New Chief Environmental Officer Outlines Priorities, Including Regional Leadership

Anthony Mai

On Wednesday, the government of Belize announced the promotion of former Senior Environmental Officer, Anthony Mai, to the post of Chief Environmental Officer. Mai succeeds former Chief Environmental Officer Martin Alegria.  Mai’s new role in the Department is of a technical nature but important for the delicate relationship between Belize’s conservation and developmental efforts. This morning we spoke with Mai via zoom about his priorities upon taking office.

Anthony Mai, Chief Environmental Officer, Department of the Environment

“My priority is definitely to set the foundation for the Department. We already have a foundation, but to strengthen, I should say, the foundation we have. We have financial responsibilities that we need to strengthen. We have real technical issues within the Department that needs to be consolidated and strengthened. We have administrative issues and human resources and capacity issues we need to deal with. I have a good understanding and grip of what these issues are. We will address them. We have some issues we need to address immediately, some within the medium term and some within the long term. We have a D.O.E. planning session, a retreat that we will be doing ending of this month, where the entire staff will come together as one. We will remind ourselves of what our goal and missions is and see how we could reach that mission. My vision for the D.O.E. is to take it to the other level. The next level for me is to obviously become the leader in the environmental management eco-system’s management nationally, regionally and internationally. I think nationally we have been doing pretty well. We need to take that now to being regional leaders in environmental management.”