Belize City gets Climate Action Plan as Mayor warns, ‘Climate change is here to stay’

Published by [email protected] at November 4, 2024

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Posted: Monday, November 4, 2024. 3:30 pm CST.

By Aaron Humes: The Old Capital has lumbered toward the goal of being a climate-resilient city despite famously being at or slightly below sea level. It has introduced electric buses to counter greenhouse gas emissions; built a pumping station to more efficiently clear the canals after rainfall and storm events, and built concreted streets to reduce the wear and tear from vehicles of all sizes pounding chip-and-seal pavements all day.

But despite not contributing much to the global crisis, Belize City is poised to suffer the effects – unless it can stave them off a while longer. That is the goal of a Climate Action Plan to be developed by the Belize City Council with support from the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, whose Caribbean office is conducting a three-day tour starting today, Monday.

International relations assistant for the Caribbean helpdesk Daniela Monteiro said her staff will be assisting the City’s planners, engineers, and others to draft a plan and install a tracking monitor that will help the City to report every two years on its progress. The Covenant, which joins municipalities on six continents and is funded by the European Union (EU), will promote Belize and ensure that it gets financial assistance for climate-related mitigation and adaptation projects.

According to Belize City Mayor Bernard Wagner, “For many cities if you don’t have a climate action plan, there is no clear direction…what this climate action plan is focused on your mitigation strategy, your adaptation strategy in clear goals, clear objectives that will contribute to the reduction…of coastal flooding and erosion.”

Belize City will have commonalities with regional cities in the same boat and be able to partner with other municipalities on identified projects. Indeed, the national capital of Belmopan was the first city in the Caribbean to join the GCOM in 2018.

And the Mayor reminded that it is an ‘all hands on deck’ issue: “It has to be an issue where all the stakeholders understand that climate change is here to stay. It includes the media, it includes national and sub-national level stakeholder input in bringing across the fact to our residents that how we treat the environment, in the long run, will come back to haunt us. If we don’t respect the environment as a City, as residents, the implication down the road will be huge – and we are seeing it today.”

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