Eric Lewis, hereditary prince of the First Peoples of Moruga, at La Retraite Beach in in Trinidad and Tobago, to the east of which lie Trinity Hills. Courtesy: Eric Lewis

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Sep 2 2020 (IPS)

Trinity Hills in Trinidad and Tobago’s southeast region, also affectionately known as the Three Sisters, is home to a wildlife sanctuary that serves as a sort of incubator for fauna to reproduce and replenish the surrounding forest reserves of the Victoria-Mayaro region that includes the communities of Guayaguayare and Moruga. But a draft management plan for the Trinity Hills environment project and reports from surrounding communities suggest that urgent action is needed to prevent losses to the sanctuary and forest reserve.

Slash and burn agriculture on the boundaries of the sanctuary are posing a threat to the sanctuary itself; alleged marijuana growing deep within the protected area adds another level of danger because of  the possibility of armed conflicts; illegal hunting threatens the viability of wildlife within the sanctuary and forest reserve; and the legal but nonetheless debilitating impacts due to international oil and gas companies cutting swathes through the sanctuary to lay pipelines also threaten flora and fauna.

Managing these problems and conflicting claims on the area will require the cooperation of all stakeholders, said Dr David Persaud, environmental manager in the Environmental Policy and Planning Division of Trinidad and Tobago’s Ministry of Planning and Development.

He told IPS that for the moment some of the threats to the area were “anecdotal not empirical”. As chair of the steering committee for the Improving Forest and Protected Area Management  of Trinidad and Tobago (IFPAM-TT) project, which ran from 2015 to 2019 and was funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), he has received information on the threats to the Trinity Hills area.

But “the actual assessment of the extent of the problem in the Trinity Hills wildlife sanctuary and the surrounding areas has to be determined,” Persaud said. “All of those things would have to be evaluated as part of further work to be done.”

The IFPAM-TT project management plan for the Trinity Hills area is yet to be finalised and submitted, he said, but it covers the threats mentioned as well as potential solutions, ranging from MoUs for management of the site, to operational guidelines for oil and gas companies, to enforcement of mechanisms to remove solid waste, as well as a research agenda and communications strategy.

The Trinidad and Tobago government and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations recently concluded an Improving Forest and Protected Area Management project designed to protect the flora and fauna of this ecologically important area.

• According to the GEF, some 60 percent of Trinidad and Tobago land is forest and woodland, and includes several distinct terrestrial ecosystems and a high species diversity to surface area ratio.
• Trinidad and Tobago is home to some 420 species of birds, 600 different species of butterflies, and 95 different mammals, among others. There are also over 2,100 different flowering plants, which include over 190 species of orchids, GEF states.
• The area has other historical significance as well. Nestled in the soil beneath the Three Sisters’ feet are remnants of artefacts that testify to the island’s First Peoples inhabitants who view the area as a sacred site with some religious significance.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Forest Programme website notes that approximately 22 percent of the land mass in the English-speaking Caribbean is designated as protected areas, like the Trinity Hills. It also states that the degradation and loss of forests threatens the survival of many species, and reduces the ability of forests to provide essential services.

Eric Lewis, who is recognised by the First Peoples of Moruga as a hereditary prince and spokesman, and Arvolon Wilson-Smith, a Guayaguayare environmental activist and president of the NGO Black Deer Foundation, told IPS the problems caused by both illegal and legal activities range from forest fragmentation that displaces animals and has the potential to disrupt their reproduction; the loss of  vegetation including trees that are hundreds of years old along with threats to the area’s 11 endemic plant species; and air, water and  land pollution that is caused both by slash and burn agricultural squatters and the oil companies.

Lewis said that his community has proffered solutions to the problem of agricultural squatting—where farmers plant small acreage to grow crops without taking up residence—to assist the government of Trinidad and Tobago for more than three decades.

“If people [in Moruga] were given the same opportunities as those in urban areas, members of  the community would not have to go into the forest reserves to do illegal farming,” he said.

The area is known for its pawpaws, coconuts, water melon, pumpkin, citrus fruits, breadfruits, peppers, avocados, bananas and other crops. It also has a reputation for organically grown marijuana. There is also a thriving fishing industry where shark, carite (streaked Spanish mackerel), kingfish, red snapper, grouper, lobster and oysters are fished.

Lewis said the people of Moruga have lived without many amenities for decades. “There is a lack of opportunity for educational progress. There is no hospital, no fire station, the health centre opens 8 am to 4 pm; the closest hospital is 15 minutes from Moruga’s farthest point. Many people have died on the way to hospital. There are no sporting facilities for the youth and only two secondary schools” for an area whose population he estimates to be around 30,000.

Wilson-Smith told IPS that members of the Guayaguayare community rely heavily on the oil and gas companies operating in the Victoria-Mayaro area for jobs (Trinidad and Tobago is the largest oil and natural gas producer in the Caribbean), though fishing and agriculture also provide employment. 

The draft management plan drawn up for the IFPAM-TT project, for which she served as a community representative on a subcommittee, includes a proposal for ecotourism as a possible alternative livelihood that could draw people away from illegal activities in the forest reserve and the sanctuary. She said it was suggested at a subcommittee meeting “as a means to effect change”.

The area has several attractions that would be of interest to tourists, she said, including a mud volcano and a three-tier waterfall, as well as good hiking terrain.

Though the proposal for ecotourism still needs to be fleshed out, she is hoping that the community and the various arms of government responsible for conservation can work together to reduce the impacts of both the illegal and legal activities affecting the area.

Persaud said while every effort would be made by law enforcement to curtail illegal activities, the oil and gas companies were operating within the law since they would have obtained relevant permissions from the environmental agencies. “In any kind of development you will have some impacts. It is how we mitigate those developmental impacts,” he said.

Lewis does not agree. “Not one of the oil companies has contributed to any sort of sustainable redevelopment of the areas they have affected,” he said. “Because they have a certificate of environmental clearance does not mean that it is good for the environment.”

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Jul 23 2020 (IPS)

Most of  the countries in the Caribbean have done a great job of containing the COVID-19 pandemic, with a few notable exceptions, namely, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. A University of Oxford study highlighted Trinidad and Tobago as being among the most successful. However, management of wildlife and illegal hunting in that country remains ineffective. 

