Belize is on track to protect 30% of its marine environment by 2026. What does that mean for those doing the protection?
By André Habet
[Audio version for accessibility to be released on Tuesday, November 25, 2025, on the Mada Fyah podcast and will be linked here then]
We were wrapping up the morning’s patrol in Port Honduras Marine Reserve when Mark spotted something bobbing among the waves. He steered the boat towards whatever was floating in the water. Initially, it seemed to be some debris tangled in sargassum, a sight we’d seen several times that morning. As the boat approached, though, the object’s identity became unmistakable.
It was a hawksbill turtle, ensnared in a gillnet, dead and bloated.
Mark Jacob, a ranger with the Toledo Institute for Development and Education (TIDE), moved the boat in parallel with it. He and one of the Belize Coast Guard (BCG) seamen hoisted the swollen animal into the boat. It thud as it hit the bottom, still encased in the net. It was not the gear’s sole victim.
Mark and the two seamen removed the net foot by foot from the sea as more marine animals began to litter the bottom of the 22-foot boat. Those captured included several eagle rays, parrot fish, queen conch, and mature spiny lobsters.
At one point, while the work continues, Mark looks over to me and says, “Looks like you’re not gonna make it back for your interview.”
I do make it for my interview, but removing the net takes more than an hour. By the time they’re done, much of the deck is covered in the nylon net. Its victims, already rotting in the summer heat, overrode the fresh salt air.
Animals that emerged still alive, Mark and the seamen tried to cut out of the net before they suffocated, sparing the lives of a few rays and finfish. Those that didn’t survive joined us back on the mainland, where TIDE rangers later inventoried and destroyed them, the meat no longer consumable due to spoilage since ensnared.
Tens of fish and hundreds of dollars in fisheries products, wasted from one net.
As we prepared to leave the site, an area frequented by those conducting illegal fishing, Mark spotted a boat in the distance, which he suspected may be the one that had left the net there in the first place. But it’s no use going after them. There’s no way to prove it’s theirs, and more than likely, their vessel can outrun the one we’re in, so Mark opens the engine and resumes the journey back to the mainland.
30% by 2026
It was an overcast day on August 4 when that gillnet was recovered. I was on day two of a 24-hour stay with TIDE to learn more about the work of marine protected areas rangers, those on the front lines of enforcing regulations within Belize’s 15 marine protected areas.
The investigative team had set out to learn about the work involved in scaling up enforcement to coincide with expansions to these sites in compliance with the Belize Blue Bond. The agreement is a debt-for-nature-swap between the Government of Belize and The Nature Conservancy (TNC), which refinances USD $364 million of Belize’s debt to a lower interest rate, freeing up USD $180 million for marine conservation.
Over the course of six months, Climate Spotlight spoke to representatives from 6 of 7 of Belize’s Marine Protected Area co-managers to learn more about their job and what they believe it will take to meet Belize’s ambitious and contractual goal of expanding its marine protected areas to 30% by the end of 2026. Per the terms of the Conservation Funding Agreement, part of the Blue Bond Act, completing this expansion is one of 8 milestones Belize must meet. These milestones, in part, intend to align Belize’s marine space with the Global Diversity Framework’s 2030 targets, which include protecting 30% of the marine space globally in a bid to stop and reverse biodiversity.
The Belize Fisheries Department (BFiD), the sole MPA manager for five (5) MPAs, did not respond to email requests for an interview.
Much of the media coverage of the Belize Blue Bond has amplified a celebratory perspective in coverage by outlets such as the New York Times and Bloomberg, which cautiously endorse Belize’s Blue Bond as a model for other developing countries rich in biodiversity seeking to reduce foreign debts, a mechanism TNC has since deployed in the Bahamas and Barbados.
However, those on the ground who spoke with Climate Spotlight shared a much more complex picture: Despite millions of dollars allocated to fulfill the terms of the Conservation Funding Agreement, those on the frontlines of enforcement face an incredibly daunting task. They must both sensitize users, primarily fishers and tour operators, and enforce rapidly expanding protected areas—for example, the Sapodilla Cayes Marine Reserve has already been expanded eight times its pre-2020 size.
The Story of the Belize Blue Bond
A Blue Bond typically involves an agreement between a country and a third party that purchases a country’s debt on the market, usually at a discounted rate, then provides that debt back to the indebted country in exchange for negotiated conservation commitments.
It’s a financial mechanism that’s received wide acclaim, including winning two Environmental Finance Bond Awards in 2022, as a means of reducing a formerly colonized country’s debt and advancing global biodiversity commitments.
In 2020, Belize found itself in unprecedented dire straits due to the combination of the severe economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the impending default on its Superbond 3.0, an inheritance from an earlier PUP administration that threatened to further weaken the Belize economy.
