Was Belize Successful in its Mission at COP27?
COP27 has been billed as the implementation COP, but for mitigation and adaptation to take place, there must be access to finance, so engaging in bilateral meetings outside of the official negotiation sessions is key. As we have been reporting, the Belize delegation has been putting in the work, as it relates to furthering our carbon market and proposals for water security initiatives across municipalities among others. But was the delegation successful in its mission? Doctor Lennox Gladden says inroads have been made.
Lennox Gladden
Dr. Lennox Gladden, Chief Climate Change Officer
“For us, nationally, because our strategy is to not only negotiate, but we also need to make certain inroads, we have to have a lot of bilaterals. So, for us, I think we have been quite successful up until today to achieve both. Yesterday, they made the announcement that Belize will be getting support from part of a regional project, waste management project so that is a plus. We’ve had some preliminary discussions with the Singapore delegation; again, this is tied into the whole initiative as it relates to carbon credits to have some sort of research agenda. We know climate finance and the discussion around climate finance is definitely important for Belize. So, we will be getting continued support from ICAT to see how we can build that climate finance module and then embed that within our national MRV system to create that dashboard so everybody can know what we are doing to combat climate change at the municipal level, under a certain ministry. So, like I said, we managed to secure a lot of those support from our partners. The Santiago Network deals heavily with adaptation and the governance as it relates to adaptation, but it also ties into loss and damage. For agriculture, they had six workshops looking at agriculture water management, soil management and some other thematic areas under agriculture. And what they were trying to see is how does – and it is understanding agriculture under the guise of food security – how does that now tie into the climate change process.”
Duane Moody
“So, the benefits of these, when are we going to see them in Belize? Over the next year, two years?”
Dr. Lennox Gladden
“Interestingly enough, in the discussion, agriculture/food security is a given. So, it didn’t matter what came out of this process, people need to eat. So as a result of the process being slow, it does not mean that countries such as our country would stop, working within the agriculture sector. So, a lot of the initiatives as it relates to climate smart agriculture – we are quite familiar with the RRB project. And then I know Ministry of Agriculture, in my discussion with Doctor Pascual, there is another project that they are looking at that looks at climate smart agriculture and how they can actually improve some of their production systems. So, these are some tangible things that we can class as actual implementation.”
