The PACT Challenge begins at Glover's Reef on Saturday. This year the theme is marine sustainability. The idea behind the challenge is to raise awareness for and money for marine protected sites. PACT's Executive Director, Valdemar Andrade told us more.
Valdemar Andrade, Executive Director - PACT
"This year we are doing a marine PACT challenge because we're trying to highlight the importance of the marine protected areas and their contribution to important industries such as the fisheries industry and the tourism industry which you know are two of our largest foreign exchange earners in Belize.
And so basically this year we want to highlight what is the importance of the marine protected areas, what are the issues with respect to development, with respect to illegal fishing, with respect to what are positive contributions as well; the fisheries that they contribute, the areas that they give us for tourists come to visit and for us to go visit as Belizeans. Sixty percent of the visitors that come to Belize go to the marine areas and so you can see the relevance of protecting these areas.
The PACT Challenge basically will launched on the 2nd where we will be having three teams: one from the University of Belize, one from the Belize Defense Force, and one from Sea Sports Belize, which is a tourism company. And they have five members each which will be accompanied by five support members including fishermen and other support staff from Fisheries.
They will be leaving from the Turneffe Atoll doing several activities that the managers engage in such as tagging of conch and lobster, such as patrolling, there will be kayaking, there will be swimming races and there will be judges who will be giving them points for all of these. From there they move on to the Lighthouse Reef Atoll at Halfmoon Caye and they will be engaging in some similar activities. For each one we have a diversity of activities.
One the last day, they will go to Turneffe from which they will have a sail boat race on fishing vessels from Turneffe, along with fishermen, all the way into Belize."
7NEWS will have coverage of the challenge next week.
