And the highlight of Rutley's visit was an MOU signing between him and the executive director of the 5 C's center, Dr Colin Young. The MOU is valued at 2.7 million pounds, which is more than 3.3 million US dollars, and it is geared towards increasing the flow of climate financing into the country. Rutley spoke more about it today.
David Rutley, UK FM For Americas & Caribbean
"We've been talking over the last year a lot about what we can do to help Belize and the Caribbean more widely on tackling climate change and there is some amazing work that's going on but one of the key asks across the Caribbean and certainly from me speaking with the Foreign Minister sabot access to climate finance and the new memorandum of understanding we signed today with the 5 C's per Caricom's infrastructure will make it easier for us to provide support in enabling countries, Belize and other across the Caribbean, to access funding and to build capacity so that going forward the countries are able to do that more effectively. There's a real art to filling out the forms and bidding requests and we want to make sure that the Caribbean is well placed, in Belize particularly, to enable them to get access, to enable you to get access to the financing."
"There will be support more widely to help build capacity to complete the necessary forms and make the engagement to get access to that finance so we'll make sure that support's available but it fits in a much wider agenda of what we're trying to do to help Belize and the Caribbean more widely. I'm particularly optimistic about the biodiverse landscape fund the we're supporting with Belize and three other Caribbean countries that helps with the green conservation but obviously there's fantastic works going on with the oceans, country partnership programs in blue conservation as well, marine conservation, so this is, what we just signed today is important, but this is just one element of a much wider program activity."
