Coastal socio-environmental vulnerability in Central America: recent advances towards its characterization

Coastal areas in Central America are important for the local populations of each country, as well as for the health of the oceans and their ecosystems. According to University of Costa Rica data, these geographic spaces are home to 21% of the total population of the Central American region.

In these spaces there is significant pressure for the population, which is in a condition of socio-environmental vulnerability derived from the difficulty of access to land, marine-coastal resources and the neglect of the Central American States for health care, education and the poverty eradication, among others. In addition to the above, climate change and climate variability increase adverse conditions for the Central American coastal population.

To ensure the resilience of these coastal populations, it is necessary for each Central American State to develop comprehensive and specialized public policies to address social and environmental vulnerability. However, this is a very distant reality, due to the lack of social, economic and environmental information of this Central American population.

For the above, a data homologation project for the determination of coastal socio-environmental vulnerability in Central America has been developed by the Interdisciplinary Coastal Program of the National University of Costa Rica; in conjunction with the University of San Carlos of Guatemala, the National Autonomous University of Honduras, the University of Panama and the University of Western Brittany of France; to identify the variables and data in each country that allow a characterization of the vulnerability condition in the Central American isthmus.

In this way, it is intended to present the results of this research to the OOSC, as well as scientific recommendations to the Central American academy and the different States of the isthmus, to ensure the availability of comparable data in the region, which allows the development of future scenarios for this population, and thus public policies can be generated that allow a better quality of life for the Central American coastal population.