Belize City Council Earns Global Recognition for Climate Action Efforts

The Belize City Council has been lauded on the international stage, receiving two significant “medals” from the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy (GCoM). This prestigious recognition for the 2024 cycle highlights the Council’s impressive progress in two crucial areas. The first medal, for Mitigation, recognizes the government’s success in completing the “Inventory” phase, a critical baseline of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions. The second medal was awarded for Adaptation, a new and highly significant recognition category. According to Mayor Bernard Wagner, this recognition acknowledges the government’s forward-thinking efforts in assessing and preparing for climate risks and vulnerabilities. 

Bernard Wagner, Mayor of Belize City: “It is a global achievement obviously from the Global Covenant of Mayors which really represents thousands and thousands of city governments all across the world and it is clearly looking at how and really congratulating Belize City on the steps it has taken in terms of adaptation, in respect to climate change and mitigation in respect to climate change. It is speaking to the fact of how has Belize City embraced climate change and put in place the sort of mitigation and adaptation interventions that really contribute to lessening the impact of the disaster risk in our little city. And so we are so glad and pleased that our work is being seen not only at the local level and regional level but at an international level. I have to commend my team every time and this encompasses not one project or two projects but it encompasses really the culture that we have shifted, that we have understood that climate change in respect to Belize City being a very coastal city and we are susceptible to sea rise levels, erosion, we’re susceptible to hurricanes, susceptible to flooding, tsunamis and all of this is part of a broader scope of our plans in respect to mitigation and adaptation.”

A congratulatory letter to Mayor Bernard Wagner from the GCoM LATAM Helpdesk praised the city for its dedication, noting that Belize’s participation is making a significant contribution to a “positive collective impact” on a global scale. /