The CBC was established in 2007 as a political commitment to the environment, endorsed by the environment ministers of Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic in the 2007 Santo Domingo Declaration, which was signed with the support of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) as the initiative’s supporting agency.
Subsequently, in 2009, with the signing of a new document self-styled as the In the II Santo Domingo Declaration, the commitment to implement the CBC initiative defined in 2007 is reaffirmed; to this end, the ministers of the participating countries committed to the initiative express their “willingness to allocate human, financial, and in-kind resources, to the extent possible,” and outline the development of a participatory action plan that includes, among other things, concrete actions to:
- The design and implementation of a joint research program on Caribbean biodiversity.
- The formulation and execution of strategic actions to develop the potential of protected areas, particularly those linked to sustainable tourism.
- Identifying and implementing actions with nations in other parts of the continent and other regions of the world that form part of the migratory routes of shared species, in order to ensure the protection of their habitats.
- Implementing a reforestation plan as green infrastructure for adaptation and the reduction of vulnerability to the effects of climate change.
In 2014, an Interministerial Agreement on the Caribbean Biological Corridor was signed. Although non-binding, this document has the distinction of being an Agreement (previous ones were declarations of political will); this not only reaffirms commitment to the initiative but also, for the first time, uses a document with a legal format to define and endorse several core aspects of the CBC:
- Its institutional structure
- The functions of the various bodies comprising that structure
- The mechanism for incorporating new countries into the initiative.
- The mechanism for reviewing the CBC’s demarcation.
The 2014 Interministerial Agreement serves as the legal basis for the existence and development of the CBC.
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