Audubon to present Environmental Agenda Tuesday

On Tuesday, environmental organisations around the world will celebrate Earth Day. As part of official activities in Belize, at seven tomorrow night the Audubon Society will officially release its third Environmental Agenda. According to Program Advocacy Manager Tanya Williams-Thompson, the document is usually published just before general elections to highlight environmental concerns and suggestions to the politicians. But this time around, Audubon says it decided to wait until a winner had been declared.

Tanya Williams-Thompson, Program Advocacy Mgr, BAS
“We wanted them to take it into consideration when they are doing the national development policy. The entire agenda is focussed on key environmental topics. Within the agenda, you will find an analysis of these topics. We identify issues which are put as concerns and make recommendations. A lot of them are policy recommendations that will take political will to correct.”

Kendra Griffith
“What are some of the major concerns?”

Tanya Williams-Thompson
“Within the environmental agenda you will see the issue of climate change, which we all know is a very important issue at this time, it’s a global issue. We have coral reefs and coastal resources which we have the year of the reef this year and last year we had serious concerns about the use of coastal resources and our reefs. We also look at the issue of protected areas and how we can improve our protected areas system.”

Kendra Griffith
“Now you mentioned policies. Some people are saying that the industry is already in policies and there is a lot of bureaucracy for you to do anything.”

Tanya Williams-Thompson
“Well, that’s not really the case. We do have some good policies which require updating because they are still in draft form and they are really being used in an ad hoc manner where we don’t really have these policies as being implemented within all departments. So while we make recommendations on new policies, we also make recommendations about taking these policies from out of draft form to implemented form.”

The 2008-2013 Environmental Agenda was produced in collaboration with local experts.