How Will Belize Prioritize Climate Change Issues?
The government has increased public capital investment on resilience building aspects, and the price tag associated with this through to the year 2030 is close to one point nine billion U.S. dollars. Towards this end, the Ministry of Climate Change made a presentation on Thursday on the various climate change resilience policy documents. It covered the ministry’s efforts over the past year in developing an institutional framework, such as the low-emission development strategy. It is a thirty-year framework which outlines the long-term vision steps to manage climate change, a ten-year plan for mid-term measures and a five-year plan that has just been updated. News Five’s Marion Ali reports.
Marion Ali, Reporting
There are several plans drafted on how Belize will, over the next several years, tackle climate change issues, mitigating measures we could take beforehand, and how we will respond to impacts. The Nationally Determined Contributions document, for example, lays out priority areas that C.E.O in the Ministry of Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management, Dr Kenrick Williams shared.
Kenrick Williams
Dr. Kenrick Williams, C.E.O., Ministry of Disaster Risk Management
“What are the key priorities and sectors for addressing the climate change issues in Belize, as well as the key investments we’re going to be needing as a country. We report this to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
We can outline all of these important strategies, actions, but if we don’t look at how we’re going to get the investments, what are the priority actions, how to do we build that collaboration with the private sector to get those investments, then we all just have these beautiful documents that we can’t use.”
Including the population along the way, will also play a key part in how successful we are as a country to overcome the challenges ahead. And governing that aspect is a communication strategy.
Dr. Kenrick Williams
“Climate change and the realities of climate change are still disconnected from people. So people see it as a theoretical issue, people see it as a science issue. But when we look at the floods in Orange Walk, for example, over the last couple weeks, that is climate change, or it’s contributed by climate change and we’re going to continue to see these effects. That is the kind of message that we want to communicate through the Communication Strategy.”
A dollar figure of the total damages to crops due to those floods is still being tabulated by the NEMO Damage Assessment Committee. Marion Ali for News Five.
