The Coastal Zone Management Institute and Authority celebrated their waves of progress this afternoon. They recognized partners who contributed towards their recently launched Reef Resilience strategy. Jomarie Lanza attended the ceremony at Old Belize to commemorate RRI's one year anniversary.
A year ago CZMAI launched its Resilient Reefs initiative. It's a collaboration between the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and UNESCO's World Heritage Marine Programme to foster projects aimed at helping Reefs and the communities that depend on them.
Today they celebrated their 1 year anniversary by honoring their stakeholders who played a vital part in developing and implementing projects built to support their mission.
Tara Scarborough, Chief Resilience Officer, CZMAI
"So back in 2021 we started the planning for the strategy for Reef resilience in Belize and in 2023 we launched it so this event essentially is one year of progress we are having the event to highlight all the progress we have had additionally we have a new project that is being added to the strategy and we are also launching at this event."
"We've seen a lot of challenges but we when also seen a lot of progress for our three flagship projects. We have one that focuses on coastal marine land tenureship in the country and we have one that focuses on sustainable alternative livelihoods and we also have one more that focuses on stony coral tissue loss disease at Turneffe atoll."
We spoke with two of the entities that launched projects under the Reef Resilience Initiative:
Ralna Lamb Lewis, Assistant Country Director, WCS
"So our project focused on primarily looking at supplementary livelihoods for fishing communities. There are two marine protected areas whereby we work at, Glovers Reef Marine Reserve and South water Caye Marine Reserve. And there are vulnerabilities these communities encounter as a result of climate change you know most of them like I said are reliant on fishing so we were looking at what other type of supplementary initiatives could be implemented that would obviously supplement their income based for the household so the project that we were looking at we did first an audit report to basically identify what type of projects have been implemented in the past in these communities, what were some of the challenges in implementations and what are some of the enabling factors needed for them in order to be successful during implementation."
Nadia Bood, Senior programme Officer WWF
"Our project particularly is focused on doing national land tenure analysis within the mangrove landscape of Belize. The aim of this is to understand who owns the land what segments of the coast are in private or public lands the aim is for us to understand not only ownership but to be able to develop a strategy on how to move forward to restore and to protect Belize's mangrove ecosystem through collaboration with stakeholders including our government partners and land owners as well in addition to local communities because we feel that local communities are seen you know the changes in Belize's mangrove landscape within their communities and bordering their community and so it is very important for us to engage them as well so what we have done is we carried out a series of workshops with local communities to understand where they have seen changes in mangroves within their area of interest they may have seen loss of mangroves or areas where restoration is happening or areas that restoration might be needed also some of the usage of mangroves within those communities so we take that information and include it into our analysis and then we are doing some field verification of whatever information was provided to us."
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