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Healthy Reefs for Healthy People first launched in 2003, is an initiative made up of influential coral reef focused organizations, devoted to safeguarding the Mesoamerican Reef. The movement is made up of 70 partner organizations, and today at the Biltmore They presented their annual MesoAmerican Reef Report card. their Country Coordinator broke it down for us.

Raphael Martinez, Country Coordinator, Healthy Reefs For Healthy People
"Today marks the launch of the 2023-2024 MesoAmerican Reef Health report card and this is a compilation of Data across four countries, Mexico, Guatemala Honduras and Belize. And together with our local partners and government agencies we go into the fields, collect this data, compile it, analyze it and present it ina. Way that everyone can understand. And so this year's report card shows an improvement in the Reef health index going from 2.0 to 2.5 right. It still classifies Belize in the poor category but the silver lining is it's an improvement. It's a significant improvement especially looking at indicators of the herbaceous fish and commercial fish biomass that's on rebound from 2021 numbers so this is a good sign and we believe that there are more improvements that can be made in terms of reef health and we hope to have a collaborative effort across our local network of partners in terms of addressing this issue of trying to improve reef health."

The numbers serve as a guide to building our Reef Health. And though Belize is not where we would want to be as yet, it may take some time to work around the mitigating factors keeping us from improving things like coral cover, commercial fish biomass and Herbivorous fish biomass. Martinez told us what those limiting factors are.

Raphael Martinez, Country Coordinator, Healthy Reefs For Healthy People
"Well a major challenge right now especially affecting coral reefs is the high level of heat stress. Now the fourth global coral reef bleaching event and we are still feeling the effects of that in 2024. This has significantly affected the coral cover within the country and across the entire mesoAmerican region so this is the main result of climate change. Climate change accompanied by other stressors that we as humans may introduce into the environment being poor water quality, Environmental degradation, you know this also helps to reduce the Health of the Reef and it is important for us to address across sectors different issues that could help to improve it. So improving water quality will help to make the reefs more resilient to different stressors being introduced."

The report also plays a useful role for research students conducting studies out at Calabash Caye. The Director for UB Environmental Research Institute says that there are many ways the data can be applied in their research. He told us how

Dr Jake Studon, Director, UB Environmental Research Institute
"So we have been working with the Data behind the report card looking at, so this data was collected by the different co managers of our reef system here in Belize and we have been looking at what that data structure is and building the supplementaries of the data so the report card presents a summary value, and we have been looking at what that data structure is and building the supplementaries of the data so the report cards presents a summary value a healthy reef index so it has come up this year but what does that mean on the ground between the different sites so if you say you are looking at Turneffe Atoll so you got a whole bunch of sites at a survey there so which sites are going up and which sites are going down and that's the sort of level of information that you can use for adaptive management and so we are working with the data, underneath these scores putting that science rigor into it and so if you look at the report card and you like what you see or you don't like what you see and things are decreasing you say where are these patterns happening and what's the story behind the data so then you look in the supplementary document and we can then start to unpick where it is and this is really important for protected area managers or for areas that are looking at what they are doing and what has happened to their reef, don't just look at that one value score look at what is happening at the site level then you know which sites are improving and which sites are not improving and which sites have large fish biomass and so they are doing really well which sites don't, is there good seagrass is there good restructure? You can get at the science question behind the management and so the UB ERI, our role here is working with this data with the partners from across Belize and healthy reefs to get at that detail so it's not just one number it's that finer level information."