Panama Protects Largest Marine Corridor in the World
The four countries of Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Panama created a project that protects 500,000 square kilometers of seas in the Eastern Tropical Pacific with high biological diversity.
Back in 2004, environmental representatives from Ecuador, Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica signed the ‘San José Declaration’ in the Costa Rican capital to cooperate in the conservation and sustainable use of their Pacific waters in something they called the Marine Corridor of the Eastern Tropical Pacific (CMAR). No one could conceive that by 2024, it would remain the largest block of protected marine areas left in the world.
Financial organizations, private funds, conservation networks and governments continued to support the project and now present CMAR as a consolidated project to protect with international aid. It is a corridor that connects Cocos Island (Costa Rica), the Galapagos archipelago (Ecuador), Coiba Island (Panama) and the Malpelo and Gorgona islands, in Colombia, but above all it involves multinational action, without each country losing sovereignty over its territory.
