The project “Upscaling innovative ‘planting-baskets’ to restore landscape diversity, and enhance climate-resilient livelihoods” is a Darwin Initiative Innovation Project, funded by UK taxpayers through the UK government-operated 'Biodiversity Challenge Funds'
The new project helps farmers grow more of Belize’s native plants and trees, enhancing their livelihoods and helping them adapt to climate change.
The UK Government, through its taxpayer-funded Biodiversity Challenge Funds programme, will be helping the next generation of smallholder farmers in Belize to benefit from new trials in growing a wider range of local native plants and trees. Dr Neil Stuart, an academic based at the University of Edinburgh, who devised the project, explains:
Rudy Aguilar, Co-Director and Head Gardener at BBG, who has been a regular face on Cayo TV’s ‘The Garden Show’, adds:
British High Commissioner to Belize, H.E. Nicole Davison, on her first visit to the BBG notes:
Apart from working with pioneering farmers, and continuing the backyard gardening initiative for people who don’t have their own farmland, the project will establish demonstration gardens at Belize Botanic Garden, and also at Galen University and at Mopan Technical High School, so students and school children can learn about these lesser grown native plants and trees.
Denaie Swasey explains:
The project also includes plans to create an agro-forestry demonstration in the Vaca Forest Reserve, for educating local farmers with the support of Friends for Conservation & Development (FCD).
Dr Zoë Goodwin, an expert from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) who has worked in Belize for many years, explains that “by including some endangered trees and plants in these baskets of plants, we can promote the growing of more endangered species, which helps to restore biodiversity to the landscape”.
Duncan Macqueen, Head of Forestry at the International Institute for Environment & Development (IIED) phrases it in a different way: