In environmental news, today the Ministry of Sustainable Development along with the Coastal Zone Management Authority and Institute, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Pew Charitable Trusts held a Blue Carbon Knowledge Workshop to discuss the findings of blue carbon assessments.
Blue Carbon credits are created by growing and conserving carbon absorbing plants, such as mangroves and seagrass, which are abundant in Belize. These coastal wetland ecosystems play a huge role to lessen the impacts of climate change globally.
And today's workshop, which representatives from a number of NGO's participated in, discussed Belize's approach and progress towards implementing protection and restoration targets for blue carbon habitats. The Minister for Sustainable Development explained the importance of these discussions.
Orlando Habet, inister of Sustainable Development
"The workshop is looking at all aspects of blue carbon, the potential that Belize has in making its assessment, looking at what we have from mangroves and then subsequently to look at seagrass. It is very important because through the assistance of the Pew Charitable Trust, the Smithsonian Institute, WWF and of course locally, we have had some work done and today they will be reporting, they haven't done up to yet, but the assessment for our national blue carbon as it pertains to mangroves, a discussion will ensue on continuing to do the assessment also for seagrass and hopefully in a discussion we are just having preliminarily, if we also agree that they can look at peat that surrounds those areas because it also has potential for carbon. But also the importance of our conservation of the eco systems which are so very important economically. Of course, mangroves are habitats for fish and other marine life, the contribution that it does to mitigation and adaptation to climate change, of course, we know what it is does when we have our hurricanes and how it prevents coastline erosion and of course the effects of high tides, so looking at all that, all the benefits economically and physically and for the, also the survivability of the species but also very importantly the livelihood of our community, especially coastal communities."
"It terms of blue carbon, it is new and so this has recently started off internationally, it is growing exponentially, there's a lot of interest, and so knowing what we have and what we can also contribute from that part into our NDC's whatever remains above our NDC commitment can hopefully also be monetized and it brings back some resources to reinvest to get something that goes back into nature but also to provide for livelihoods for these communities."
And a study published in the journal, Science of the Total Environment, found that the almost 58,000 hectares of mangroves in Belize were found to hold 25.7 million metric tons of carbon.
