Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula is an ecologically and socially vital region, home to critical ecosystems like coral reefs, mangroves, seagrasses, cenotes, and coastal dunes. These provide essential services such as coastal protection, carbon sequestration, water regulation, and biodiversity conservation, supporting local livelihoods. However, sea-level rise, droughts, stronger cyclones, shifting rainfall, and ocean acidification are intensifying. These climate challenges, combined with human-driven threats like tourism expansion and unsustainable agriculture such as overfishing, endanger ecosystems and the communities and livelihoods that rely on them, particularly indigenous and vulnerable populations.

The project aims to increase the climate resilience of vulnerable communities, ecosystems, and productive systems by supporting locally led Ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) interventions that enhance biodiversity, reduce climate vulnerability, and sustain essential ecosystem services in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

Some key activities are financing ten sub-projects to conserve, restore, and improve productive practices to increase communities’ adaptive capacities in coastal and marine landscapes, mobilising financing to scale up community-level activities, and knowledge sharing and enhanced coordination among local stakeholders, national agencies, and NGOs.

GCF's Project Preparation Facility (PPF) and Readiness Programme support were deployed to help develop the project.