Belize village gets water from sunlight

ERM is proud to have played a role in providing a reliable source of drinking water to a remote island community suffering from the impacts of COVID-19.

Caye Caulker Village is on the southern side of Caye Caulker Island, about 20 miles northeast of Belize City. The island is around five miles long and less than one mile wide, with a population of approximately 2,000. It has poor access to fresh water, and storms and flooding mean it often struggles to produce enough drinking water. As such, it relies on shipments of drinking water in plastic bottles, delivered on ferries.

In November 2019, ERM completed installation of 21 SOURCE™ hydropanels at a primary school in Caye Caulker, Belize, as part of an ongoing climate change adaptation project for the Inter-American Development Bank Caribbean Climate Smart Island Program. These hydropanels use solar energy to generate drinking water by capturing humidity from the air. The system is connected to three drinking fountains installed at the local primary school. It can produce up to 100 liters of drinking water a day under the right conditions, and the entire system can store more than 600 liters of drinking water.

As designed, the system will provided drinking water in case a severe weather event (such as a hurricane) seriously impacts Caye Caulker, until power and other utilities come back online. The primary school was chosen for this adaptation project because it is the remote island’s only National Emergency Management Organization approved hurricane shelter.

The additional benefit of installing the hydropanels at the primary school is that students and staff and the surrounding community now have access to a steady and reliable source of drinking water that is completely off the grid. In addition, by eliminating the need for plastic jugs of water, this system dramatically reduces the school’s carbon footprint.

With the COVID-19 pandemic hitting countries in the Caribbean, areas that rely on bottled drinking water feel the impacts of slower commerce and slower transportation of goods. For Caye Caulker, the situation became dire when ferries used to deliver bottled water were shut down to contain the virus.

In response to the shortage of bottled water on the island, the local government and the primary school have made the drinking water produced by our system available to the wider Caye Caulker community during this time of shortage.

The story of how this project is helping the tight-knit island community survive the pandemic is featured in a 28 April 2020 article in Newsweek Magazine.