Climbing up the coconut industry has been anything but easy for Rosamund Benn, who has dedicated the past 32 years of her life working on a 50-acre coconut farm in The Pomeroon, a farming region of Guyana.
The Caribbean has the unenviable reputation as one of the most disaster-prone regions in the world, a situation exacerbated by climate change and vulnerability that experts warn could have significant economic consequences if unaddressed.
Imagine Guyana and Dominica without forests and rivers, or Antigua, Barbados and St. Lucia without beaches.
As regional delegates meet to discuss a legally binding ban on the use of mercury this week, Guyanese officials are arguing that an exception should be made for the South American country's lucrative gold mining sector until an acceptable alternative is found.
Pedro Melville, 62, a father of nine from Guyana's northwestern gold and manganese mining district of Matthew’s Ridge, sees the impacts of unchecked prospecting on the local environment every day.
Over the past six months, governments in two influential Caribbean trade bloc member states – Jamaica and Guyana - have floated political test balloons on the question of whether colonial-era laws criminalising homosexuality should be amended in keeping with trends in most Western states.