With an estimated total population of 10.535 million inhabitants (49.9% men, 50.1% women) and 218 inhabitants per square kilometer (as of 2021), the Dominican Republic is the third most populous Caribbean country. The population is still growing but at a rate that has been declining since the 1970s (0.87% estimated annual growth rate as of 2021) and is projected to reach over 11.25 million inhabitants by 2030 [4], [5].

The spatial distribution of the population is highly uneven. The southern coastal plains and the Cibao valley are the most densely populated areas of the country. The Santo Domingo Metropolitan region has an estimated population of 4,004,906 (about 38% of the country’s population) in 2021. Other important provinces are Santiago de los Caballeros, San Cristobal, and La Vega. The Dominican Republic has been going through a rapid urbanization process as a result of population growth in cities and rural-to-urban migration. Some 82.8% of the population is estimated to live in urban zones in 2021, compared to 73.8% in 2010 (date of the latest population census) [4], [5].

With a 2019 UNDP’s Human Development Index value of 0.756 and a Gross National Income per capita of $7,260 (as of 2020), the Dominican Republic is regarded as a high human development, upper-middle income country [6]. The Dominican economy, formerly dependent on the export of agricultural products such as sugar, cocoa, and coffee, has transitioned to a diversified mixture of services (particularly tourism, telecommunications, and finance), manufacturing, agriculture, mining, and trade over the last three decades. As a result, it has enjoyed robust economic growth: GDP grew steadily at a 4.9% average annual growth rate over the 2001–2019 period, making the Dominican Republic one of the fastest-growing economies in the LAC region. Virtually all sectors contribute to this growth; the service sector (mainly including tourism, telecommunications, and finance) accounted for 58% of GDP, followed by manufacturing (13.8%), agriculture, forestry, and fishing (5.2%), and other activities, as of 2019. Remittances from the Dominican diaspora, mainly in the United States, have been also contributing substantially to the country’s economic growth, with the equivalent of 8.3% of GDP in 2019.

The recession that followed the collapse of Baninter bank in 2002–2003 resulted in the monetary poverty rate reaching 50% in 2004. But thanks to the strong economic growth of the last 15 years, poverty has been substantially reduced and the middle class has been expanding. Monetary poverty decreased from 47.2% in 2005 to 21.0% in 2019, while extreme poverty decreased from 16.1% to 2.7% over the same period. Significant disparities in poverty level still remain across different regions of the country. Monetary and extreme poverty in the southern and western regions along the Haitian border are the highest in the country and significantly higher than the countrywide rates: 37.0%/5.2% and 35.6%/4.1% general/extreme poverty in the Enriquillo and El Valle regions, respectively. Thus, the inequality in income distribution, as measured by the Gini coefficient, has also improved but not as dramatically: from 0.508 in 2005 to 0.431 in 2019.

The Dominican Republic was severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to the public health crisis, the pandemic had a major impact on growth and poverty. The unemployment rate climbed up to 8.9%, GDP contracted by 6.7%, and poverty is estimated to have risen to 23.4% (i.e., some 270,000 people fell into poverty) in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the DR into its first recession in nearly 17 years [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12].

The Dominican Republic currently has an advanced telecommunication system and internet services. In 2005, 90% of the population had access to electricity (95.2% vs. 79.7% in urban vs. rural areas), fixed telephone services had a coverage of only 9.9 subscriptions per each 100 people, the penetration of cellular phone services was 39.8 subscriptions per each 100 people, and only 11.4% of the population were using the internet. Thanks to the vigorous economic growth of the last 15 years, access to electricity increased to 100%, the penetration of cellular phone services increased to 83.3 subscriptions per every 100 people, and 75.8% of the population were using the internet by 2019.

The country relies heavily on fossil fuels for electric power, but in recent years it has made a priority of generating more of its electricity from renewable sources. About 13% of the electricity generated in 2005 came from hydroelectric sources, 0.5% from wind energy, and the rest from fossil fuel sources; the share of wind energy increased to 4.1%, hydroelectric sources was 5.5%, and the share of solar energy increased to 0.78% in 2019 [7].

Lying at the core of the Atlantic hurricane belt, the Dominican Republic is highly exposed to cyclones and hurricanes, which hit the country once every two years on average (but can occur as often as two per year or as little as every five to ten years), usually between June and October, with the greatest impact along the southern coast. The occurrence of hurricanes is also strongly linked with ENSO and La Niña, being more frequent during La Niña events. The cyclones and hurricanes cause heavy rains, floods, and landslides, with considerable economic and social impacts. For instance, Hurricane Georges in 1998 caused a total of 347 deaths and loss and damages for 3,146 million, which amounted to approximately 14% of the 1997 GDP. Tropical storms Olga and Noel hit the country in 2007 directly affecting over 141,000 people. A total of 25 named tropical storms and hurricanes hit the Dominican Republic between 2011 and 2021, causing a total of 245 deaths and damages for 909 million. Poor rural households whose livelihoods depend heavily on natural resources, are particularly vulnerable to these natural disasters [2], [3], [13].