Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System

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The largest reef system in the Atlantic, running roughly a thousand kilometres along the Caribbean coasts of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras, from the northern Yucatan to the Bay Islands. The Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System, a component of it, was inscribed as World Heritage in 1996, placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2009 over offshore oil concessions and mangrove clearance, and removed from that list in 2018 after Belize legislated a moratorium on offshore petroleum work — one of the few reversals on that list, and a demonstration that the Danger listing can function as leverage rather than only as an epitaph. Ecologically the Mesoamerican reef is the counter-example to the Pacific story told through the Great Barrier Reef: its dominant losses have come less from heat alone than from disease, first the white-band epizootic that removed the Caribbean acroporids from about 1980, then stony coral tissue loss disease from the 2010s.