By the time the People’s United Party (PUP) came to power again in November 2020, the pandemic had already severely impacted the country’s tourism-dependent economy, sending the country’s debt above 100% of its Gross Domestic Product. According to the Caribbean Development Bank, “the pandemic decimated the tourism industry,” as the Philip Goldson International Airport was closed, and cruise ship calls were halted in March that year to mitigate the spread of the virus.
Therefore, the PUP government renewed negotiations about a possible debt-for-nature swap shortly after its win over the incumbent United Democratic Party, which had held office since 2008.
Many across the country and internationally lauded the PUP when they announced, a year after their election in November 2021, that they had successfully negotiated a debt-for-nature swap, referred to as the Blue Bond Agreement, with TNC.
In the view of its architects, the Belize Blue Bond provided both a new tool for conservation financing as it sought to reduce Belize’s outstanding debt, and a means for the country to commit some of its savings to Belize’s marine conservation efforts in alignment with global 30 x 30 commitments.
However, there’s more to the story. UK Charity Debt Justice released a brief in May on debt-for-nature swaps, including the Belize Blue Bond, stating that debt-for-nature swaps reduce debt seven times less than debt restructurings. In that brief, Debt Justice demonstrated that, unlike what has been touted by the Prime Minister himself, the Bond didn’t actually save Belize over 1.1 billion dollars.
According to Debt Justice’s Policy Advisor Tess Woolfenden, Belize actually saved 5.8% of the amount owed on the super bond rather than the 12% stated by the Government of Belize. This discrepancy comes from fees the Government of Belize is responsible for paying over the course of the bond.
Among those fees, Woolfenden states, are those that “the country has to pay to process the loan, and Public Risk Insurance Guarantee from the International Development Finance Corporation of the United States,” which is insurance purchased with public funds that ensures TNC’s investors’ loan is covered should the government fail to cover its payments. As of publication, TNC Belize has not responded to questions about the source of the discrepancy.
In light of these looming milestones, Belize’s rangers and coast guards are now stepping up to the challenge with a range of tools to strengthen MPA enforcement.
“According to Debt Justice, Belize actually saved 5.8% of the amount owed on the super bond rather than the 12% stated by the Government of Belize.”
The Work of an MPA Ranger
MPA rangers, also known as enforcement officers, often work in remote areas based at island field stations within their designated MPA for an average of 14 days at a time, with an average relief time of 10 days. While on active duty, rangers work to ensure users of the MPA comply with its regulations as legislated by the Fisheries Act, the Fisheries Resources Act, the Belize Coastal Zone Management Act, and individual MPAs’ statutory instruments. Compliance enforcement takes form in two main activities: 1) enforcement patrols and 2) education.
Ranger teams typically conduct an average of one patrol a day, with patrol routes predetermined before launch to maximize effectiveness according to where illicit activity has been sighted. Using primarily boats ranging in size from 20 to 25 feet for fuel efficiency, the patrols can last anywhere between four to eight hours, depending on the activity encountered.
The teams vary their patrol times to mitigate predictability, sometimes starting patrols in the early morning at 3 or 4 am, or conducting night patrols to catch fishers hoping to elude detection via the cover of dark. Marlon Chun, a ranger with the Southern Environmental Association (SEA), said, “I would tend to want to meet the fishers when they’re still diving.” Often, though, patrols occur without encountering anyone actively violating regulations. Instead, what they usually encounter are passive fishing gear like gillnets, line hooks, and fish pots, which are left in place by fishers to be collected later.
Four Hol Chan Marine Reserve rangers patrol the MPA, one of the most popular marine tourism sites in Belize. Photo by Marco Lopez. 
Rangers from the Sarteneja Alliance for Conservation and Development (SACD) conducting research. Photo by SACD. 
Mark Jacob, a TIDE ranger, using Smart System to log a longline found in the Port Honduras Marine Reserve. 
A fisher uses a long pole to slowly navigate the shallow waters towards a field station at the Swallow Caye Wildlife Sanctuary. 
A Hol Chan Marine Reserve compliance officer collecting park fees from the day’s visitors. Photo by Marco Lopez.
As mentioned, co-manager rangers often conduct joint patrols with members of the Belize Coast Guard (BCG). This is, in part, a matter of jurisdiction. As fisheries officers, rangers have jurisdiction over laws and regulations regarding fisheries and protected areas.
Unlike MPA rangers, BCG seamen also have the authority to arrest persons found in violation of laws outside of those concerning fisheries or protected areas, such as illegal arms, drug smuggling, or piracy.
This partnership also occurs due to another factor: firepower.