The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists 66 endangered or vulnerable species in Trinidad and Tobago, including fish and amphibians. A few, like the Piping Guan, are listed as critically endangered because of being avidly hunted.

Could the scourge of illegal hunting in Trinidad and Tobago lead to an outbreak of another zoonotic disease?

In this Voices from the Global South podcast, IPS Caribbean correspondent Jewel Fraser talks with a University of the West Indies virologist, a wildlife conservationist and a wildlife biologist about the threats posed to both human and animal health by illegal hunting in Trinidad and Tobago.

Excerpt:

By Jewel Fraser
PORT-OF-SPAIN, Mar 17 2020 (IPS)

Trinidad and Tobago, like many other signatories to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, had made commitments in 2010, to achieve several biological diversity targets during the decade 2011 to 2020, commonly referred to as the Aichi targets. However, achieving most of those targets continues to be a work in progress.

Kishan Kumarsingh, head of Multilateral  Environmental  Agreements  at Trinidad and Tobago’s Ministry of Planning and Development tells Voices from the Global  South that the government is keen on achieving the targets, however, in view of the economic benefits the country expects to  derive  from having healthy biodiversity.

In 2016, in its fifth national report to the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, Trinidad and Tobago estimated that coastal protection services provided by coral reefs, mangroves and marshes were worth nearly $50 million annually to the country, while the forests in Trinidad’s famous Northern Range were estimated to provide soil retention services valued at as much as $620 million annually, representing nearly seven percent of central government annual revenues. A more recent study completed with the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the U.N. suggests that communities close to forests enjoy a 30 percent increase in their annual income due to forest-related employment.

Though biodiversity in Trinidad and Tobago is coming under increasing pressure, Kumarsingh says the hope is to incorporate the economic value derived from biological diversity and ecosystem services into the country’s national development plans.

In this Voices from the Global South podcast, IPS Caribbean correspondent Jewel Fraser learns more about Trinidad and Tobago’s challenges with regard to achieving these sustainable biodiversity goals.

Excerpt:

Kishan Kumarsingh, lead negotiator for Trinidad and Tobago on climate change. Credit: Jewel Fraser/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Mar 15 2019 (IPS)

Trinidad and Tobago unveiled its monitoring, reporting and verification system in mid-March with a flourish, with government authorities underscoring the launch of the Monitoring, Reporting, Verification as a milestone in that country’s efforts to reduce its emissions in line with its commitments under the 2016 Paris agreement. And even while acknowledging the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report that current efforts such as these globally are unlikely to protect the world from warming more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, Trinidad and Tobago’s lead negotiator at climate negotiations since 1998, Kishan Kumarsingh, remains upbeat that his country is on the right path. 

He told IPS the Paris agreement is the foundation for a world a transition thanks to the exercise of “political will” and national sovereignty.

“It all goes back to the function of political will,” he said. “Because the efficacy of international law is invariably a function of political will because it is underpinned by national sovereignty.” He said it was governments that would create an enabling environment for a carbon free world since it was these same governments, not private citizens, that negotiate climate agreements.

But Dr. Leon Sealey-Huggins, a senior teaching fellow in Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick and a self-proclaimed scholar activist, is of the view that that is where the problem lies for the Caribbean in its efforts to secure its future against climate change.

“Whether or not it’s even possible through the United Nations framework to achieve the kind of change needed for the Caribbean is questionable,” Sealey-Huggins told IPS.

“The global structures of decision-making such as the UN are born out of a legacy of imperialism and globalism,” he said, with its unequal power structures and wealth distribution that have contributed to the current difficulties the Caribbean faces with climate change and its inability to successfully defend itself against it.

As a consequence, Sealey-Huggins said, the solutions promoted at climate change negotiations tended to focus on funding for“more technical approaches” like MRV systems that do not allow for the kinds of “social, political and economic reorganisation” that could shift the climate agenda towards more meaningful transformation and innovative solutions.

Trinidad and Tobago’s new MRV system will focus on emissions from industry, transportation and power generation, enabling identification of the source and quantity of emissions, and helping with efforts to reduce emissions in these three sectors by 15 percent by 2030, a press release from that country’s Ministry of Planning and Development said.

But such solutions “limit other options in terms of what is funded”, limiting research on other potential solutions, said Sealey-Huggins, in spite of the evidence that the global trajectory on carbon emissions reductions is insufficient to achieve the Paris goals.

Nevertheless, Kumarsingh maintains there are signs of real progress, particularly since Copenhagen. He points to the launch of the Green Climate Fund which was agreed upon at Copenhagen, and the establishment of the Warsaw International Mechanism for dealing with the sticky question of loss and damage.

“The Green Climate Fund is one manifestation of advancement for provision of finances and support…to developing countries,” he said. “It is not a cut and dried issue that the interests of developing countries are locked out of negotiations, because they are negotiations by nature and even among the developed countries, among the developing countries there are varying interests.”

He said the issue of loss and damage has proved to be “challenging”. Besides this, however, “there is widespread acceptance that beyond adaptation there is the issue of permanent loss, permanent damage that needs to be addressed.”

But how these issues would be addressed remains to be determined since monetary compensation alone might not be sufficient to compensate for the loss.

“Would a monetary compensation for the loss of an island be adequate for the people themselves?…. these ideas are now being ventilated and discussed. But the cut and dried issue of compensation just won’t happen because of the historical nature of the negotiations themselves,” Kumarsingh told IPS.

He stressed that countries sit at the negotiating table with the intention uppermost in mind of protecting their own country’s interest, not that of another. And while developed countries had accepted they have a responsibility towards SIDS in terms of technology transfer and financing, he acknowledged that their delivery of such help could be increased.

“Of course more could be done to advance the multilateral cooperation to protect the planet as a whole from climate change because climate change is everybody’s business, particularly given the urgency and the accelerating rate of climate change we have seen in recent years,” Kumarsingh added.

Grenada’s former Ambassador to the UN Dessima Williams, who was chair of the Association of Small Island States from 2009 to 2012, told IPS that the effects of climate events on the region’s economic development was a cause for great concern and needed greater action.

“The issue of risk has to be broadened from beyond climate events” to factor in the increasing financial burdens these events are placing on countries that are already strapped with development debt, she said. Williams said the question of climate financing must be placed firmly on the climate agenda “in a meaningful way to impact debt reduction and share the burden in an equitable way.”

