Honduras: Climate Change Advances Quicker than Gov. Policies
HAVANA TIMES – Ranked as the third most vulnerable country in the world according to Germanwatch’s Climate Risk Index 2025, Honduras faces a profound paradox: while its vulnerability to hurricanes, floods, and droughts increases year after year, the country has presented a second update of its nationally determined contribution (NDC) that seems more a statement of intent than a viable roadmap.
The NDC outlines the country’s climate action plan, including its target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It’s an action provided for in the Paris Agreement, in which nations commit to curbing global warming through promises to reduce emissions, restore forests, and advance towards resilient development.
The NDC analysis is Honduras’ letter of introduction to the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) on climate change, which will be hosted by the Amazonian city of Belem do Para, in northern Brazil, from November 10 – 21.
However, the big question is whether this commitment is compatible with the structural reality of this Central American country.
With weak institutions, economic limitations, and slow implementation of climate policies, the ambitious targets Honduras presents in its NDC do not seem realistic, especially since the country has not outlined measures that indicate a concrete action plan. Meanwhile, the nation pays the price of climate change every year—with lives and millions in losses.
The document, prepared by the Honduran Secretariat of Natural Resources and Environment (Serna), maintains the goal of reducing projected emissions by 16% by 2030, in addition to incorporating the Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry sector for the first time, in search of greater control over greenhouse gas sources and carbon sinks.
Although the official document, presented in April 2025, seeks to show commitment to the Paris Agreement, the specialists consulted for this report agree that the lack of financing, weak institutions, and the absence of political will threaten its actual fulfillment.
Jose Ramon Avila, from the Association of Non-Governmental Organizations and a critical voice in the social sector, points out that although Honduras adopted thirteen strategic mitigation and adaptation objectives in the 2021 NDC, “the climate agenda is suffering a serious setback because they’re not addressing the fundamental problems standing in the way of favorable climate management.”
He emphasizes the lack of effective actions en key areas such as sustainable rural development, energy transition and control o deforestation where there are more announcements than real implementation.
An ambition more methodological than political
All national climate ambitions remain dependent on international financing. According to the official document, compliance will depend on the arrival of external funds under the Paris Agreement, which is now 10 years old. This implies that, without foreign resources, mitigation and adaptation will not progress.
Ana Rosario Velasquez, co-founder of the Honduran Environmental Coalition, considers it to be “a plan without the financial muscle or institutional capacity to be implemented,” highlighting the lack of a portfolio of bankable projects, implementation schedules, or monitoring and transparency mechanisms.
The failure of developed countries to meet their financial climate commitments once again highlights the gap between promises and climate action.
Although civil society and developing countries expected the new global financing goal to reach $1.3 trillion per year (based on an estimate of how much money would be needed to accelerate energy transition and address the impacts of climate change), the agreement at the last COP barely reached $300 billion for the period up until 2035.
The development of a roadmap remains pending. By agreement, this still undeveloped plan should indicate the paths to reach $1.3 trillion in financing, although there is no new official agreement about this quantity.
In addition, this second update of Honduras’ NDC incorporates for the first time the Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry sector, which allows for the accounting of gas sinks and removals under the guidelines of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
According to the Serna, the Honduran government’s environmental agency sees this inclusion strengthening environmental integrity and makes the NDC more “comprehensive and transparent.”
Ávila points out that including this change may have an impact depending on how the regulation is applied: if there is greater control over logging and better forest management, gas emissions can be reduced, but he warns that this requires political will and concrete actions that are not currently happening in the country.
For his part, Ricardo Pineda, director of Sustenta Honduras, warns that the NDC update artificially increases the emissions baseline; he explains that this has to do with the fact that the goal for emissions reductions is based on a duplication of the current emissions.
“It’s like wanting to sell a percentage reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, but in real numbers an increase in emissions is expected. It seems to show that they’re just doing this to fulfill a commitment, not out of any will for real climate action.”
This “methodological ambition” complies with the requirements of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, but lacks practical translation into energy, agricultural, or forestry policies. Instead of consolidating a strategic vision with quantifiable results, the update turns the mitigation exercise into an accounting calculation, with no real effect on the country’s decarbonization.
The specialists consulted feel the problem lies in the fact that the Honduran NDC was constructed as a technical rather than a political document, without any operational plans or budgetary support to guarantee its implementation.
Velasquez warns that Honduras is “painting its failure green” because it depends almost entirely on international financing, without generating national resources or strengthening its own institutions.
Pineda adds that, with this approach, Honduras is excluding itself from access to international climate financing because “it is not demonstrating willingness or clarity in its mitigation commitments,” while Avila stresses that “the problem is not technical but political: the country lacks the will to transform its extractive and energy model.”
