Transborder Drylands Restoration: Vision and Reality After Three Decades of Innovative Partnerships on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Résumé 0

Cuenca Los Ojos (CLO) is a private organization dedicated to large-scale restoration of degraded arid and semi-arid ecosystems. Incorporated both in Mexico and in the United States, CLO has land-restoration projects that span 748 square kilometres in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands region. This case study focuses on CLO’s restorative operations on the Mexican side of this increasingly fortified border region. It examines the progress, shortcomings, and challenges of the restoration underway on the 10 000 hectares of Rancho San Bernardino, which abuts the international border in northeastern Sonora. CLO’s achievements over the past 15 years — in controlling erosion, refilling and vegetating deeply incised arroyos, increasing surface and subsurface water, and expanding biodiversity — point to the value of considering the Rancho San Bernardino experiment as a global model. That this experiment has coincided with a prolonged drought also marks it as a model for drylands restoration in the hotter, drier conditions predicted with climate change. Similar large-scale restoration projects might also benefit from a review of CLO’s strategies for fostering cross-border cooperation, building multisectoral alliances among private and governmental participants, restoring transborder wildlife corridors, and creating links between land restoration and emerging restoration economies.