However, whether Caribbean SIDS do get their concerns over financing on the agenda “could very well be an issue of negotiating capacity and negotiating skills to actually get what [we] want,” Kumarsingh concluded.

A leatherback turtle on the beach. Communities in Trinidad and Tobago are actively conserving the leatherback. Courtesy: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region Follow/CC by 2.0

By Nalisha Adams
NAIROBI, Nov 26 2018 (IPS)

On the north-eastern shores of Trinidad and Tobago, on the shoreline of Matura, more than 10,000 leatherback turtles climb the beaches to nest each year. But there the local community is keenly area of one thing: ‘a turtle alive is worth more than a turtle dead.”

It’s a lesson the community learned almost three decades ago when the government of Trinidad and Tobago first created a tour guide training course in the north-eastern region. Dennis Sammy, Treasurer of the Caribbean Natural Resources Institute (CANARI), also a community leader from Matura, was part of the course. But instead of just working as tour guides, the community had a bigger vision of conservation, at a time when people were “killing lots of turtles”.

The area of Matura is one of the few places in the world where the leatherback turtles nest. Sammy tells IPS that it is also easily accessible via a beach road, something which places the turtles at risk to poachers.

But in four years the community residents, who had formed a conservation organisation, were able to stop the slaughter of turtles, Sammy tells IPS. The residents themselves had been part of the problem initially, he adds.

“They changed because the community became part of the solution.”

By 2000, the population of turtles rose as a result of the conservation efforts, thereby creating a problem for local fishers as up to 30 turtles a day became caught in their nets.

Now, ecotourism is practiced and people pay to come watch the turtles nesting.

Sammy is one of the participants at the Sustainable Blue Economy Conference, which is currently being held in Kenya and spoke to IPS alongside a side event on blue enterprises.

He uses the above example of turtle conservation as a key example of a community-led intuitive during the discussion on the blue enterprise titled “SIDS inclusive economic development through community-led conservation and social enterprise”.

“We have seen one turtle, by documenting and tagging it, come up so many times and we have been able to identify the number of people seeing this turtle. And we have traced back the value that these people pay to come and look at this turtle, and it’s a very high value,” Sammy says.

He explains that this is clear to the local communities that, “a turtle is worth more alive than dead”.

Nicole Leotaud, Executive Director of CANARI, a non-profit technical institute which facilities and promotes participatory natural resource management, says that in order to engage further community engagement, the Local Green-Blue Enterprise Radar, a tool that engages small enterprises by questioning them about their sustainability.

The radar is a list of questions, with each question being an indicator related to the SDGs. It looks particularly at poverty, environmental sustainability, well-being, and good governance.

This happens through a facilitated process where each and every member of the enterprise, not just business leaders, are asked probing questions.

“The blue economy and green economy are very top-down concepts being imposed on us. How do we make it real and how do we involve local communities and recognise small and micro enterprises as part of economic development?

“Very much you are hearing about big sectors, tourism and shipping and [seabed] mining and how do you involve the real enterprises that are there and always doing it?”

Nicole Leotaud, Executive Director of CANARI, a non-profit technical institute which facilities and promotes participatory natural resource management. Credit: Nalisha Adams/IPS

CANARI asked the questions how local, rural and marginalised communities could become part of the movement that was not only delivering economic benefits to communities but also asked how these communities could practice environmental sustainability.

“The radar is really designed for community enterprises that are using natural resources,” Leotard tells IPS.

“They are already starting to make changes. We are not telling them to make changes, it is a self-discovery.”

Leotaud explains that the organisation Grande Riviera Turtle Conservation experienced a similar process of discovery.

“One community enterprise working on turtle conservation have big tanks where they keep baby turtles, if these have been born in the day,” Leotaud says. She says thanks to the radar, the organisation then looked into not merely conserving turtles but also conserving water and using renewable energy.

“They said can we think about renewable energy. It would not only be good for the environment but it would be a steady energy supply because [they are based] in a remote village where they are cut off [from electricity] all the time.

“They realised that they can do better in terms of energy and water. And they realised they have a few powerful leaders but they are not doing enough to engage other members of the enterprise and bring them in, they are not doing enough to build partnerships,” says Leotaud.

“They said: ‘Ah now we see how we are part of the blue economy.’”

Mitchell Lay of the Caribbean Network of Fisherfolk Organisation says that in order to help community enterprises become part of the blue economy and to become even stronger, the actors already operating in the space have to be recognised.

The small fisheries sector, he says has “across the globe operating in the aqua environment over 90 million individuals. In the Caribbean region, the Caribbean community alone, we have in excess of 150,000 operating in the entire production already in the blue economy space.”

He says their contributions should be recognised. These contributions include “not only to SDG 14, but to the other SDGs. Their contribution to eradicating poverty, in terms of job creation, their contribution to human health and wellness. The contribution to ending hunger.”

Lay says support is critical because of the nature of the enterprises as they are small and micro and that their sustainable development needed to be promoted.

“So support from a policy perspective, support from other perspectives as well, capacity development etc.”

Meanwhile Leotaud says that “Community enterprises especially because they are informal they are marginalised. They are not part of the decision making they are not part of the discussion. So how can we get them to feel a part of this movement, for them to make their own transformation? And for them to call on governments?”

She explains more enabling policies were needed and that CANARI was working on building a more enabling environment for the micro enterprises.

She says that community enterprises don’t have access to finance, and that the technical capacity available in countries for enterprise development was not tailored for them.

The base for a water catchment tank. Faced with severe droughts, many farmers in the Caribbean have found it necessary to set up catchment areas to harvest water whenever it rains. Credit: CDB

By Desmond Brown
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Aug 14 2017 (IPS)

A Trinidadian scientist has developed a mechanism for determining the degree of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) compliance with respect to projects, processes and products.

This comes as global attention is drawn to climate-smart agriculture as one of the approaches to mitigate or adapt to climate change.“It can be used as a preliminary filter to sort through the number of ‘green-washing’ projects that may get funded under the rubric of climate-smart agriculture...all in a bid to access the millions of dollars that should go to help small and genuinely progressive farmers." --Steve Maximay

Steve Maximay says his Climate-Smart Agriculture Compliant (C-SAC) tool provides a certification and auditing scheme that can be used to compare projects, processes and products to justify the applicability and quantum of climate change funding.

