Edwin Josue Castellanos

University of the Valley of Guatemala · Instituto de Investigaciones

The limited success of international efforts to reduce global warming at levels established in the Paris Agreement, and the increasing frequency and strength of climate impacts, highlight the urgent need of adaptation, particularly in developing countries. Unfortunately, current levels of adaptation initiatives are not enough to counteract the obse...

Central America is highly impacted by current extreme events associated with climate variability and the adverse effects of climate change, showing high vulnerability compounded by its historical context and socioeconomic structure. In light of the important findings published by the WGII of the IPCC AR6 in 2022 on the adverse effects of climate ch...

Soil erosion is one of the major causes of soil degradation worldwide, because it causes the depletion of soil organic carbon, nutrients, and water holding capacity. In Central America, coffee production is vulnerable to soil erosion since it often occupies steep slopes with high annual precipitation. To assess management options to control erosion...

The Working Group II contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a comprehensive assessment of the scientific literature relevant to climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. The report recognizes the interactions of climate, ecosystems and biodiversity, and human societie...

Nature-based solutions provide adaptation and mitigation benefits for climate change as well as contributing to other sustainable development goals (high confidence). Effective nature-based climate change mitigation stems from inclusive decision-making and adaptive management pathways that deliver climate-resilient systems serving multiple sustaina...

Climate change, growing populations, and increasing wealth are increasing demand for food, energy, and water. Additionally, water stress is expected to increase in the future in areas with high rates of seasonality of precipitation, due to increased variability in precipitation. One approach to limiting the impact of climate change on food system p...

Limited information is available regarding chemical water quality at the tap in Guatemala City, preventing individuals, water utilities, and public health authorities from making data-driven decisions related to water quality. To address this need, 113 participants among households served by a range of water providers across the Guatemala City metr...

El Informe del estado del agua de la Región Metropolitana de Guatemala 2022: el agua nos une, representa un primer esfuerzo para caracterizar el estado actual de los recursos hídricos de la región. Para la elaboración del mismo se reunieron diversos actores, incluyendo a centros de investigación de universidades, organizaciones no gubernamentales n...

Central and South America are highly exposed, vulnerable and strongly impacted by climate change, a situation amplified by inequality, poverty, population growth and high population density, land use change particularly deforestation with the consequent biodiversity loss, soil degradation, and high dependence of national and local economies on natu...

Climate-related risks in Central and South America have received increased attention and concern in science and policy, but an up-to-date comprehensive review and synthesis of risks and adaptation potential is currently missing. For this paper we evaluated over 200 peer-reviewed articles and grey literature documents published since 2012. We found...

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/ The chapter is divided in two main sections. The first section follows an integrative approach in which hazards, exposure, vulnerability, impacts and risks are discussed following the eight climatically homogeneous sub-regions described in WGI AR6 (see Figure 12.1). The second section assesses the implemented an...

Chapter 12 assesses climate change impacts and risks, vulnerability as well as barriers and options for adaptation and climate resilient development in Central and South America.

The devastating 2015 earthquakes in Nepal highlighted the need for effective disaster risk reduction (DRR) in mountains, which are inherently subject to hazards and increasingly vulnerable to extreme events. As multiple UN policy frameworks stress, DRR is crucial to mitigate the mounting environmental and socioeconomic costs of disasters globally....

Mountain social-ecological systems (MtSES) are vital to humanity, providing ecosystem services to over half the planet's human population. Despite their importance, there has been no global assessment of threats to MtSES, even as they face unprecedented challenges to their sustainability. With survey data from 57 MtSES sites worldwide, we test a co...

The interconnectedness of food, energy, and water systems-commonly referred as the FEW nexus-calls for the integrated study of these systems to improve resiliency of these natural resources and adapt to our changing world. In this article, we explore the state of FEW nexus research in Guatemala to highlight progress while also pointing out future r...

Many countries have taken on ambitious but potentially costly renewable energy development goals to combat climate change. The government of Guatemala has introduced a plan to increase renewable generation capacity, while an estimated 76% of Guatemalans are energy poor. In this paper, we evaluate the trade-offs between alleviating energy poverty an...

This article investigates how migration and remittances affect forest cover in eight rural communities in Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico. Based on household surveys and remote sensing data, we found little evidence to support the widespread claim that migration takes pressure off forests. In the Chiapas sites, we observed no significant changes in f...

