Belize’s Blue Bond an Example for Central America

Orlando Habet

Belize’s Blue Bond Agreement is the second, but largest of its kind in the region and so the country serves as an example to other Central American countries and Dominican Republic. It has to do with the protection of marine life and the Mesoamerican Reef System, for which several countries are linked. During today’s session of the regional environmental congress, there was a panel discussion on the Blue Loan Agreement of Belize.

Orlando Habet, Minister of Sustainable Development, Climate Change & Disaster Risk Management

“We were able to get a good amount of monies that were saved through that Blue Bond and so we will be doing presentations where the other countries will see what we did, how we did it and hopefully when they do theirs they can improve on what we did and better it cause it is a global community.  But also from the Blue Bond project, we have some monies that go into conservation and so whether or not we are going to do private public partnerships with some of that funding, whether it is going to be project finance for permanence which we already started off with some funding going in there. We are looking at how we can also take some of those monies to put back into nature; in this case, possibly not much is going into the terrestrial area, but certainly into the marine and coastal area. And involvement from our ministry is that we are also still responsible for marine protected areas and we are trying to see how we can work as close as possible with the Ministry of Blue Economy which is also largely in charge of all marine reserves.”