Blue Forum Brings Over 200 Stakeholders Together to Advance Belize’s Blue Economy

For two days this week, the Blue Bond and Finance Permanence Unit, hosted more than two hundred persons at the first ever Blue Forum.  The event was packed with panel discussions, presentations from various entities, both local and abroad, as well as breakout sessions.  The Blue Economy is a major contributing factor to the rebounding of the country’s economy, and one that has millions of dollars still untapped.  While the country has seen similar forums take place year in year out, Chief Executive Officer in the unit, Beverly Wade, explained to Love News that there is a strategy in place to unpack the information and data acquired and translate them into beneficial actions.

Beverly Wade, Director, Blue Bonds and Finance Permanence Unit: “We’re actually creating a formal proceeding from this forum. That’s the first thing. And that proceedings will highlight what were the main  themes, what was the key information and what were the recommendations that came out because those  should help us when we are now developing our programs, let’s say with the IDB or with some of these other organizations and even internally domestically when we’re developing these programs, we are hoping that these proceedings are going to now  inform and strengthen our approach in this space to do things better and to ensure that we are really addressing some of the considerations. Also what the proceedings and the forum did was to highlight areas of opportunities. It highlighted where there are opportunities for us to strategically collaborate with various organizations. And that’s another way that this forum and the proceedings we’re hoping will bring some of these things together. And thirdly, to be frank, what the forum did for us was that it highlighted areas with our current programs that we need to address that the stakeholders brought out to our attention and we’re hoping that those will inform some of the immediate things that we are looking at currently.”

CEO Wade noted that this first of its kind session that focused not only on what was happening in Belize, but also to see where new partnerships could be formed as well as a holistic look at the concerns in the blue economy.

Beverly Wade, Director, Blue Bonds and Finance Permanence Unit: “I believe the Blue Forum was actually a call to action. A call to action for us to harness the opportunities which existed for strategic partnership  by taking stock of what we’re already doing with key organization and partners. That’s one.  It was a call to action for us also now to look at what we have done and to find or to pinpoint where the opportunities were to go further and to also now identify those areas that we saw important for us to now do work on in order for us to be answering key questions for us. How do we now approach our blue space in a responsible way, but at the same time  ensure that it is people-centric? One of the recurring themes within the forum was that economic development and environmental stewardship are not opposing forces. They are actually forces that marry each other and that they are able to now allow us to approach our blue space in a way that we can now  benefit from the whole idea of good environmental stewardship by having functional ecosystems that are delivering important ecosystem services which supports economic activity and support livelihoods at the end of the day.”

The forum had representation from the OAK Foundation, the Caribbean Regional Fisheries Mechanism (CRFM), Turneffe Atoll Sustainability Association, Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium, Global Ocean Accounts Partnership, Natural Capital Project Stanford University, Coastal Zone Management Authority and Institute, Beltraide and Inter-American Development Bank, among other agencies.