Effectively Managing Belize’s Marine Resources and Sea Spaces

Ibukun Adewumi

It is essential to provide hands-on training and practical exercises to countries, including Belize, and relevant stakeholders to understand the concepts of ocean accounting as a tool for guiding the necessary transformations.

Ibukun Adewumi, Ocean Governance Officer, GOAP

“Belize, as a country, is taking a giant stride in this sphere of blue economy, development of marine spatial planning and coastal zone management, and one critical thing is that countries like Belize that have been doing this sort of exercise have two things in mind, or two things that are critical.  One is, either we do it absolutely right or we get it exactly wrong, and this is why exercises like this sort of workshop is important to help government develop the statistical foundation that is needed to track and monitor progress towards the development of the blue economy and also to build in-country capacity to be able to do this monitoring and tracking themselves.”

Charles Colgan

Charles Colgan, Director, Center for the Blue Economy

“Belize is well advanced compared to other countries in planning for the sustainable use of its ocean spaces.  Its done a lot with spatial planning, coastal zone management, the sustainable oceans plan and the blue economy.  It’s got a lot of capacity, [but] what it needs to do now is to put it all together and to be able to say once we put it all together, are we getting to where we want to go?  And that’s really what we help people do, put together a system of integrating information that informs different ministries, the legislature, the executive about what progress they’re making in this really complex environment.”