“C-SAC provides a step-by-step, checklist style guide that a trained person can use to determine how closely the project or process under review satisfies the five areas of compliance,” Maximay told IPS.

“This method literally forces the examiner to consider key aspects or goals of climate-smart agriculture. These aspects (categories) are resource conservation; energy use; safety; biodiversity support; and greenhouse gas reduction.”

He said each category is further subdivided, so resource conservation includes the use of land, water, nutrients and labour. Energy use includes its use in power, lighting, input manufacture and transportation. Safety revolves around production operations, harvesting, storage and utilization.

Biodiversity support examines land clearing, off-site agrochemical impact, limited introduction of invasive species, and ecosystem services impact. Greenhouse gas reduction involves enteric fermentation (gas produced in the stomach of cattle and other animals that chew their cud), soil management, fossil fuel reduction and manure/waste management.

“These subdivisions (four each in the five categories) are the basis of the 20 questions that comprise the C-SAC tool,” Maximay explained.

“The manual provides a means of scoring each aspect on a five-point scale. If the cumulative score for the project is less than 40 it is deemed non-compliant and not a truly climate smart agriculture activity. C-SAC further grades in terms of degree of compliance wherein a score of 40-49 points is level 1, (50-59) level 2, (60 -69) level 3, (70-79) level 4, and (80-100) being the highest degree of compliance at level 5.

“It is structured with due cognizance of concerns about how the global climate change funds will be disbursed,” he added.

The United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) describes climate-smart agriculture as agriculture that sustainably increases productivity, enhances resilience (adaptation), reduces or removes greenhouse gases (mitigation) where possible, and enhances achievement of national food security and development goals.

The climate-smart agriculture concept reflects an ambition to improve the integration of agriculture development and climate responsiveness. It aims to achieve food security and broader development goals under a changing climate and increasing food demand.

CSA initiatives sustainably increase productivity, enhance resilience, and reduce/remove greenhouse gases, and require planning to address tradeoffs and synergies between these three pillars: productivity, adaptation, and mitigation.

While the concept is still evolving, many of the practices that make up CSA already exist worldwide and are used by farmers to cope with various production risks.

Mainstreaming CSA requires critical stocktaking of ongoing and promising practices for the future, and of institutional and financial enablers for CSA adoption.

Maximay said C-SAC is meant to be a prioritizing tool with a holistic interpretation of the perceived benefits of climate-smart agriculture.

“It can be used as a preliminary filter to sort through the number of ‘green-washing’ projects that may get funded under the rubric of climate-smart agriculture…all in a bid to access the millions of dollars that should go to help small and genuinely progressive farmers,” he said.

“C-SAC will provide bankers and project managers with an easy to use tool to ensure funded projects really comply with a broad interpretation of climate smart agriculture.”

Maximay said C-SAC incorporates major categories of compliance and provides a replicable analysis matrix using scalar approaches to convert qualitative assessments into a numeric compliance scale.

“The rapid qualitative analysis at the core of C-SAC depends on interrelated science-based guidelines honed from peer reviewed, field-tested practices and operations,” Maximay explained.

“Climate-smart agriculture often amalgamates activities geared towards adaptation and mitigation. The proliferation of projects claiming to fit the climate smart agriculture designation has highlighted the need for an auditing and certification scheme. One adaptation or mitigation feature may not be enough to qualify an agricultural operation as being climate-smart. Consequently, a more holistic perspective can lead to a determination of the level of compliance with respect to climate-smart agriculture.

“C-SAC provides that holistic perspective based on a structured qualitative assessment of key components,” Maximay added.

The scientist notes that in the midst of increased opportunities for the use of global climate funds, it behooves policymakers and financiers to ensure projects are not crafted in a unidimensional manner.

He added that small farmers in Small Island Developing States are particularly vulnerable and their needs must be met by projects that are holistic in design and implementation.

Over the years, agriculture organisations in the Caribbean have been providing funding to set up climate-smart farms as demonstrations to show farmers examples of ecological practices that they can use to combat many of the conditions that arise due to the heavy rainfall and drought conditions experienced in the region.

Maximay was among the first agricultural scientists addressing climate change concerns during the Caribbean Planning for Adaptation to Climate Change (CPACC).

A plant pathologist by training, he has been a secondary school teacher, development banker, researcher, World Bank-certified training manager, university lecturer, Caribbean Development Bank consultant and entrepreneur.

Maximay managed the first Business Development Office in a Science Faculty within the University of the West Indies. With more than thirty years’ experience in the agricultural, education, health, financial and environmental sectors, he has also worked on development projects for major regional and international agencies.

Sargassum inundates a beach on Barbados. Credit: H. Oxenford/Mission Blue

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Jul 25 2017 (IPS)

As Tobago’s tourism industry struggles to repel the sargassum invasions that have smothered its beaches with massive layers of seaweed as far as the eye can see – in some places half a metre thick – and left residents retching from the stench, the island’s government is working to establish an early warning system that will alert islanders to imminent invasions so they can take defensive action.

The Deputy Director of Trinidad and Tobago’s Institute of Marine Affairs (IMA), Dr. Rahanna Juman, told IPS, “After the 2015 sargassum event, the IMA got stakeholders together and developed a sargassum response plan. We looked at some sort of early warning mechanism [using satellites]. We know that it comes off of the South American mainland. If we know when it is coming and we can forecast which part of the coast it is going to land, we can inform the relevant regional authority so they can put things in place.A particularly heart-rending consequence of the sargassum invasions has been the devastation it causes to turtle nesting sites on the island.

“We have this network set up. We got the Met Services to provide an idea of where [the sargassum] is going to land,” she said.

The 2010-2015 State of the Marine Environment (SOME) report, released in May this year by the IMA, states, “Sargassum invasion of Trinidad and Tobago’s beaches is a relatively novel phenomenon for which we have been largely unprepared for in the past. However, with climate change causing continuous warming of the oceans, it appears that future events are likely.”

The country experienced massive onslaughts of sargassum, a type of seaweed, in 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2015, and some again this year. “Sargassum is a natural phenomenon,” said Dr. Juman, but it was the quantity of the seaweed that stunned the public during these years.

