PACT Awards $3 Million in Climate Adaptation and Mitigation Grants

Rounding out Climate Week, the Protected Areas Conservation Trust (PACT) held a signing ceremony for grants to four entities today to support climate adaptation and mitigation activities. PACT, as an accredited organization, made over three million dollars in grants available to the recipients from the Adaptation Fund, through the Enhance Direct Access funding window. Eli Romero, Climate Finance Manager, PACT spoke on the grant recipients and the initiatives that the funds will be supporting.

Eli Romero, Climate Finance Manager, PACT: “The grants that we signed today account for over $3 million and it’s really our second cohort, the first cohort we had signed in March of this year. it was for a total of $4.4 million. So it’s a $10 million project that we had secured from the adaptation fund. PACT is an accredited entity to the fund and we’re able to mobilize these funds from these climate finance mechanisms to make it available for our local stakeholders in building climate resilience. There are four recipients actually signing a grant today. The first one is the National Biodiversity Office which is going to be supporting  building climate resilience in communities along the Macal and Mopan River watersheds. The second grantee is the Belize Zoo who are going to be supporting building resilience in fire management in  communities around Hattieville, Taiwanese community, Gracie Rock, and building fire brigades. The third recipient is the Ministry of Rural Transformation. The ministry is securing funds for building disaster risk management resilience in two communities in the south,  Golden Stream and Blue Creek, and two in the north being San Jose and Trial Farm. And the fourth recipient is the National Fire Service that will be benefiting the Ladyville Village along with Sun Hill and Bermudian Landing in building resilience and fire management as well.”

Clifford King, Director of Local Government, Ministry of Rural Transformation, said that applying for the grant shows the ministry’s commitment to the development of communities countrywide.

Clifford King, Director of Local Government, Ministry of Natural Resources: “So what this project is going to do is providing the funding for there to be the assessment of the challenges communities face from what we see now the effects of climate change and in particular the challenge of flooding. And so we have four communities, two in the south Blue Creek and Golden Stream in the south that will benefit from  flood risk assessment designed to address those challenges and for the intervention works that this project will support. So we have Blue Creek,  Golan Stream in the Toledo district, and San Jose and Trial Farm in the north. And so we are very pleased with the support that we are receiving from PACT. This initiative is really a part of what our strategic aims are. One of our key result areas in terms of our strategic effort is addressing the challenges with climate adaptation and climate resiliency to make sure that our communities are very sustainable, that they are very resilient to the effects of climate change. “

The signing was done at the Climate Finance Forum held at the Grand Resort in Belize City./