1. Duty Station of the Consultancy: Belize – Primarily remote, with required field visits to key sites in the southern and western borders.
2. Duration of Consultancy: 6 months (from September 2025 – February 2026)
3. Nature of the consultancy: This consultancy provides technical expertise to update Belize’s National Protected Areas System Plan (NPASP), ensuring it reflects current biodiversity priorities, climate commitments, and international obligations. It focuses on strengthening conservation governance, enforcement, and resilience through policy review, threat assessment, stakeholder engagement, and the development of a costed implementation and monitoring plan.
Objectives
The objective of the consultancy is to provide the technical expertise and guidance to the Government of Belize to undertake the updating of the National Protected Areas Policy and System Plan (NPAPSP) for a ten-year period, ensuring it reflects current biodiversity priorities established in the NBSAP (2025-2035), NDC 3.0 biodiversity and climate linkages, community needs, and international obligations such as the CBD and SDGs, by carrying out the following activities:
i. Review the current Belize National Protected Areas Policy and System Plan (NPAPSP) and supplemental documents, to highlight implementation successes, gaps, opportunities, and lessons learnt, with a focus, but not limited to, the western and southern regions.
ii. Conduct a legal and institutional analysis to identify overlaps, gaps, and conflicts in policies, and consider institutional opportunities to strengthen governance, enforcement and monitoring, and other programmatic areas that are core to resource protection.
iii. Assess the status of protected areas in border regions, including management effectiveness, governance structures and threat assessment (including illegal logging, wildlife poaching, illicit drug transit, human trafficking, illegal fishing, pollution and cross border encroachment), with a view to establish baseline information for the development of strategies and actions in the System Plan.
iv. Develop an updated NPAPSP, with aligned Policy statements reflecting findings and recommendations from the policy analysis, and a comprehensive System Plan, indicating a core set of prioritized strategies and actions, that will ensure meeting the long-term vision of the Policy and System Plan.
v. Develop a costed Implementation Plan, particularly for the prioritized strategies and action areas. The Costing will indicate implementation needs for core action areas of enforcement and monitoring, education and awareness, social and stakeholder inclusion, and others.
vi. Develop a Monitoring and Evaluation Plan to support tracking implementation of System Plan.
Organizational Department / Unit to which the Consultant is contributing: EU-Belize Multi-Indicative Programme (MIP 2021-2027) – Priority Area 2: Regional Integration and Border Management
Reporting: The consultant will report to IOM Belize and will coordinate with an established Technical Committee comprised of relevant government and conservation agencies.
i. Advanced degree in Environmental Management, Natural Resource Management, Conservation Policy, or related field.
ii. Minimum 10 years of experience in conservation policy development, protected area management, conservation planning, or related sectors.
iii. Experience working with inter-agency coordination, biodiversity conservation environmental security and land use policy.
iv. Working knowledge of Belize’s environmental and protected areas context, particularly with the threats and pressures affecting the protected areas system
v. Proven stakeholder engagement and training facilitation skills, including solid Mediating and Consensus-building skills
vi. Strong skills in project costing, strategic planning and M&E design
vii. Familiarity with national and regional conservation, climate, and development frameworks.
viii. Strong report writing and communication skills.
ix. IBM experience would be an asset.