Macaya National Park: The Post-Matthew Situation

Macaya is the massif at the western end of the southern peninsula and the country's most important remaining cloud forest, which also put it directly in Matthew's path. This presentation by the park's management unit, with the national protected-areas agency and the environment ministry, reports its condition five months after the storm. Its length relative to the other decks in the session reflects that a protected area has an inventory to compare against, so damage can be stated in terms of what was there before rather than impressions. For a territorial library the case matters beyond conservation: Macaya's forest cover is the upper watershed of the rivers running through the communes below it, so its condition is an input to the flood exposure of settlements downstream, which is the link the CIAT's watershed colloquium had argued seven years earlier.