Washington, DC - The countries of Central America’s Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) are among the most vulnerable in the world to the severe and mounting impacts of climate change. Hurricanes regularly strike the region, compounding preexisting humanitarian and economic crises by displacing hundreds of thousands of people and causing billions of dollars of economic losses. Less predictable weather conditions and a general increase in droughts and floods also threaten large parts of the region’s Dry Corridor that are highly dependent on agriculture. These trends are expected to accelerate as the climate crisis deepens, interacting with other structural factors such as poverty, inequality, corruption, gang violence, weak rule of law, and the continuing impacts of Covid-19 to increase migration, including to the United States.

As the Biden administration crafts its Northern Triangle policy and seeks to address the root causes of migration, climate change adaptation to help vulnerable communities should be a fundamental focus. The Task Force on Climate Change in the Northern Triangle will convene diverse voices from the region to provide policy recommendations on US assistance for climate change adaptation in the Northern Triangle, with a focus on economic and social equity and climate justice.

The Task Force will meet three times between September 2021 and February 2022 to provide inputs for a series of policy reports. Task Force members include a diverse group of individuals from the Northern Triangle, including representatives of environmental organizations, rural, Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, youth activists, and prominent former government officials and business leaders, as well as technical experts. For a full list of members, see below.

The task force is coordinated by Lisa Viscidi, director of the Inter-American Dialogue’s Energy, Climate Change & Extractive Industries Program. The project is made possible by support from the Open Society Foundations.