Empowering Belize’s coastal future: mobilizing readiness for coastal resilience

Enhancing adaptation planning and increasing climate resilience in the coastal zone and fisheries sector of Belize (BLZ-RS-006) helped Belize set its stage in adaptation planning, to address climate change, by improving data collection and monitoring. It also helped integrate climate change into national plans and policies that strengthened the communication networks for coastal and fisheries communities. With support from GCF’s readiness grant firstly, it ensured there were extensive consultations and participations, giving human experiences equal merit to the hard sciences when it comes to adaptation planning. Secondly, it emphasised gender integration via a gender analysis and the "women in fisheries forum with 70 female participants " which encouraged ownership from all beneficiaries and a full understanding of the nuances of gender and climate change in Belize, lastly, it provided complementary support allowing vulnerability and livelihood assessments from 4 to 6 coastal communities. Overall, the climate finance access offered significant benefits for people living in Belize's coastal communities, whose lives and livelihoods depend on a resilient coastal zone sector. 

The NDA strengthening and country programming support for Belize through CCCCC (BLZ-RS-001) project worth USD 300,000 strengthened the operational guidelines for the functioning of the NDA and the development of a country programme document identifying funding priorities in the short and longer term for key sectors. This programme iterates that Belize faces climate challenges such as rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, sea-level rise, and coastal erosion and it includes existing GCF projects and readiness support. This successfully boosted the NDA’s capacity to handle the GCF process and strengthened the engagement of national stakeholders, which led to the development of a project concept note for the GCF funding. 

The entity support for Belize through CCCCC (BLZ-RS-005) facilitated the preparation of nominated entities such as the Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and the Social Investment Fund (SIF) to meet GCF accreditation standards in areas such as environmental and social safeguards (ESS), gender, and project development. This allowed for greater engagement with the private sector and provided other financing options for climate investments. This GCF readiness grant also assisted in giving preliminary support by providing post-accreditation assistance to Protected Areas Conservation Trust (PACT) as it seeks to meet the GCF's conditions for accreditation. It established its planning framework for engagement with the GCF, mobilized climate action among national stakeholders, and strengthened its capacity to implement climate projects. PACT eventually became accredited on 20 October 2018, and has four approved readiness proposals, three of which are capacity building for adaptation planning allowing access to climate finance. This grant provided additional training for seventeen PACT technical personnel and its network of thirty-three national stakeholders on the GCF climate rationale, project funding process, and policies and procedures for environmental and social safeguards (ESS) and gender mainstreaming. Lastly, this grant supported the process of refining the preliminary draft of PACT's entity work programme and preparation of the first project submission to the GCF. This has allowed PACT to advance its experience and evidence in preparation for a future accreditation upgrade from the environmental and social category.