ABSTRACT
Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have a rich and diverse history, incorporating indigenous cultures, ancient civilisations, European colonisation, African slavery, Chinese and Japanese immigration and global exchanges that make it complex and difficult to describe as a whole. There are 33 independent countries in the region and 13 dependencies or other territories, with a population of over 600 million people (Box 1). LAC is a region of high biodiversity, with dramatic landscapes ranging from the Sierra Madre in Mexico to the forests and volcanoes of Central America, tropical islands in the Caribbean, the extensive Andes mountain range, the dry deserts of Western South America and the grasslands of the Southern Cone, Patagonia and the Amazon. Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Ecuador and Venezuela are generally considered to be among the world’s ten most biodiverse countries as measured by species richness.
