_{Grant recipients along with Government officials}

by Charles Gladden

BELMOPAN, Thurs. Feb. 13, 2025

The Protected Areas Conservation Trust (PACT) distributed 4.4 million BZD in grants on Wednesday, February 12, to four Belizean organizations to support four subprojects under its Building Community Resilience via Transformative Adaptation project (EDA Project).

The EDA Project is funded through the Adaptation Fund’s Enhanced Direct Access with a 10 million BZD project that aims to improve Belize’s long-term capacity to protect communities from the impacts of climate change over five years.

The EDA Project is an on-granting mechanism for in-country climate finance, targeting five interconnected components critical to building community resilience, and was approved by the Adaptation Fund Board at its 41st Meeting held in Bonn, Germany, in October 2023.

_{Abil Castañeda, Executive Director of PACT}

“It’s more for the local communities to be able to address specific vulnerabilities they are facing. We were able to grant four of our recipients that are part of this process so far, to execute their projects with us,” said Abil Castañeda, Executive Director of PACT.

The four recipients and their projects are the following: Belmopan City Council – Flood Mitigation and Environmental Restoration Initiative; Belize Forest Department – Strengthening Wildfire Management for a Resilient Belize; Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) – Creating Opportunities to Support Alternative Livelihoods; and Sarteneja Village Council Building Resilience and Adaptive Capacity on Fire Management and Control in the Sarteneja Village in the Corozal District.

Each recipient respectively received various amounts of money with a timeframe to complete their project: The Belmopan City Council received 684,500 BZD within 24 months; the Belize Forest Department received 676,219.25 BZD within 36 months; IICA received 2,604,967.60 BZD within 42 months; Sarteneja Village Council received 464,454.96 BZD within 24 months.

“PACT as an organization has had to invest a lot in specific policies and procedures and systems that allow us to monitor and evaluate the impacts. We have installed a project management unit that’s part of our climate finance unit specific to this program. There is a technical expert team that is there to provide guidance, and also a project steering committee that will be providing overall oversight on the program; so, we do have various mechanisms to be able to ensure that we are meeting our targets. We have about three years or so to finalize these investments, and so we need to make sure that we meet all those objectives before the time runs out,” added Castañeda.

According to Castañeda, a second cohort of recipients will be granted later in the year.