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The UN Foundation has officially listed the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System as “World Heritage in Danger” due to unsustainable tourism activity. The designation hopes to encourage responsible tourism that is crucial to the economic well-being of the region while highlighting the site’s unique natural value.

The UN Foundation has officially listed the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System as “World Heritage in Danger” due to unsustainable tourism activity.

“The preservation of the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System is critical to both its marine inhabitants and the local communities that depend on the site for their livelihoods,” read a statement by Erika Harms, Executive Director of the Sustainable Development Program at the United Nations Foundation. “In light of the Committee’s decision, we recommit ourselves to support long-term solutions to the conservation challenges in the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System World Heritage site.”

The United Nations Foundation is an advocate for the UN and a platform for connecting people, ideas, and capital to help the United Nations solve global problems. The foundation works to build partnerships, grow constituencies, mobilize resources and advocate policy changes to support the UN’s work for individual and global progress.

It focuses on, among other things, improving disaster relief, protecting diverse cultures and environments and creating a clean energy future.

Working alongside local tourism businesses and conservation organizations for the past 9 years, the UN Foundation has joined with the Belizean government as well as other UN bodies to raise awareness and build support for the conservation and protection of the Barrier Reef as well as its local communities.

Seven separate pieces of the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System were inscribed as a serial World Heritage site in 1996, comprising 370 square miles that include 450 cayes and 3 atolls. The site is part of the Mesoamerican Reef, the second longest in the world behind only Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and boasts 500 different species of fish and 65 species of coral.

With the new “World Heritage in Danger” designation, the foundation hopes to encourage tourism – crucial to the economic well-being of the region - that highlights the “unique natural value of the site and support the government in its efforts to create a framework to preserve the site, support sustainable tourism in and around the site, and empower local communities to improve their livelihoods.”

The Foundation is working diligently to promote throughout the international community the idea that the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System, as well as ecosystems like it, “belong to all of us, and it is vital to protect these sites and their natural and cultural heritage.”

For more information, visit www.UNFoundation.org