The consequences for Tobago’s tourism industry have been debilitating.

A director on the board of the Tobago Hotel and Tourism Association, Environment Tobago and the Association of Tobago Dive Operators, Wendy Austin, told IPS the first major event for the Tobago tourism industry was in 2015. “People were cancelling their bookings. Visitors were having to move, particularly from the north end of the island. Speyside had it very bad and the smell was awful. The restaurants had to close because people were not coming out to eat.” As the sargassum rotted, it emitted a nauseating stench.

“This year we have been hit fairly hard once again,” Austin added. “Recommendations have been put forward to the Tobago House of Assembly (THA) as to how the situation can be handled environmentally so that tourism would then have fewer problems. However, there is no money to put these recommendations into action.”

The THA reportedly spent approximately 500,000 dollars during one year to clear up the decaying sargassum.

Apart from the tourism industry taking a hit, the country’s marine environment has also been adversely affected .

A particularly heart-rending consequence of the sargassum invasions has been the devastation it causes to turtle nesting sites on the island. The SOME report notes, “Ecologically, both adult and juvenile sea turtles can become entangled in the thick masses.”

Dr. Juman said hatchlings making their way out to sea from Tobago’s shores in 2015 got caught in the mass of sargassum, as well as many leaving the beaches of Trinidad in the northeast after they were hatched. Local media reports earlier this year expressed fears that turtle hatchlings would die because of becoming entangled in the masses of sargassum that washed ashore in April.

Further, “sargassum can smother your coral reef and seagrass, and they can bring in organisms that are not native to [Tobago], so that can have a negative impact on the native species,” said Dr. Juman, who is a wetlands ecologist.

The SOME report notes that the seagrasses which the sargassum destroyed off southwest Tobago are important for the marine environment since they “stabilize bottom sediments, slow current flow, prevent erosion, and filter suspended nutrients and solids from coastal waters.”

In response to this phenomenon, as well as other threats caused by climate change to the nation’s coastlines, the Trinidad and Tobago government has established as a priority of its new Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) policy the objective of maintaining “the diversity, health and productivity of coastal and marine processes and ecosystems”.

Deputy Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Planning Marie Hinds said via e-mail that this objective, the eighth one listed under the ICZM policy, incorporates tackling the sargassum problem.

She said achieving the objective would involve implementing a “programme to manage/control the introduction of alien invasive species into the coastal and marine zones.”

Establishment of an ICZM policy was a requirement of the Inter-American Development Bank for Trinidad and Tobago to access funding to deal with climate change, Hinds added. The ICZM policy will facilitate coordination and cooperation between civil society, government and the private sector in addressing the impacts of climate change.

However, there is still relatively little research data on which to base decision-making and management of the sargassum problem because it is such a new phenomenon, said Dr. Juman.

Among the proposals for disposing of the sargassum is to transform it into a biogas. But, “if you are going to invest in some sort of industry…you have to have a known quantity, you need to know how much, you need to have a consistent supply.

“You also need research to quantify such an industry’s impact on the fishing and shipping industry, as well as tourism. We do not have that kind of data,” said Dr. Juman. “Having the research and knowing how to treat with it so we can be proactive not reactive,” she said, was important for the IMA in finding solutions to the sargassum problem.

CNG fuel signs at the NP Ramco service station, on the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway, Orange Grove, Trinidad. Credit: Jewel Fraser/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Mar 26 2017 (IPS)

The Trinidad and Tobago government has invested about 74 million dollars in the first phase of a 295-million-dollar project to encourage more drivers to use Compressed Natural Gas (CNG), described by experts here as a preliminary step in the country’s transition to using more sustainable forms of energy.

Use of CNG would represent a major behavioural shift for Trinidadians and Tobagonians whose country’s economy has relied heavily on exports of major fossil fuel reserves, giving it one of the highest per capita incomes in Caricom as well as placing it among the top ten emitters of carbon per capita in the world.The economic downturn has made maintaining generous fossil fuel subsidies an unsustainable proposition.

The shift to CNG “starts a certain behaviour because [CNG] is the cleanest fuel Trinidad and Tobago has which is affordable,” said the president of NGC-CNG, Curtis Mohammed.

In 2013, the government mandated the National Gas Company (NGC) to promote the sale and use of CNG. NGC formed NGC-CNG in January 2014 to carry out the mandate. In keeping with its mandate NGC-CNG has offered substantial incentives to both public and private vehicle owners to retrofit their vehicles for the use of CNG, including thousands of dollars in free CNG to school buses and taxis. The government has also given substantial tax incentives to buyers of CNG-fuelled vehicles.

Mohammed said the Public Transport Service Corporation (PTSC), which is Trinidad and Tobago’s government-run bus service, has plans to eventually convert its entire fleet to CNG vehicles. The country’s Finance Minister Colm Imbert in his 2016-2017 Budget report also said that the association representing the privately owned public service vehicles, known as maxi taxis, has committed to introducing approximately 1,200 OEM CNG vehicles over the next three years.

However, “while CNG offers a cheaper and cleaner option for transportation fuel, it is to be recognized that it is a transitionary fuel and the deployment of renewable energy sources are more sustainable…the 10% renewable energy target signals Government’s intention to gradually move away from traditional fuels to more sustainable sources,” explained head of the Multilateral Environmental Agreements Unit, in Trinidad and Tobago’s Ministry of Planning and Development, Kishan Kumarsingh, in an e-mail interview.

Though CNG has been an option under consideration for many years, a combination of factors over the past couple of years has increased interest among citizens in shifting from heavy domestic use of fossil fuels to the use of CNG for transport and eventually to renewables.

The government had for decades provided generous fuel subsidies that made owning and driving a vehicle in the country affordable for a large portion of its population. However, the government saw its revenues decline by 35 per cent between 2014 and 2016, that is, from 8.4 billion dollars in 2014 to 5.5 billion in 2016.

“Because of the collapse in oil and gas prices, we have lost 20 billion in annual revenue since 2014,” Minister Imbert was reported as saying in his 2016-2017 budget speech.

Thus, the economic downturn has made maintaining the generous fuel subsidies an unsustainable proposition and the government has gradually removed most of them.

Retrofitting to use CNG is a cheaper alternative for drivers who travel substantial distances. CNG retails at 15 cents per litre, compared to 46 cents per litre for super gasoline, 85 cents per litre for premium and 25 cents per litre for diesel. The government still subsidises the price of diesel which is used by public transport.

