Seventeen communities in the southern Honduran department of El Paraíso will begin efforts in the next two months to preserve the area flora and fauna as part of a sustainability and poverty-fighting project promoted by the European Union. With a budget of 1.6 million dollars, the project is framed in recovery, protection and sustainable use of natural resources, Cooperation Minister Karen Zelaya told Tierramérica.

The project focuses on poor communities along the Patuca, Choluteca and Negro rivers, near the northeastern biosphere of the Plátano River.

Over two years the hope is to build local capacity to mitigate environmental risks, as well as generating opportunities for self-management that will help fight poverty, which is suffered by 80 percent of all Hondurans.