Joel Verde, Executive Director at the Sarteneja Alliance for Conservation and Development (SACD), which co-manages the Corozal Bay Wildlife Sanctuary (CBWS), shared that “NGOs find it hard to take responsibility for weapons.” Therefore, members of the coast guard are often requested to accompany rangers on patrols, especially for transboundary ones in the north and south, lending their firepower should engagements with other boats escalate.
The desire for partnering with law enforcement is now extending to police as well with SEA’s interim executive director Wilbur Garbutt, stating “We hope that when we have another conversation with you, that we’ll be able to report that we have two policemen on board with us, along with 2 coast guards, which strengthens our firepower that we hope we’ll never have to use.”
Much of the rangers’ time is taken up with what they refer to as boat-to-boat activity, which SEA’s Protected Area Manager Andrea Cowo calls “Jehovah’s Witnesses on Water” due to the proselytizing nature of the work. Cowo said that in boat-to-boat activities, “Rangers go about within the park, encountering every fisherman that they can and spreading the word about the regulations.” These encounters often include snacks for fishers to incentivize interaction.
Captain Romero, a fisherman of 20 years, said that breaking the heads of spiny lobsters to retrieve the extra meat can be a painful and burdensome task—especially while bobbing on a small sailboat off the coast of Belize. Yet, this is exactly what we saw him and some members of his crew focused on as we approached them for a boat-to-boat session organized by the Belize Audubon Society (BAS) in the Lighthouse Reef Atoll Marine Reserve, a MPA within the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System.
from the Belize Fund for a Sustainable Future,
which includes community grants of BZD $50,000.
Photo by Marco Lopez.
“We do the work of the lobster head because that helps us to make our provisions—it makes it easier for us,” Romero told Climate Spotlight. He captains a crew that travels from the northern village of Chunox, Corozal, to work the waters on the outskirts of the Lighthouse Reef Atoll Marine Reserve.
“Marine Protected Areas are taking a bite out of the fishermen’s livelihood”
Carlos Arevalo, chairman of the Chunox Fishermen Association (CFA)
Outside of active patrols and education, rangers occupy their work time cleaning sites within the MPA and logging patrol data. With the expansion of several MPAs since 2022, rangers are devoting even more time to awareness campaigns about expanded no-take or conservation zones, which are more restrictive than MPA General Use Zones.
Carlos Arevalo, chairman of the Chunox Fishermen Association (CFA), says that though fishers in CFA resist the expansion of protected areas, saying, “it’s taking a bite out of the fishermen’s livelihood,” they still endorse it for sustainability, recognizing the long-term benefits of co-managers’ work in curtailing unsustainable fishing practices in MPAs like gillnets and line hooks.
Of the seven that applied up to 2024, CFA is the only fishers’ organization so far to receive a grant from the Belize Fund for a Sustainable Future (Belize Fund), a trust developed to disburse the savings from the Blue Bond to support the conservation funding agreement’s milestones.
While CFA has received funding to develop a multi-purpose center and provide business training to its members, fishers like Eworth Garbutt, president of the Belize Flats Fishery Association, view the Blue Bond with skepticism, questioning how Belize ever got to the point of displacing fishers for conservation mandated by what he views as external interference.
Garbutt states, “I refuse to take any money from the Blue Bond grant. I don’t want any because what is significant about all the projects I’ve led is to show self-determination.” In his view, the primary beneficiaries of such grants are hotels like the Biltmore, which frequently hosts government events. Garbutt alleges that to date, “The people who need it most, they are not feeling anything as yet.”
During the 24 hours Climate Spotlight spent with the TIDE rangers, most of it was spent at their station on Abalone Caye, where the rangers passed the time between daily patrols resting, cooking, and planning their next patrol in coordination with the protected areas managers, usually stationed on the mainland at the co-manager’s offices.
Working from a field station, however, does have its drawbacks, with several rangers like Ewan, Jacob, and their superiors lamenting the time rangers regularly spent away from their families. Cowo stated, “Some people won’t take the lick our rangers take.”
Connecting to families on the mainland is much simpler for those stationed in places with internet connections, though more remote locations, such as SEA’s station at Little Water Caye in the Gladden Spit and Silk Caye’s Marine Reserve, struggle to even get phone service. Chun, the previously mentioned SEA ranger and father of two, stated, “Two weeks away from my kids and my common law wife, I would call it neglect. Due to poor communication, I would not get in contact with them.”
Meanwhile, at Abalone, the three TIDE rangers and two coast guard seamen sat around Sunday evening, messaging friends and family or streaming videos, the station’s generator humming in the background for a few hours after nightfall.
Comfortable surroundings aren’t available for all rangers, though. According to Cowo, “It’s really bad when it comes to the king tide at SEA’s Little Water Caye. It gets flooded, and then you have to be walking in water.”