Another factor is Trinidad and Tobago’s active engagement over the years in initiatives to combat climate change, with the country being a signatory to the 2015 COP21 Paris agreement.

“The country has adopted a National Climate Change Policy and is currently implementing a range of projects aimed at addressing climate change nationally such as reducing emissions and assessing climate vulnerability. Trinidad and Tobago has taken a proactive approach and was the first Caribbean country to submit its NDC [Nationally Determined Contributions] to the UN as well as among the first countries to formulate and adopt a National Climate Change Policy,” Kumarsingh said in an e-mail.

Included in government’s plans are “a feed-in-tariff to allow for renewable energy to be generated and to be fed into the national power grid,” he said. However, “the current legislative and policy structure limits the wide deployment of renewable energy mainly due to very old legislation.”

Kumarsingh said, “As a first step, the enabling environment from a policy and legislative perspective has to be in place. Once that policy and legislative framework is established, opportunities for installation of generation capacity from renewable energy sources, and therefore opportunities for job creation and income generation, can be more fully explored.”

The members of the Energy Chamber, representing more than 400 gas and petrochemical industry companies in Trinidad and Tobago, also see opportunities opening up with the removal of the fuel subsidy. Dr. Thackwray Driver, CEO of the Energy Chamber said, “You would see opportunities for electric vehicles as well. Trinidad’s electricity is very cheap…Because of the decreasing price of renewable energy we might reach a point where…electricity vehicles would be more attractive.”

He said there was “a lot of interest” in energy efficiency and renewable energy among Energy Chamber members.

Dr Driver said the Chamber had always advocated for the removal of subsidies because they encouraged “wasteful use of valuable resources which could be sold on international markets…In other countries you see people are less wasteful in using fuel. When there are higher prices to pay for it, they buy cars that are more fuel efficient, they tend to make more fuel-efficient decisions. People in Trinidad do not worry about fuel efficiency.”

With regard to renewables becoming a major source of energy locally, Dr Driver said, “I think given the structure of Trinidad and Tobago’s economy, it will remain relatively small for the next decade:” He added that the domestic sector was likely to see a 10-15 per cent uptake of renewables in the next decade or two.

Meanwhile, “I think right now the biggest interest is in energy efficiency, because there is a huge opportunity in the electricity sector to improve energy efficiency…Once we get energy efficiency up that is where we will see the deployment of grid-scale renewable energy,” Dr. Driver said.

Feast or famine: Just three years ago, flooding in Trinidad's capital of Port of Spain left residents little choice but to wade through the deluge. But lately drought has become a problem in the dry season. Credit: Peter Richards/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Jun 23 2015 (IPS)

Starting in 1999, the Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA) of Trinidad and Tobago began a 10-year effort to map the country’s water quality. They started to notice a worrying trend.

The watersheds in the western region of Trinidad had progressed from being of moderate quality in some places to being outright bad. By 2010, a survey of the country showed more than 20 per cent of the watersheds were in serious trouble.“By adopting these ecological measures to protect our river water supplies, we can reduce the need for more energy intensive and more costly measures of obtaining water such as desalination.” -- Dr. Natalie Boodram

“We have raised the alarm bell,” said senior hydrologist David Samm. ”WASA is concerned.”

WASA received a lot of bad press during the recently concluded dry season. Residents whose communities were roiled with protests almost weekly over lack of access to potable water vehemently criticised the agency while waving placards and publicly burning tyres.

WASA is the designated body responsible for all of Trinidad and Tobago’s water sources and supply.

But factors beyond its control, like climate change and climate variability, are significant contributors to the crisis.

“During the dry season we would have longer droughts so we will not have as much water for groundwater recharge,” explained Samm, adding, “there is more intense rainfall for a given time period and because of continued development we have more flooding problems during the rainy season.”

That has resulted in more surface runoff “and that water is being flushed through the watercourses and out to sea. Therefore, we have less recharge of our groundwater systems,” he explained.

He told IPS that 60 per cent of Trinidad and Tobago’s potable water comes from surface water sources.

There has also been major housing construction along the east-west corridor of Trinidad, he pointed out. “With climate change and the increase in impervious cover (due to urbanisation) the recharge of our groundwater system will be reduced,” Samm said. As well, “with urban growth, you see garbage in the rivers – refrigerators.”

The authority decided it needed to act to protect the health of the watersheds on which its water supply depends. It introduced the Adopt-A-River programme in the summer of 2013. Since its rollout, several of the country’s rivers have been adopted, including six of the most important, and there are 175 citizens working with the Adopt-A-River programme.

Though river adoption programmes are known in several states in the U.S., the programme in Trinidad and Tobago is among the first for the Caribbean.

WASA’s decision to focus on preserving ecosystems was a forward-looking approach to the issue of sustainably ensuring access to potable water for all, as evident from observations made in the Executive Summary of the United Nations World Water Development Report 2015. Commenting on the water situation worldwide the report states the following:

“Most economic models do not value the essential services provided by freshwater ecosystems, often leading to unsustainable use of water resources and ecosystem degradation. Pollution from untreated residential and industrial wastewater and agricultural run-off also weakens the capacity of ecosystems to provide water-related services.

“Ecosystems across the world, particularly wetlands, are in decline. Ecosystem services remain under-valued, under-recognized and under-utilized within most current economic and resource management approaches. A more holistic focus on ecosystems for water and development that maintains a beneficial mix between built and natural infrastructure can ensure that benefits are maximized.”

In keeping with the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals’ focus on reducing poverty and environmental degradation by helping communities to help themselves, the UNDP provided funds for one of Trinidad and Tobago’s Adopt-A-River participants

Through its Global Environment Facility’s Small Grants Programme (SGP), the UNDP provides funds and technical support to civil society organisations working on “projects that conserve and restore the environment while enhancing people’s well-being and livelihoods at the community level.”

The Social Justice Foundation, which works in underdeveloped areas of Central and South Trinidad, received funding of just under 50,000 dollars from the SGP, which it matched with 65,000 dollars of its own money to sponsor an Adopt-A-River programme involving at-risk and disadvantaged youths in the communities of Siparia and Carlsen Field.

