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Children and young people in Belize are at the center of a currently underway climate focused assessment being carried out through a UNICEF-supported study known as the Climate Landscape Analysis for Children, or CLAC Plus. The initiative is designed to examine how climate change is affecting children across the country and to identify ways national systems can better respond to those challenges. The study highlights growing climate-related pressures, including stronger storms, flooding, drought conditions, and disruptions to essential services such as education, healthcare, and access to safe water. These impacts are increasingly shaping the daily lives and overall well-being of young people in Belize. According to Emergency and Disaster Risk Reduction Officer Jenna Hoare, the CLAC provides a detailed analysis of how climate and disaster risks affect children, while also identifying gaps in the systems currently in place to protect them.
Jenna Hoare, Emergency and Disaster Risk Reduction Officer: “So the climate landscape analysis is a UNICEF-based evidence generation tool that was developed back in 2016 where we were supporting the government with really assessing and looking at the existing landscape as it pertains to different types of programs, investments, different types of capacity building that really look at the impact of climate on children. And it was through this partnership with the Ministry of Sustainable Development, Climate Change and Solid Waste Management that we said you know what we wanted to really understand what are the major impacts of climate, what are the current environmental challenges as well as the energy vulnerabilities that are affecting our children in Belize. Belize wanted to take a different spin on what the CLAC would look at and so this is where we incorporated youth, we involved indigenous communities, we looked at persons living with disability as well as pregnant and lactating women. And when we looked at that spin what we wanted to do was to really look at the vulnerable communities. And so what the CLAC did we took on a participatory approach where we had carried out a series of consultations with young persons with adolescents from different high schools across the country. And then we also facilitated focus group sessions with the vulnerable groups, as I mentioned, persons with disability, pregnant and lactating women, and within the different Indigenous communities. When it comes to heat stress and the heat waves that we are expected to endure in this super El Niño year is that children’s education will be disrupted. And we’ve seen this back in 2024 when schools had to cut down on the amount of hours that children were attending classes. And so knowing these trends, we wanted to ensure that we’re supporting the government to create different protocols that will better help children so that their learning outcome does not get affected by the changing climate.”
The assessment is expected to strengthen national decision-making by ensuring that the needs of children are considered in future climate resilience and disaster preparedness strategies.
English (US) ·