MISSION: CLIMATE FINANCING
Climate financing agencies need to embrace the potential of ocean energy, strengthen our international partnerships and recognise the critical role of innovative financing in securing a sustainable future for SIDS and Coastal Developing Countries.
Honourable John Briceño, Prime Minister of Belize, President of the eighth session of the SIDS DOCK Assembly representing the Caribbean Region
“For our youths, the Global Ocean Energy Alliance (GLOEA) represents a promise of a better future, as business as usual has nothing productive to offer most of them, growing up in the era of global instability, sky high energy prices, and changing climate where 70% of the population lives in close proximity to the coast, and with infrastructure that is still underdeveloped, due to limited availability of resources. But what can the GLOEA do? It can build a foundation for our youth, who are destined to be the ultimate beneficiaries of the GLOEA, where they will be harnessing the largest clean energy resource on the planet – the Ocean – for a significantly brighter future, where ocean energy technologies are commercialized, in all its forms, developed and deployed in SIDS and other energy vulnerable coastal countries, and where ocean energy is a major baseload energy resource in the energy mix, increasing the population’s climate resilience.”
Honourable Wavel Ramkalawan, Vice President of the eighth session of the SIDS DOCK Assembly representing the AIS Region
“On the day of our election as President and Vice President of the eighth session of the SIDS DOCK Assembly in September 2024, Belize and Seychelles continued our campaign to decarbonise our islands with a focus on ocean energy that has the support of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and the Commonwealth Heads of Government. We are keeping up the momentum for climate financing and support for the Global Ocean Energy Alliance (GLOEA) launched at the UN Ocean Conference in Lisbon, in June 2022.”
GLOEA… Hosted by the Happiest Place in the Caribbean
If you ever visited Belize, that amazing multi-everything country that personifies “Island Life,” with its great Belize Barrier Reef visible from space and its hundreds of islands, you believe you’re in the most beautiful place in the world. After all, when the infamous U.S. artist, Madonna, sang about La Isla Bonita (The Beautiful Island), Belizeans, especially those living on the island of San Pedro, “owned that song,” and then the tourists came to Belize in 1987, praying “that the days would last.”
Other countries failed to claim the title of La Isla Bonita, because when Madonna sang about that “tropical breeze,” and “nature wild and free,” and people with “beautiful faces” and “no cares in this world,” that is Belize, the “Happiest Place In the Caribbean.” For the record, the 2025 World Happiness Report ranks Belize among the top 25 happiest countries, globally, the perfect home for the Global Ocean Energy Alliance (GLOEA).
Island people are storytellers and storytelling is a part of our culture and reciting traditional knowledge. But we Island People tell the same story about the sea. We may live separately and afar but we are connected by the oceans. We eat from and live by the ocean, that’s how we survive. We can smell the rain before it comes, we know the weather will change when the birds go silent, we can tell the ocean is angry when the waves swell high.
We always knew about the power of the ocean, storytellers say it’s a mighty gift. So, get ready for the future of ocean power as the Global Ocean Energy Alliance (GLOEA) anchors its base in Belize, led by SIDS from the Pacific, Caribbean and Atlantic and Indian Ocean and South China Sea (AIS) Regions with support from the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the Global Network of Regional Sustainable Energy Centers (GN-SEC).
Our goal is harnessing the largest clean energy resource on the planet – the Ocean – for a significantly brighter future for our youth, where ocean energy technologies are commercialized, in all its forms, developed and deployed in SIDS and other energy vulnerable coastal countries, and where ocean energy is a major baseload energy resource in the energy mix, increasing the population’s climate resilience.
It can build a foundation for our youth, who are destined to be the ultimate beneficiaries of the GLOEA, and to give them a fighting chance to survive the unimaginable projected impacts of climate change and sea level rise that is fast becoming a reality. Now that’s a story to tell.
