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Belize City has earned global recognition after its e-Mobility Pilot Project emerged in the top five for the Clean, Reliable Transportation category of the 2025 Bloomberg Philanthropies Local Leaders Awards. The announcement was made earlier this month at the COP30 Local Leaders Forum in Rio de Janeiro, where Mayor Bernard Wagner also represented Belize City at the GPSC Mayors’ Roundtable on sustainable urban development. During the Roundtable session on Driving Low-Carbon Transformation, Mayor Wagner highlighted the city’s ongoing transition toward cleaner and more inclusive urban transportation. He emphasized that the award is a testament to Belize City’s commitment to reducing carbon emissions and advancing resilient mobility solutions.
Bernard Wagner, Mayor of Belize City: “We were a finalist in the category of clean, reliable transportation. I believe sometime in August of this year we wrote a project to Bloomberg Philanthropies really capturing the essence of our e-mobility project. We went up against cities such as Oslo, Norway. We went up against Sao Paulo, Brazil, Rio de Janeiro. And while we did not win, per se, the award we were in the top five. And so for me, that’s significant for a small city of 70,000 people being recognized on the world stage, alongside some of these larger, bigger cities. And so that was the core of our trip to Brazil. And it also gave us an opportunity to meet with almost 14,000 local leaders at the mayor’s summit, which again was organized by C40 cities. Right, it really brings all these mayors together, all these local leaders representing close to 14,000 cities and it was like a preliminary to COP30.”
The 2025 Local Leaders Awards, delivered in partnership with C40 Cities, recognized 12 winners selected from over 160 applications across 45 countries. Belize City emerged as the top five global projects with others such as Jakarta (Indonesia), Oslo (Norway), and São Paulo (Brazil). The Brazilian winner in the category was Belo Horizonte for its shared electric bicycle program. Belize City’s winning e-Mobility Pilot Project focuses on increasing the use of eBuses and eTaxis, expanding charging infrastructure, and introducing solar energy integration. Mayor Wagner also attended other meetings that looked at climate change and sustainable development.
Bernard Wagner, Mayor of Belize City: “We had discussions, we had stakeholders meeting, we had plenary sessions dealing with how does cities, global leadership, how do we as cities mobilize for climate action? And out of those meetings, we came up with essentially three core areas that we wanted to focus in as local leaders. How do we help countries achieve their national climate goals really by engaging partners? We want to move from the stage of preparing the project and we want to move to the stage of implementation. That is where we as local leaders saw that the fight for climate change will be on the local level. And so while we have seen where at the COP30 many of the national leaders globally has met, we at the local level are saying that nothing will be achieve unless you engage the local leaders who are closest to the people who are every day when something happens on the local level it is the mayors, it is the city councils, it is the local government that are driving the sort of change we wanted to see.”
Joining Mayor Wagner in Brazil were San Pedro Mayor Wally Núñez and Placencia Chairman Warren Garbutt, who participated in exchanges with regional and international city leaders on shaping the future of climate-resilient cities. The GPSC Mayors’ Roundtable was organized by the Global Platform for Sustainable Cities, the World Bank, and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), with support from C40 Cities, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the European Union in Belize, UNDP Belize, the Government of Belize, the Ministry of Public Utilities, Energy and Logistics, and the Department of Transport./
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