Ya’axche Continues to Fight Wildires in Southern Belize  

In the south, wildfires have also devastated huge tracts of land in a protected area managed by the Ya’axche Conservation Trust.  The organization has been busy over the past few weeks fighting these fires that have destroyed crops and displaced wildlife in the Golden Stream Corridor Preserve.

 

Christina Garcia, Exec. Dir., Ya’axche Conservation Trust

“We’ve been battling with fire in the Maya Golden Landscape for the past month.  First fire that affected the preserve, the Golden Stream Corridor Preserve, our rangers and fire management crew have been battling fires in the preserve that have destroyed a little over two thousand acres of forest within the Golden Stream Corridor Preserve.  So we’ve been battling in terms of controlling that fire so that the fire does not reach the field station, an investment that we have here for over twenty-five years.  Apart from the fire in these protected areas, we’ve also been assisting communities in controlling fires within their farming landscape.  So a lot of the work that has been carried out over the past weeks is with the beneficiaries that Ya’axche works with, controlling fires and ensuring that those fires do not completely destroy all the farmscapes and the different agro forestry systems that we have created jointly with the farmers over the years, although that has been very difficult because as you can see from images that the news has reported on, there has been a lot of damages in these communities, especially the farms, especially the destruction of cacao and different fruit trees, timber saplings and this is actually food that the farmers depend on.”