Belize Encourages Others to Follow the Footsteps of the Blue Bond Agreement  

While participating in a side event at the Small Island Developing State Conference in Antigua and Barbuda, Orlando Habet, Minister of Sustainable Development, Climate Change, and Disaster Risk Management showcased Belize’s Blue Bond Agreement. The event was cohosted by the Government of Belize and the Nature Conservancy with the goal to educate other countries on how debt-for-climate swaps can help their economies. The Belize Blue Bonds was presented as a success study to emphasize how tools such as these agreements can be used to help them reach their nature and climate commitments without increasing the nation’s debt. We spoke with Habet today, who told us more about the presentation.

 

Orlando Habet, Minister of Climate Change

“We have been in certain conversations in dialogues and our participation to some of these dialogues has been the presentation of our blue bond agreement. We demonstrated to the rest of Caricom and the other SIDS and those other participants that are here at the meetings whole country like ours. Using its natural assets can have debt sustainability by engaging in these types of agreements. Leveraging your assets to reduce your debt. But also to have some conservation funding. And in our case, an additional amount of money is going for an endowment that can increase and can be used for other sources, putting some back to nature, and also some that can go back international development. This has been taken on and seen as something very viable for some states that can have that have those assets. But also, one of the requirements is that you have to have the debt to be able to restructure the debt and then other commitments that can be made from other institutions. In our case, we were lucky to be able to have the development finance corporation from the United States to back up our part of the agreement. And so we were able to be successful in that transaction. So things, all these things have to be put in place so that then it can be done.”