Abalone Caye, the current location of TIDE’s field station in PHMR, has experienced significant erosion, even with attempted erosion mitigation, leading the co-manager to move its Port Honduras station to the mainland.
A photograph of Abalone Caye as it was when TIDE’s field station began construction in 2001 with funds from Seacology following the official establishment of the Port Honduras Marine Reserve in 2000. Photograph located at the Abalone Caye field station. 
Abalone Caye as it was during a visit on August 3, 2025, having significantly eroded since the station was constructed. 
A seawall constructed around one end of Abalone Caye. It wasn’t sufficiently effective to limit erosion to the island, leading TIDE to make the decision to soon move its field station off the island.
In Cowo’s view, “If it weren’t for Eworth Garbutt and all the people of the community who contributed to erosion interventions, we wouldn’t have Silk Cayes. The same applies to Laughing Bird Caye Nation Park (LBCNP).”
Despite being at the frontline of enforcing Belize’s marine protected areas and facing the risks involved, rangers are generally entry-level positions, usually requiring a minimum of a high school degree.
While Chun was studying to become a teacher before moving to Placencia from Punta Gorda to join SEA, Jacob moved to Punta Gorda for his wife’s job, joining TIDE shortly after receiving his boat captain license. Some, like Ewan at SACD, had a more circuitous route to becoming a ranger. He stated, “When I started in conservation, I was doing accounting. Then I transferred to being a ranger, then to a Quick Response Team,” before he moved to SACD and assumed the head ranger position.
The starting salary for a ranger is roughly BZD $1,200 a month at most co-manager organizations, with more possible for those already in possession of a fisheries officer certification, tertiary education, special constable designation, boat captain’s license, or prior experience in protected areas enforcement. Some MPA co-managers pay more than others, though Ewan shared that greater pay doesn’t always translate to improved quality of life, stating that while he’s heard Hol Chan Marine Reserve rangers receive BZD $2,000, the higher cost of living in San Pedro nulls out the increased salary.
Dr. Arthur Tunde, president of the Western Indian Ocean MPA network WIOMSA, and a former ranger himself, says that salaries for rangers tend to be low worldwide, stating that “in Kenya, rangers are paid an average of USD $400 a month.”
Low wages contribute to job retention issues. In Cowo’s view, “rangers get the training that they need from SEA and then just leave to start tour guiding or go to other NGOs because they pay better.”
In the case of SACD, stagnant wages weighed heavily in their ranger team’s decision to quit. According to Verde, “By the end of 2024, almost a year ago, we lost our entire fleet that we had with us for 6 or 7 years.”
WIMOSA has addressed retention issues through its WIOCOMPAS courses, providing capacity recognition and building for MPA employees seeking upward mobility within the conservation field, an effort that has seen no duplication outside of that region, according to Tunde and another WIOCOMPAS researcher.
The relatively low wages that rangers receive limit the applicant pool, with TIDE Executive Director Leonardo Chavarria stating, “People don’t want to work for $1,200, $1,300 a month, leaving their families for 20 days a month, so they don’t apply.” That limited applicant pool has contributed to a shift in demographics since the establishment of the country’s protected areas.
“People don’t want to work for $1,200, $1,300 a month, leaving their families for 20 days a month, so they don’t apply.”
According to TIDE’s terrestrial manager, Mario Muschamp, a ranger with over 26 years of experience, “When protected areas started, we were focusing mainly on hiring people impacted by the declaration of these protected areas. Rangers came from the communities impacted by their establishment, with co-managers hoping to get more community buy-in by hiring from among the community.”
Over time, though, there’s been an increase in hires from military veterans. Chavarria says this was not a proactive policy decision. Rather, co-managers hire “the best from those who are interested, and these are normally ex-farmers, soldiers, et cetera, and they already have maybe a pension.” Such a pension helps to supplement their income.
While Romero and others have settled into their jobs, new challenges amplified by the Blue Bond-mandated expansions demonstrate that the work of a ranger is about to become much more difficult.
Hiring people with military or police experience also has the benefit of bringing their security experience and familiarity with firearms, as well as the hardiness gathered from years’ worth of military operations in rugged terrain. John Romero, a Belize Defense Force veteran and TIDE ranger, said that compared to his years of bushwacking and sleeping in the rainforest in the service, rangers “live good in terms of hardship.”
While Romero and others have settled into their jobs, new challenges amplified by the Blue Bond-mandated expansions demonstrate that the work of a ranger is about to become much more difficult.
Continue to the second page to learn about the latest challenges facing Belize’s rangers with the expansion of Belize’s marine protected areas, and some of the innovations they’re using to meet those challenges.