Understanding drivers of deforestation is essential for developing any successful intervention to reduce forest degradation or loss, yet there remains relatively little consensus or clarity on how drivers should be identified and classified. To capture the full range of values and mediating factors that may contribute to land-use behaviours, an app...

Mountain social‐ecological systems (MtSES) are vital to humanity, providing ecosystem services to over half the planet's human population. Despite their importance, there has been no global assessment of threats to MtSES, even as they face unprecedented challenges to their sustainability. With survey data from 57 MtSES sites worldwide, we test a co...

The devastating 2015 earthquakes in Nepal highlighted the need for effective disaster risk reduction (DRR) in mountains, which are inherently subject to hazards and increasingly vulnerable to extreme events. As multiple UN policy frameworks stress, DRR is crucial to mitigate the mounting environmental and socioeconomic costs of disasters globally....

Climate change will have serious repercussions for agriculture, ecosystems, and farmer livelihoods in Central America. Smallholder farmers are particularly vulnerable due to their reliance on agriculture and ecosystem services for their livelihoods. There is an urgent need to develop national and local adaptation responses to reduce these impacts,...

Guatemala's population is dependent on cash crops and subsistence agriculture, the yield of which depends on both the timing and quantity of rainfall. Detailed knowledge about Guatemala's past, current, and future climate is therefore critical to the well-being of a country so reliant on agriculture. Relatively little information about Guatemala's...

International migration flows between Guatemala and North America are now over thirty years old. The maturation of this phenomenon permits us to look beyond the immediate impacts of migrants and their remittances on Guatemalan livelihoods and to view how migration processes affect Guatemala’s most valuable natural resource – land. We combine an int...

IntroductionAdvances in ecology face the complexity of ecosystems with dynamics longer than a single scientist’s career. In forestry and REDD+ practice, in particular, our ability to understand forest ecosystem dynamics and to manage them for mitigation and adaptation strongly relies on the combination of long-term research efforts and on data shar...

IntroductionThe main goal of national forest programs is to lead and steer forest policy development and implementation processes in an inter-sectoral way (FAO 2006). National forest monitoring systems contribute to forest programs through monitoring forest changes and forest services over time (FAO 2013). To do so, they generally collect and analy...

Key messageThree options are proposed to improve the accuracy of national forest biomass estimates and decrease the uncertainty related to tree model selection depending on available data and national contexts.IntroductionDifferent tree volume and biomass equations result in different estimates. At national scale, differences of estimates can be im...

Here, we contribute to the debate surrounding the impact of international migration and remittances on agriculture. In 2011, we surveyed families with and without migrants in four rural communities in Chiapas regarding their farming practices. We also sampled agrobiodiversity on the land managed by a subset of each group. Contrary to our expectatio...

Con este artículo se pretende contribuir al debate sobre el impacto de la migración internacional y de las remesas en la agricultura. Presentamos los resultados de una encuesta realizada en 2011 sobre agricultura, combinados con muestreos de agrobiodiversidad en parcelas de familias con y sin migrantes de cuatro comunidades campesinas de Chiapas. E...

The Central America (CA) and South America (SA) region harbors unique ecosystems and has the highest biodiversity on the planet and a variety of eco-climatic gradients. Unfortunately, this natural wealth is threatened by advancing agricultural frontiers resulting from a rapidly growing agricultural and cattle production (Grau and Aide, 2008). The r...

Drought in Guatemala has negative consequences for agriculture and potable water supplies, particularly in regions of the country with highly seasonal rainfall. General circulation models suggest that a decrease in both winter and summer rainfall over Central America is likely and imminent as a consequence of anthropogenic influences on the climate...

Top-down natural resource management approaches have been criticized as failing to sustainably protect forest resources. Decentralization of this management has become increasingly popular but there is a lack of consensus on whether or not decentralization has produced more effective natural resource management. Guatemala adopted a partially decent...

In this paper, we ask what the effects of migration and remittances are on land tenure, agriculture and forests, based on empirical evidence from four rural communities in Guatemala. Our results suggest that remittances improve migrant families' access to agricultural land which – depending on the context – fosters more equitable local land distrib...

Given the pressing need to quantify carbon fluxes associated with terrestrial vegetation dynamics, an increasing number of researchers have sought to improve estimates of tree volume, biomass, and carbon stocks. Tree allometric equations are critical tools for such purpose and have the potential to improve our understanding about carbon sequestrati...

While climate change adaptation policy has tended to focus on planned adaptation interventions, in many vulnerable communities, adaptation will consist of autonomous, “unplanned” actions by individuals who are responding to multiple simultaneous sources of change. Their actions are likely not only to affect their own future vulnerability, but, thro...

