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Saul Cruz, Director, National Biodiversity Office
"So today we are having a national consultation for the updating of our national Biodiversity strategy and action plan, the strategy and action plan is basically Belize's commitment, national commitment to achieving our global biodiversity goals and in this instance we are alleging our national strategy with the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity targets and so the process here is to take it from an all of society and all of government approach, ensuring that all of our stakeholders, both conservation partners and civil society partners to be apart of this realignment of our national biodiversity goals. We all play a part in it so everyone's input is important."

"It looks at how do we ensure from a biodiversity standpoint, how do we look at protection of our species to ensure that we have as best as possible 0 extinction but also it also considers our target to ensure that there is economic benefits or some level of benefits with our communities as you know, our community basis is basically natural resource dependent there is some level of interaction with our communities and so how do we do benefit sharing as you know Belize is a nature based economy, we look at tourism at our fishery industry and these other industries, all nature base and so it's how we reassess, it might be that we are on target or on plan so it might be that we just have to adjust some of these targets but where is it we are behind we would then need to redesign those action plans to make them achievable because at the end of the day we want to make sure we meet those targets but also want to have a visionary plan, something that pushes us to action against what we see as a good vision for Belize."

Ryan Zuniga, Program Lead, UNDP
"So we are partnering with the national biodiversity office to ensure that we provide support in the process as was explained by the director just now, we are doing consultation or supporting the consultation to revise the national biodiversity strategy and action plan. And so from a UN perspective we are just ensuring that one we are providing resources for the process to take place but in doing so to ensure it is an inclusive and participatory process, we include all stakeholders, vulnerable groups, and vulnerable communities women lead NGO's and also indigenous people in the process we also want to ensure it is actionable and also aligns with our global targets as a UN organisation in terms of mainstreaming biodiversity conservation in the larger development space and context."

"So the financing comes from the GEF the global environmental facility so they provide financing to the UNDP, globally and then we use that money to support national governance in advancing their parties in this regard, its on an ongoing basis I think this project is just under 175K USD just for this process alone but again there are several different pots of monies that we use to support the different aspects of the revision of the NBSAP. We have other things online, other things in the pipeline that is to look at the whole realisation of the program, how it is we determine the financial feasibility, the financial economic feasibility of integrating this into the national development priorities and again how we look at the environmental and social responsibility we have to ensure that it's about people, it's about the environment and it aligns well with the development practices and the development goals and targets of the government of Belize."