Dominican government and judiciary join forces to secure protected areas

Santo Domingo.- In a decisive move to preserve the nation’s natural heritage, the Dominican Republic’s Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources and the Council of the Judiciary have signed a groundbreaking cooperation agreement to enhance the legal security of protected areas. The accord, unveiled on December 10 in Santo Domingo, underscores the two institutions’ joint commitment to environmental protection and land rights enforcement.

Under the agreement, the Environment Ministry will furnish updated and consolidated data on protected zones, buffer areas, and related lands to support land registry officials. Minister Paíno Henríquez emphasized the importance of this effort: “This agreement reaffirms our commitment to protecting every inch of the country’s natural heritage and ensuring those areas are correctly delimited and under legal security.”

The judiciary, through its land registry units, will offer legal assistance and technical support for cadastral mapping, title processing, and real-time registry systems. This includes identifying state-owned lands within protected areas and ensuring that they’re officially recorded for efficient legal enforcement.

Both institutions are bound by a four-year mandate to safeguard the confidentiality, integrity, and public interest nature of the shared information. By combining environmental data with judicial authority, this pact signals a new era of transparency and institutional collaboration designed to strengthen resource defense and land-use governance across the country.