7 News Belize

The Importance of Belize’s Water Shed
posted (October 2, 2015)
There are major, active threats to Belize's Water Shed. Today stakeholders held a one-day workshop to identify those threats and, ultimately, to come up with a strategic plan to safeguard Belize's waters. The coordinators at the event explained to us why it's important to protect and manage this precious resource.

Nadia Bood, Belize World Wildlife Fund
"We feel that this initiative is very important because the water sheds in Belize are very important to society. We depend on it for our water, for depend on it for food from the fisheries sector; water to drink, water for agriculture manufacturing and so it's very important and we are also seeing increase impact to the water shed, based on multiple land use practices, which is affecting the water sheds ability to effectively do the function that they are supposed to be doing. The ultimate deliverable from this workshop is a strategy, an action plan that we can then put in place to work on the ground to address some of the key challenges that we are facing."

Paul Flowers, Director of Policy - Ministry of Natural Resources
"Belize has specific strengths and specific weaknesses in the area of water. Our strength specifically is that per capita we have about 75 square meters per person and that puts us I believe way up in the region. I think the average in the region is about 19 and so that's about 19. We are like 3-4 times the regional average in fresh water availability per person and so this is tremendous strength that Belize have, but we have to keep it that way. Because we also have weakness which is that more than 60% of our perimeter is coastline, which is beautiful for tourism, but you have saline intrusion. Salt water intrusion is always at threat to get into aquatic system."

Belize has 16 major watersheds - 5 of which we share with Guatemala and other neighboring countries. A plan will be drafted after consultations.

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