Geography of Honduras

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thumb|upright=1.2|A map of [[Honduras.]]

Honduras is a country in Central America. Honduras borders the Caribbean Sea and the North Pacific Ocean. Guatemala lies to the west, Nicaragua south east and El Salvador to the south west. Honduras is the second largest Central American republic, with a total area of .

Honduras has a Caribbean coastline extending from the mouth of the Río Motagua in the west to the mouth of the Río Coco in the east, at Cape Gracias a Dios. The southeastern side of the triangle is a land border with Nicaragua. These mountains are woodland covered with mainly pine forests. In the 1970s, government policy encouraged agricultural cooperatives and collectives to establish themselves in the lightly populated area, but after 1992 government policy favored privatization. Miguel Facussé, owned some in the lower Aguán, which he planted in African palms for his palm oil venture.

Pacific lowlands

The smallest geographic region of Honduras, the Pacific lowlands, is a strip of land averaging on the north shore of the Gulf of Fonseca.

The climatic types of each of the three physiographic regions differ. This massive hurricane not only battered the Honduran coastline, but engulfed nearly the entire country with its powerful winds and torrential downpours. Approximately 100,000 Hondurans were evacuated from the Caribbean coast.

The high rainfall caused many rivers in the country to overflow "to an unprecedented extent this century", as described by the United Nations. Two earthflows caused significant damage near Tegucigalpa. Hurricane Mitch wrought significant damage to Honduras, affecting nearly the entire population and causing damage in all 18 departments. Throughout Central America, Mitch claimed in excess of 11,000 lives, with thousands of others missing.

Hurricanes occasionally form over the Pacific and move north to affect southern Honduras, but Pacific storms are generally less severe and their landfall rarer.

Drought

Drought in Honduras has become a driver of emigration, causing poor crop yields for poor subsistence farmers, and has been a factor in the formation of migrant caravans to the United States.

According to the FAO, migrants leaving central and western Honduras between 2014 and 2016 most frequently cited "no food" as their reason for leaving.

|source 2 = Deutscher Wetterdienst (humidity, 1951–1993) Meteo Climat (record highs and lows)

|date=October 2011

Climate change

Hydrography

thumb|upright=1.3|The [[Ulúa River as seen from the air. The Ulua is perhaps the most economically important river in Honduras.]]

Honduras is a water-rich country.

Tree cover extent and loss

Global Forest Watch publishes annual estimates of tree cover loss and 2000 tree cover extent derived from time-series analysis of Landsat satellite imagery in the Global Forest Change dataset. In this framework, tree cover refers to vegetation taller than 5 m (including natural forests and tree plantations), and tree cover loss is defined as the complete removal of tree cover canopy for a given year, regardless of cause.

For Honduras, country statistics report cumulative tree cover loss of from 2001 to 2024 (about 19.1% of its 2000 tree cover area).

The first assessed submission, technically assessed in 2018, was a national forest reference emission level (FREL) covering only "reducing emissions from deforestation". Using a 2000-2016 reference period, the modified FREL was assessed at 6,552,746.47 t CO2 eq per year. The technical assessment states that it included above-ground biomass, below-ground biomass, deadwood and litter, excluded soil organic carbon, and reported CO2 only. A third submission, technically assessed in 2024, was again presented as a FREL and covered all five REDD+ activities for the 2016-2020 reference period; the modified FREL was assessed at -5,545,227 t CO2 eq per year, shifting the benchmark from net emissions to net removals. The 2023 technical assessment states that this updated benchmark included above-ground biomass, below-ground biomass, deadwood, litter and soil, and included CO2 as well as CH₄ and N₂O from forest fires.