Mexico’s Caribbean coast is losing up to 2 meters of beach every year

Mexican beaches successful Cancún, Cozumel and elsewhere on the Caribbean Sea are vanishing astatine a complaint of up to 2 meters per year, a situation that scientists accidental is being intensified by unchecked tourism improvement and inadequate biology planning.

Oceanographic technologist Rodolfo Silva Casarín, whose probe focuses connected coastal zones, said past week that diminishing formation width is affecting much than 80% of the Quintana Roo coastline, a agelong that includes the tourer jewel, the Riviera Maya.

A program is successful spot to halt the erosion of Mexico’s Caribbean beaches, but scientists are acrophobic that it lone addresses immoderate of the affected areas and truthful mightiness conscionable determination the occupation to different coastlines. (Elizabeth Ruiz/Cuartoscuro)

While storms and hurricanes people reshape coasts, Silva Casarín said human activity — particularly the operation of ample hotels and population-driven discarded contamination — is pushing the strategy toward collapse.

“The coastal situation has stopped generating the sediments” that make the iconic achromatic sands, explained Silva Casarín, a specializer successful the Oceanography and Coastal Engineering radical astatine the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

He said that the coral reefs and marine taxon that person helped prolong that process are present being destroyed.

With that, helium warned that the authorities of Quintana Roo, which past week received a big of honors astatine the 2025 World Travel Awards, tin nary longer carnivore further tourism infrastructure without worsening erosion.

His comments came during a league for students and coastal absorption engineers titled “Diagnosis and Possible Alternatives for Managing Erosion of the Mexican Caribbean.” It was held astatine the University of the Caribbean successful Cancún, Q.R.

Data from earlier this twelvemonth highlights the standard of the loss.

Quintana Roo’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment (SEMA) reported successful January that much than 31.5 kilometers of beaches person already been critically eroded, with up to 7 meters of soil having disappeared from Playa del Carmen, Cancún, Puerto Morelos and Cozumel. 

An 800-million-peso (US $43.6 million) restoration program is underway, initially targeting 6 kilometers successful Playa del Carmen, but officials acknowledged it covers little than fractional the affected areas.

Silva Casarín criticized past short-term fixes, specified arsenic artificial soil fills successful 2006 and 2009, for ignoring reef wellness and accelerating erosion successful neighboring zones. He urged coral situation rehabilitation arsenic the lone viable semipermanent solution.

Adding urgency, NASA has warned that rising oversea levels from clime alteration could submerge respective Mexican beaches wrong decades. “New NASA instrumentality predicts extremity of Acapulco, Cancun and Cabo San Lucas” work a 2021 header successful The Hill.

NASA has predicted that by 2150, h2o levels could emergence astir 2 meters successful places similar Acapulco and implicit 1.5 meters successful parts of Yucatán and Tamaulipas — a menace not lone to ecosystems but to tourism economies nationwide.

With reports from El Economista, Infobae and Quinta Fuerza