The programme ran for nine months from September 2014 to June 2015, during which time young people have been trained as eco-leaders and taught skills in water testing to monitor the health of the rivers in their communities, using La Motte test kits, as well as video production to record the work done.

They learned how to test for temperature, pH, alkalinity, turbidity, dissolved oxygen, phosphate and nitrate and to record the changes in these parameters over the nine months of the project.

Mark Rampersad, administrative manager at the Social Justice Foundation, told IPS that WASA’s Adopt-a-River unit “further refined the project’s scope and depth as well as facilitating the various seminars and workshops, which featured environmental awareness.”

The Caparo River in Central Trinidad and Coora River in South Trinidad were the two rivers adopted by the Social Justice Foundation for their Adopt-A-River initiative.

Though the programme has enjoyed some favourable response from communities and schools, corporate support for the programme has not been as great as the Adopt-A-River unit would have liked. However, Samm said, the unit has been successful in its Green Fund application and will be furthering its community outreach with the funds awarded.

Preserving the health of the rivers was also based on financial considerations, said Raj Gosine, WASA’s head of Water Resources. “It is very expensive to treat poor water quality, so WASA’s motive was also financial.”

“The key thing is to stress that we can all make a positive contribution,” Gosine added.

Along with water quality monitoring and public education, WASA’s Adopt-A-River programme includes reforestation and forest rehabilitation, as well as clean-up exercises.

Global Water Partnership-Caribbean’s Programme Manager Dr. Natalie Boodram told IPS, “Programmes like Adopt-A-River which encourage reforestation of watershed and riparian zones (i.e., areas along the bank of a river or watercourse) help protect water supplies by encouraging water infiltration as opposed to surface runoff.

“By adopting these ecological measures to protect our river water supplies, we can reduce the need for more energy intensive and more costly measures of obtaining water such as desalination.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

From Brown to Green Again, Trinidadians Reclaim a Forest

By Desmond Brown
FONDES AMANDES, Trinidad, Feb 25 2015 (IPS)

Thanks to committed involvement by the local community, the Fondes Amandes Community Reforestation Project has transformed this area of Trinidad from a bare, dusty hillside to one where tall trees flourish, fruit trees grow alongside flowering plants, and more wildlife returns each year.

A worker at Fondes Amandes demonstrates the building of fire traces. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
FONDES AMANDES, Trinidad, Feb 18 2015 (IPS)

Not far above Trinidad’s capital, Port-of-Spain, in a corner of the St. Ann’s valley in the Northern Range, the community of Fondes Amandes has come together since 1982 to respond to climate change.

For several years, bush fires reduced their forested surroundings to burned grass and charred tree stumps.

Locals have also witnessed increased rainfall in the area, in which the rainy season has encroached on the dry.

Akilah Jaramogi, who started the Fondes Amandes Community Reforestation Project (FACRP) 32 years ago with her now deceased husband, told IPS they have managed to reclaim and revive the forest and river.

“Coming to Fondes Amandes in the early 1980’s I was really happy to be part of this watershed, but that was only in the rainy season. In the rainy season the place would be really green and nice, but come dry season it was a different story,” Jaramogi told IPS.

“The place would turn brown, then from brown it would turn grey, and then bright fires in the night; the hillsides burn up and that was the whole issue. The trend at Fondes Amandes here, forest fires during the dry season and floods around the watershed during the rainy season. So for me, coming from a rural community in south Trinidad it was something strange to me…it was heartbreaking.”

The Fondes Amandes Community Reforestation Project has transformed the area from a bare, dusty hillside to one where tall trees flourish, fruit trees grow alongside flowering plants, and more wildlife returns each year.

And not since 1997 has a bush fire broached the system of fire traces and quick community action developed to protect the watershed.

Jaramogi said climate change is a reality for the community, and the change has affected the quality and yield of fruit trees. She noted the impact on citrus, mangoes and avocados. She said it makes sense for individuals and communities to be prepared.

“Over the years I’ve noticed drastic changes in the weather pattern. We no longer have a dry season or a rainy season, so for the past years we have had extremely dry weather conditions. This year we had a really long dry season that resulted in tremendous forest fires around Trinidad and Tobago,” Jaramogi explained.

She said one of the reasons for the longevity and success of FACRP is the involvement of the community.

“In spite of all the challenges, we are able to keep on going because we are community-based. Most of the members are from right here, and there is a sense of ownership – pride in our natural environment. That is what also attracts our supporters to continue to keep up their relationship with Fondes Amandes. With or without funding, they come out to deal with what has to be done.”

Akilah’s daughter, Kemba Jaramogi, also gives support to the Project. She is a trained firefighter and dedicated protector of the forests.

She explained that although fires sometimes burn outside of FACRP’s reforestation project area, this does not deter its volunteers from fighting them, even if it means trekking two hours to the fire site.

She outlined some of the challenges facing FACRP and mentioned a few simple things that could help contain fires before they get out of hand.

“First, there needs to be better coordination between the firefighting units of the Forestry Division, National Reforestation groups and forestry NGOs. Second, these groups need access to better equipment,” she said.

“FACRP, for instance, lacks basic bushfire fighting equipment like Back Pack Fire Pumps. These are water tanks with a pump that can be strapped to a firefighter’s back. Thirdly, the National Security helicopters have been fighting fires from the air with Bambi Buckets (specialised buckets which carry water suspended by cable from the helicopter), but this is often done when the fires are already out of control.”

“A more effective use of this air power would be to equip the choppers so that firefighting crews can be dropped near remote fires while they are still manageable, much like the equipment afforded to smokejumpers.”

A smokejumper is a firefighter that parachutes into a remote area to combat wildfires. Smokejumpers are most often deployed to fires that are extremely remote.

“A fourth solution could involve training and employing the T&T Regiment to fight fires during fire season,” she added.

In Trinidad and Tobago, it is illegal to light fires outdoor during the dry season.

Kemba Jaramogi said that despite Trinidad and Tobago’s oil wealth, the country does not have a working national action plan for fighting forest fires, i.e. trained personnel with equipment and protective gear and a proper pay package with health insurance – due to the risky nature of the job.

She wants the authorities to explore options for a forest and bush fires action plan, noting that “we cannot wait until the hills are all degraded in the dry season and eroded in the rainy season to realise the importance of our forests.”

