Belize Hosts Climate Financing Conference with International Partners

Over the past two days, Belize met with International Partners on the Placencia Peninsula to discuss the country’s potential for climate financing. The Strategic Alliances International Partners Conference began yesterday and ended today, bringing together global partners supporting Belize’s development. It was organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and featured panel discussions on non-conventional climate financing strategies, leveraging international climate finance, building national capacity to access funds, and fostering opportunities for collaborative partnerships. Aniceto Ruiz, head of the Corporation of the European Union’s Delegation for Belize, spoke about the outcome of the meeting and how it focused on Belize’s future. 

Aniceto Rodriguez Ruiz, EU Head of Cooperation: “I’m very happy and I think all my colleagues from the other organizations are as well because when talking about development cooperation we need to be coordinated. We need to be coherent, we need to be complementary. We need to avoid any overlapping in the interventions and the most important is the government has to be at the steering wheel of the process. It’s the government who establishes the priorities, who has to establish the line to be followed and this is the purpose of this event that we had different ministries, departments and agencies involved in development cooperation explaining to the international community what are the priorities, what are the strategies, what are the objectives of the government and this is the necessary element for us to make our interventions more efficient, more complementary to avoid overlapping and to be aligned with the strategies and the priorities of the government.” 

Rocio Bolivar, the country representative of the International Development Bank, also shared her views on the conference and expressed the importance of discussing the effects of climate change. 

Rocio Medina Bolivar, Country Rep, IDB: “I think everyone that has to be working on the climate finance arena in the international bilateral organizations, multilateral banks, all the international development partners were here so I think that’s a big accomplishment and actually was a very rich agenda. I think it was very good to see about the visions, where are the directions and to focus the discussion on climate finance and disaster risk management. I think it was a right track and a right trend. It was something that was mentioned several times during the conference is we cannot separate what is the climate change to the disaster risk and the need is urgent to invest on the disaster risk management. So I think one of the takeaways is how we can actually coordinate all the development partners and how we can actually support the government of Belize. I think it’s different initiatives from the different multilateral, from the IDB, EU, US, UK all the partners but I think everyone has the willingness to support so I think you have that I think how do we coordinate better and align this event is proof and evidence of what we need to do more and to have these discussions to coordinate much more and also to go beyond also how the multilateral and IDB how they can support the technical capacity. The arena of the climate finance is very complex and needs the possibility how to create bankable projects how to prepare for projects that you can access because financing exists but it’s how to actually mobilize those finances and different financial tools and increased the financial box of tools that Belize can achieve but I think we’re in the right track and I’m looking forward to the next discussions as well here in Belize.”

The event was held under the theme “Unlocking Climate Finance and Disaster Risk Financing for Sustainable Development.”