Belize Coast Guard Trains in Drone Technology for Enhanced Maritime Surveillance

Members of the Belize Coast Guard are in the United States this week, receiving special training on using unmanned aerial drones. The five-member Drone Squadron is in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, training with the Perimeter-8 Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV). The training is being conducted by the company Skyfront, which specializes in using drones for surveillance and geographical mapping. The BCG says that the training is a major step towards developing air capability in the maritime domain. One of the main uses of the UAVs is for the Coast Guard to assist the Government of Belize in its conservation commitments under the Blue Bond agreements. The Coast Guard will use the UAVs for surveillance to assist with enforcing regulations within the Biodiversity Protected Zones established under the Blue Bonds. The Blue Bond and Finance Permanence Unit secured the funds for the drones through the Belize Fund. Beverly Wade, Director of the Unit, says increasing the capacity of the BCG was critical to ensuring greater enforcement in the protected zones.

Beverly Wade, Director, Blue Bonds and Finance Permanence Unit, OPM: “One of the greatest issues that we have in ensuring the sustainability of our marine resources and that the conservation measures that we have in place are being effective is really to have effective enforcement. And so we see the coast guard playing a very important role in the monitoring of our blue space and enforcing our management measures and our legislation and what we have been able to do through the Blue Bonds program is to now invest and strengthen the capacity within the coast guard where we have no invested actually in unmanned vehicles to now build their aerial capacity which should be able to compliment their already maritime capacity with their vessels to ensure that we have better coverage and to ensure that we increase the effectiveness of enforcement within our group. It’s funded under the Belize Blue Bonds Program through the Belize Fund which has a facility for government funding that’s called the Government Strategic Allocation so it’s being funded under the Belize Fund through the Government Strategic Allocation facility and this is all through the Blue Bonds Program. This is all as a result of the successful negotiation of the Blue Bond.”

The Belize Blue Bonds was an agreement by The Nature Conservancy and the Government of Belize on November 4, 2021.