GCF Greenlights Grant to Enhance Climate Risk Management

The Green Climate Fund has approved a Project Preparation Facility  application for a project titled, “Integrated Flood Management in the Upper Regions of the Belize River Watershed.” The 1.3-million-dollar facility is designed to investigate the feasibility of flood protection measures along with its associated social and environmental impacts and the impacts of climate change on flood and flood risk. The Ministry of Economic Development, the country’s National Designated Authority to the GCF, sees this as a means to help municipalities like San Ignacio/Santa Elena, which are susceptible to the ravaging effects of climate change. The Ministry’s Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Osmond Martinez explained. 

Dr.Osmond Martinez, CEO, Ministry of Economic Development: “The project preparation facility will assist us in; one to help us determine where the problems are, two it will assist us to say what are the steps that we should take to solve the problem and in addition to that it will assist us in helping the communities there to mitigate the problems that they have. So I will be responsible right now to tell you where the problem is because the problem preparation facility is the one that will help us to identify and to tell us where the problems are and what we should do to solve the problem. So right now the project is a concept node which was approved by GCF which is a little bit over $1.2 million Belize dollars to do all the studies, the preparation facility, put a full concept note which we are assuming according to the expert that the total of the concept note will be around $24-30 million Belize dollars and those funds should come from the Green Climate Fund which is grant, free money, so meaning our ability to be able to put the proposal forward, our ability to be able to identify the problem to help the Belizean people is what will help us to mobilize those funds. In addition in affecting businesses you know just the regular livelihood of our regular persons but more important the vulnerable population who is already living under certain conditions that are not acceptable. But to answer your first question Five C’s is the accredited entity so the funds will go through 5 C’s and what they will do is normally they do the procurement process and they try to get experts from the Caribbean region to come and assist.”