Adaptation: the Aquiles Heel of climate change
Climate adaptation has become one of the most urgent pillars of environmental action in Honduras. In the second update of its NDC, the government reaffirms that the goal is not only to reduce emissions, but also to strengthen the resilience of communities and ecosystems impacted by the climate crisis.
In addition, it seeks to strengthen resilience in critical sectors such as agriculture, marine-coastal, water, infrastructure, and biodiversity, aligning itself with the pillars of the National Adaptation Plan.
According to the First National Adaptation Communication (2023), priorities include increasing water storage capacity, protecting degraded ecosystems, restoring mangroves and wetlands, and incorporating adaptation criteria into land use and infrastructure planning.
However, despite having a robust technical framework and strategies such as Ecosystem-Based Adaptation, implementation faces limited resources, a lack of inter-institutional coordination, and unequal access to climate finance mechanisms.
Cesar Quintanilla, a climate change specialist, points out that Honduras “is naked in the face of climate impacts,” with coastal and agricultural communities continuing to lose homes and livelihoods to flooding, erosion, and sea level rise.
Although the NDC makes mention of the country’s vulnerability, it doesn’t include any operational adaptation measures such as land use plans, early alert systems or financing for the rural towns and communities.
One example of this is the coastal community of Cedeño, where the sustained advance of the sea onto the dry land in the last four decades has caused severe coastal erosion in the Gulf of Fonseca in southern Honduras. The phenomenon has considerably reduced the strip of beach and destroyed businesses and restaurants located in the former tourist zones of the Marcovia municipality.
This coastal retreat, caused by rising sea levels and more intense storm surges, has transformed the landscape and forced dozens of families to relocate, leaving behind fragmented communities and a local economy increasingly battered by the effects of climate change.
Rosa María Pastrana, a 68-year-old fisherwoman, has seen the sea destroy homes—including her own—and her livelihood—fish—become scarce, both as a result of climate change.
Despite the vulnerability they are experiencing, Pastrana notes sadly that municipal and central government authorities have not bothered to implement mitigation plans, let alone adaptation plans. “We have learned to live with the advancing sea, but they’ve left us all by ourselves here.”
Today, Rosa María’s former home lies underwater, as do those of many locals. Although the effects have been felt for years, Marcovia has yet to implement a land use plan. According to municipal authorities, a lack of resources has prevented any implementation of the land use study developed in conjunction with the Embassy of the Republic of China (Taiwan).
In the words of Cesar Quintanilla, Honduras “hasn’t succeeded in translating its vulnerability into action,” given that the most at-risk communities – especially the rural and coast areas – still receive no support to respond to the droughts, hurricanes and marine erosion and intrusion. Due to this lapse between planning and execution, adaptation has become an urgent social and environmental debt owed by the national climate agenda.
How will Honduras present itself at COP30?
Ahead of COP30 in Belem, those interviewed believe that Honduras will arrive with green rhetoric and empty hands; in other words, with a weak agenda and no concrete climate strategy.
Pineda foresees that the Honduran delegation will be “fragmented and unprepared,” focused more on the country’s upcoming elections than on the climate emergency.
Honduras will choose its next president on November 30, just one week after COP30, and Lucky Medina, secretary of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, is the campaign manager for the candidate of the Libertad y Refundación party, currently in power.
Pineda warns that the lack of institutional coordination and civil society representation reinforces the exclusion of communities, women, and young people from international negotiation spaces.
He also argues that “it will be the most important COP for the region, but Honduras arrives with the least preparation,” without any projects ready or a position aligned with global mitigation and adaptation goals.
This situation, according to Pineda, not only weakens the country’s credibility within the UNFCCC process, but also limits access to international climate funds, particularly those earmarked for loss and damage.
From civil society, voices such as those of Velásquez and Ávila regret that the government is arriving in Belém “empty-handed,” with a discourse that promises climate action but lacks technical and financial support.
Ávila believes that Honduras “will attend while sustaining its debt to the population and its international commitments,” due to a lack of political will, little applied research, and poor coordination between academia, the public sector, and communities.
Quintanilla is even more critical: he asserts that the country will repeat the same pattern of previous years, with large but technically weak delegations that do not participate in the negotiating tables or contribute concrete proposals.
To recover its credibility and viability, experts recommend adopting an NDC 2025–2030 Operational Plan with measurable goals, allocated budgets, and genuine citizen participation. Only then can Honduras cease to be perceived as a country that has failed in climate management in Central America and move toward a more equitable, coherent, and resilient approach to the crisis.
This report was elaborated with help from “Latin America Climate Tracker” and the support of Oxfam.
First published in Spanish by IPS and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.