 The forum started as a means for a woman engaged in the fisheries sector to be able to have a space for them to come together, for them to have conversations about the fisheries sector, you know. What are some of the issues that require some attention, I mean, understanding the roles that they play within the fisheries sector and seeing how we could amplify those within the fisheries sector. The problem is that we have been invisible. Mostly when you hear fisheries, you think of the fishermen and we don't really highlight what women are doing within the value chain, free harvesting, the harvesting and post-harvesting. This year's WIFT, the team is General and Climate Change Understanding the Link. The main objective of this WIFT forum is to spread the news of the effects of climate change, to have women involved in fisheries and coastal zones, and to demonstrate to them how they can adapt to climate change, how they can actually contribute as a leader in their community, to share the information and give us information to include in our gender strategy. To ensure that we're inclusive and to ensure that our programs that are implemented in Belize also benefit women, we need to understand what they do, how they do it, what are they using, where, how, and so this initiative is part of that. We're suffering from what's going on, because the Lengosta, the Caracol, the fish, are running out. Right now, the time is harder, the fishing is going down. Before March, April, May, there were months when the climate was very hot and very dry. Right now, the rain is starting, the Lengosta is hiding, there's no one coming out. There's a completely different tide. When the tide gets low, it goes low, low, low, low. And when it gets high, it actually eats away the sand along the beach. Basically this erosion started, I would say, over 25 years ago. Most of what we're seeing happens with what is going on on the watershed. The watershed or the river is the supplier of the materials that maintain the beaches. And a lot of the activities happening on the river is impacting and decreasing the functions that the river can do. So diversions of water, extraction of sand and gravel, loss of riparian zones, changing in the river streams. All of those things lead to loss of flow and loss of materials need to come to the coastline. We need to learn to fish more sustainably, because as we can see, as a result of overfishing and different practices, that it's affecting our environment dramatically. It is important that they try to diversify to ensure that we are able to use the blue resources, not only for the traditional fishing, but for other areas, such as mariculture, getting women involved, you know, in seacocomber, in growing octopus, for example, and so forth. Over the two days that I've been here at this forum, I've learned that our environment and different communities, they're really being affected by climate change in a dramatic way. I have learned a lot, a lot about erosion and the planting of mangroves, how mangroves can help erosion. I have learned about gender equality, where women and men should, you know, work together. We need to do better in the things that we do and the practices, and we also need to help one another through difficult times like the situation Monkey River is experiencing. The only way we can adapt and mitigate climate change is by having resilient ecosystems and communities. So we have to have healthy ecosystems, so we must ensure that we manage our ecosystems, our rivers, our forests, our oceans. We need to manage those things so that they can be healthy to continue to support us as a community. We know that women are very resilient. It is in the nature of women to be able to adapt to the most difficult of circumstances. So they're survivors, so they can be teachers. They can teach and they can also encourage other women so that they themselves will be able to as well move forward in terms of meeting the challenges of climate change. It's a great opportunity for us as women. You know, it's not only the guys at Fish, we ladies can do it as well. If you have the passion for the sea, come and join us.