And across the hall, another workshop was taking place, this one on the recently approved National Adaptation Plan For Integrated Water Resource Management In Belize.
The project that a Press release from the Caribbean Center for climate change called the start of addressing key water sector challenges was held under the theme "Groundwater Is Invisible, But Its Impact Is Visible Everywhere."
And this workshop's approach was multisectoral with speakers from The Ministry of Natural resources, The Ministry of economic development, and the 5 C's own program development director Dr. Keith Nichols. We caught up with him after to get his take on the meeting's central message:
Keith Nichols - Programme Development Caribbean Climate Change Center
"The Belize NAP or the National adaptation plan as it's probably better known is an attempt to bring rational management to the use of our water resources here in Belize, Why? And for everything we mentioned there are problems associated with water resources management, from use, from extraction of resources of what's called abstraction from the rivers we destroyed the integrity, we have compromised the integrity of the system and so there's a need to bring some sort of rationalization to the use of those water resources through a variety of interventions. I mean water is key to our economic development, every single sector is dependent on water to sort of, to be successful, for the country to survive requires water. Belize's situation is that some of the water resources originate outside of Belize, so we have those trans boundary issues that already add an additional level of complexity to manage the resource so we have to develop a sort of stewardship approach to how we manage those resources. We need to bring on board the private sector, we need to bring on board all the critical stakeholders, Ministry of Finance economic development, the ministries of health, ministry of tourism and every single sector to add their voice and to provide some sort of action that will build the sort of stewardship approach matching use of our resources in the country."
