In a collaborative step to address growing climate and natural hazard risks across Central America and the Caribbean, Belize has launched a new bilateral cooperation agreement with Cuba focused on elevating national disaster readiness capabilities, with Cuban expertise set to drive capacity building across multiple key areas of risk management.
The formal agreement to expand cooperation took shape during a high-level working meeting between Belize’s Minister of Disaster Risk Management Henry Charles Usher and a senior delegation from Cuba’s Ministry of Science, Technology, and Environment (CITMA), led by First Deputy Minister Rudy Montero Mata. Discussions centered on designing a structured joint support program that will deepen technical ties between the two nations, with tangible initiatives already on the negotiating table.
Under the proposed framework, the partnership will prioritize three core objectives: upgrading Belize’s existing early warning systems, enhancing nationwide hazard monitoring infrastructure, and standardizing community-level risk assessment protocols. In practical terms, these changes will deliver more accurate hazard data, faster public alerts for impending disasters, and more targeted, evidence-based emergency planning at the local level.
To bring these goals to life, both sides have proposed a range of cooperative activities, including cross-border expert exchanges, specialized training programs for Belizean emergency management personnel, and an upcoming study visit by Belizean officials to Cuba to observe the country’s disaster management systems in action. The Cuban delegation also floated the possibility of permanently deploying specialized technical experts to Belize, where they would provide hands-on training, help build local institutional capacity, and share decades of on-the-ground experience in hazard response.
Cuba has earned longstanding regional recognition for its robust, community-centered disaster response framework, particularly for its proven track record of mitigating damage from Atlantic hurricanes—one of the most consistent and deadly climate threats facing Caribbean and Central American nations. For Belize, which faces repeated exposure to tropical storms, flooding, and coastal erosion tied to climate change, tapping into this established expertise offers a accelerated path to strengthening its own disaster resilience.
Officials from both sides emphasized that the partnership builds on a foundation of existing regional cooperation on climate action, and that the next step will be formalizing the joint program details to launch initiatives in the near term. The agreement comes as small island and coastal developing nations across the Caribbean increasingly turn to regional knowledge sharing to address the accelerating impacts of climate change, which have pushed disaster risk management to the top of national policy agendas across the region.