**’s reporting on the Maya Forest, 2026, and the WWF statement on the Calakmul Declaration by Belize, Guatemala and Mexico. Photograph: the view from Structure 2, Calakmul, by **Bernard DUPONT** via Wikimedia Commons under [CC BY-SA 2.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/).