The environmental stakeholders of Belize are embarking on updating and reshaping the Global Environmental Outlook report for the country. The last time a GEO report was done was back in 2010, and a lot has changed since then, including laws, regulations, and ministries.
And when the updated report is published, anyone who wants data about any environmental subject, issue, or concern will be able to find it there.
But that is still a couple years away. The work has just started and today there was an inception meeting with key stakeholders who will help to guide the progress of the report.
Today, we spoke with the Chief Environmental Officer who told us more about the expectations.
Anthony Mai, Chief Environmental Officer
"The purpose of us meeting today is actually to sit, discuss and come up with a plan to basically guide the development of the GEO report. The GEO report is essential for the country because it basically give the government and the general population a sense of the environmental health of where we are. So in my earlier intervention I mentioned that it's like a scorecard for natural resources management organizations such as the Department of Environment, basically tells us where we are with the implementation of our policies, etc."
"There are several expectations, one obviously this will give us a better idea of where we are now, considering all the changes that has happened within the environment with regards to all the policies and legislation that have changed. Again, we have a new Ministry of Blue Economy so the new Ministry of Blue Economy was not considered and the policies that they have was not considered in the first year of the report. There's updates to environmental regulations, there's updates to several policies, the mangrove regulation was updated, the fisheries regulation was updated and so that has changed but also the physical environment in itself has changed due to all of the development that has been going on. And so if we continue to do a report like this, it will continue to develop a trend in terms of how Belize has been developing and the state of the environment as it relates to that development."
Dr Javier Neme, Programs Management Officer, UNEP
"Our organization is a leading world environmental agency and we are supporting since 1990's the elaboration of these reports, both at global, regional, and national levels. In this case, we're assisting technically and financially the country of Belize in the updating of their report which the previous version was done 13 years ago, we are assisting them in the update, in the re-elaboration, reshaping of that national integrated environmental report."
Dr Apolonio Aguilar, Dean, FST, UB
"At the Faculty of Science and Technology, we have people who are experts in environmental resource, so we have our natural resource management program, our biology, chemistry, and marine biology programs, all of the experts in here can contribute to producing this report. We have our head, Mr Castillo, who is coordinating all of this effort, so we're excited that we can take part in this, not only are we going to be producing this but we're going to help to see what the gaps are, we are excited in the sense that, knowing these gaps, we are preparing ourselves in terms of research to fill these gaps, so we can help to see what the bigger picture is."
The report will be available online, as well as at the University of Belize and public libraries. It is expected to be published in 2025.