The continued expansion of dendroclimatology into Mesoamerica requires the identification and evaluation of species whose rings can be precisely dated and then statistically compared with precipitation and temperature variability in order to make inferences about past climate. Here, we establish the basis for using Abies guatemalensis Rehder (Pinac...

Tree removal in Latin American coffee agroforestry systems has been widespread due to complex and interacting factors that include fluctuating international markets, government-supported agricultural policies, and climate change. Despite shade tree removal and land conversion risks, there is currently no widespread policy incentive encouraging the...

Geomorphic processes play an important role in the transfer and storage of Carbon within mountainous terrain. Among these, mass wasting stands out because of its impact on above and below-ground Carbon pools and its potential for releasing or sequestering Carbon. A combined remote-sensing and GIS approach was used to quantify the amount and spatial...

Tercer estudio nacional elaborado por 2 instituciones de gobierno (Instituto Nacional de Bosques - INAB y Consejo Nacional de Áreas Protegidas - CONAP), y 2 universidades privadas (Universidad del Valle - UVG y Universidad Rafael Landívar - URL), para estudiar la dinámica forestal durante los períodos 2006 y 2010, a través de imágenes satelares LAN...

More than a century after the introduction of electric power transmission, almost 3 billion people still rely on biomass fuels to meet their energy needs. Use of this renewable fuel in unvented cooking stoves results in disastrous consequences for human health and global warming. These negative outcomes have led governmental and nongovernmental org...

Segundo estudio nacional elaborado por 2 instituciones de gobierno (Instituto Nacional de Bosques - INAB y Consejo Nacional de Áreas Protegidas - CONAP), y 2 universidades privadas (Universidad del Valle - UVG y Universidad Rafael Landívar - URL), para estudiar la dinámica forestal durante los períodos 2001 y 2006, a través de imágenes satelares LA...

Communities who rely directly on the natural environment for their survival typically have developed risk management strategies to enable them to avoid dangerous thresholds of change to their livelihoods. Development policy appropriate for natural resource-based communities requires an understanding of the primary drivers of social-ecological chang...

This article explores the role of risk perception in adaptation to stress through comparative case studies of coffee farmers’ responses to climatic and non-climatic stressors. We hypothesized that farmers associating these changes with high risk would be more likely to make adaptations than those who saw the events as part of normal variation. Neve...

El análisis de los medios de vida se ha utilizado con éxito para ilustrar el comportamiento de las familias como resultado de la interacción de sus miembros con un mundo lleno de restricciones y oportunidades institucionales a escala local, regional, nacional y global. En ese mundo, las familias organizan sus activos y recursos para hacer frente co...

Ecosystem services are fundamental to the development of sustainable landscapes but are largely ignored or taken for granted in land management strategies. Ecosystems, and the ecological processes that define them, form the natural infrastructure supporting human activities to enhance the economic and social well-being of communities. This chapt...

This volume presents eighteen case studies of natural disasters from Australia, Europe, North America and developing countries. By comparing the impacts, it seeks to identify what moves people to adapt, which adaptive activities succeed and which fail, and the underlying reasons, and the factors that determine when adaptation is required and when s...

Attention to institutional arrangements has become integral to research on forest management and conservation. While strong institutions typically are associated with better forest conditions, few institutional studies have evaluated the influence of underlying biophysical factors on forest conditions. Our research compared institutional arrangemen...

This article explores the impacts of market shocks and institutional change on smallholder livelihoods, and the challenge of adaptation in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. The rapid decline in coffee prices since the dissolution of the International Coffee Agreement in 1989 has had widespread and profound impacts across coffee-producing regions. The...

As a result of a dramatic decline in world coffee prices and the restructuring of both domestic and international institutions, coffee farmers have been facing one of the most difficult periods in sector history. In 2003, a comparative case study project (supported by the Small Grant Program of the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Researc...

The assumptions behind the fluorescence quenching (FQ) method were thoroughly evaluated to assess its potential for quickly and accurately assessing the importance of hydrophobic organic contaminant-macromolecular organic carbon interactions in aquatic systems. Perylene was used as the probe molecule to avoid problems encountered with other fluores...

This paper presents a study on strategies of coffee growers in Mesoamerica to face global changes such as market shocks and price volatility, climate variability and pests. We pay particular attention to institutional factors that may shape farmers' choices, especially their participation in civil organizations, which recently took on roles formerl...