Today, the World Wildlife Fund and partner organizations launched a report assessing the value of Belize's marine resources. The idea is to highlight the incredible resource that is imperiled by a host of issues. And to bring into focus the urgency to protect the second largest Barrier Reef in the World, the experts put a dollar value on it. Nadia Budd of the WWF explained that and Adriel Castaneda summarized the main topics discussed at the conference.
Adreil Castaneda, Fisheries Officer of the Belize Fisheries Department
"Essentially we are trying to evaluate what the value of our marine protected areas are and compare it to the actual cost of operation and as we can see or as we saw on the presentations for one specific site we are talking about 8 million US dollars in benefits just looking at the tourism industry. Considering there are countless other services tourism, livelihood there is much more that we can take out from the marine protected areas that are beneficial."
Sahar Vasquez, reporter
"What is the barrier worth?"
Nadia Bood, WWF
"As some of the presenters mentioned before there was a study done in 2009 that looked at the economic value of our reef system through goods and service provided through tourism, fisheries, and coastal protection and it found that it could be worth half a million USD. Half a billion sorry."
As Bood said, the Belize Barrier Reef is worth a half a billion US dollars.
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