The FACRP is currently funded by the Trinidad and Tobago government though its Green Fund. Other partners include several state agencies: the Water and Sewerage Authority, the Forestry Division of the Ministry of Housing and the Environment, and the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Management.

Support also comes from the Caribbean Natural Resources Institute (CANARI) and the Global Water Partnership–Caribbean (GWP-C).

Gabrielle Lee Look, Communications Officer for the GWP-C told IPS, “Since our partnership with them, not only have they been active, but we have been able to collaborate with them in different ways like the rainwater harvesting system that’s actually on the compound here that supports the project when they have very limited water is something that we take pride in and we’ll continue to support Fondes Amandes in terms of their activities.”

The Project has won several awards, including the Humming Bird Medal national award in 2007, recognising FACRP’s national service in the sphere of environmental conservation. FACRP has also won the Green Leaf Award, Trinidad and Tobago’s highest environmental honour, and was named by CANARI as a model for community forestry throughout the Caribbean.

Contact Desmond Brown on Twitter @BrownBerry2013

Edited by Roger Hamilton-Martin

Members of the Caribbean Youth Environment Network (CEYN) clean debris from a river in Trinidad. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
PORT OF SPAIN, Jan 19 2015 (IPS)

At 24 years old, Stefan Knights has never been on the side of those who are sceptical about the reality and severity of climate change.

A Guyana native who moved to Trinidad in September 2013 to pursue his law degree at the Hugh Wooding Law School, Knights told IPS that his first-hand experience of extreme weather has strengthened his resolve to educate his peers about climate change “so that they do certain things that would reduce emissions.”“Notwithstanding our minor contribution to this global problem we are taking a proactive approach, guided by the recognition of our vulnerability and the tremendous responsibility to safeguard the future of our people." -- Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Dookeran

Knights recalled his first week in Trinidad, when he returned to his apartment to find “the television was floating, the refrigerator was floating and all my clothes were soaked” after intense rainfall which did not last more than an hour.

“When we have the floods, the droughts or even the hurricanes, water supply is affected, people lose jobs, people lose their houses and the corollary of that is that the right to water is affected, the right to housing, the right to employment and even sometimes the right to life,” Knights told IPS.

“I am a big advocate where human rights are concerned and I see climate change as having a significant impact on Caribbean people where human rights are concerned,” he said.

Knights laments that young people from the Caribbean and Latin America are not given adequate opportunities to participate in the major international meetings, several of which are held each year, to deal with climate change.

“These people are affected more than anybody else but when such meetings are held, in terms of youth representation, you find very few young people from these areas,” he said.

Youth climate activist Stefan Knights. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

“Also, the countries that are not independent within Latin America and the Caribbean, like Puerto Rico which is still a territory of the United States, Montserrat, the British and U.S. Virgin Islands, the voices of those people are not heard in those rooms because they are still colonies.”

Knights, who is also an active member of the Caribbean Youth Environment Network (CYEN), said young people are ready to lead.

“They are taking the lead around the world in providing solutions to challenges in the field of sustainable development,” he explained.

“For instance, CYEN has been conducting research and educating society on integrated water resources management, focusing particularly on the linkages between climate change, biodiversity loss and unregulated waste disposal.”

CYEN has been formally recognised by the Global Water Partnership (GWP) as one of its Most Outstanding Partners in the Caribbean.

As recently as December 2014, several members of CYEN from across the Caribbean participated in a Global Water Partnership-Caribbean (GWP-C) Media Workshop on Water Security and Climate Resilience held here.

CYEN has been actively involved in policy meetings on water resources management and has conducted practical community-based activities in collaboration with local authorities.

CYEN National Coordinator Rianna Gonzales told IPS that one way in which young people in Trinidad and Tobago are getting involved in helping to combat climate change and build resilience is through the Adopt a River (AAR) Programme, administered by the National Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA).

“This is an initiative to involve the community and corporate entities in the improvement of watersheds in Trinidad and Tobago in a sustainable, holistic and coordinated manner,” Gonzales said.

“The aim of the AAR programme is to build awareness on local watershed issues and to facilitate the participation of public and private sector entities in sustainable and holistic projects aimed at improving the status of rivers and watersheds in Trinidad and Tobago.”

Most of Trinidad and Tobago’s potable water supply (60 per cent) comes from surface water sources such as rivers and streams, and total water demand is expected to almost double between 1997 and 2025.

With climate change predictions indicating that Trinidad and Tobago will become hotter and drier, in 2010, the estimated water availability for the country was 1477 m3 per year, which is a decrease of 1000 m3 per year from 1998.

Deforestation for housing, agriculture, quarrying and road-building has also increased the incidence of siltation of rivers and severe flooding.

“The challenge of water in Trinidad and Tobago is one of both quality and quantity,” Gonzales said.

“Our vital water supply is being threatened by industrial, agricultural and residential activities. Indiscriminate discharge of industrial waste into waterways, over-pumping of groundwater sources and pollution of rivers by domestic and commercial waste are adversely affecting the sustainability of our water resources.

“There is therefore an urgent need for a more coordinated approach to protecting and managing our most critical and finite resource – water,” she added.

Trinidad and Tobago’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Dookeran said there is an urgent need to protect human dignity and alleviate the sufferings of people because of climate change.

“We know that the urgency is now. Business as usual is not enough. We are not on track to meet our agreed 2.0 or 1.5 degree Celsius objective for limiting the increase in average global temperatures, so urgent and ambitious actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere is absolutely necessary,” he told IPS.

Dookeran added that “there is no excuse not to act” since economically viable and technologically feasible options already exist to significantly enhance efforts to address climate change.

“Even with a less than two degrees increase in average global temperatures above pre-industrial levels, small island states like Trinidad and Tobago are already experiencing more frequent and more intense weather events as a result of climate change,” Dookeran said.

The foreign affairs minister said residents can look forward to even more mitigation measures that will take place in the first quarter of this year with respect to the intended nationally determined contributions for mitigation.

“Notwithstanding our minor contribution to this global problem we are taking a proactive approach, guided by the recognition of our vulnerability and the tremendous responsibility to safeguard the future of our people,” he said.

“Trinidad and Tobago has made important inroads in dealing with the problem as we attempt to ensure that climate change is central to our development. As we prepare our economy for the transition to low carbon development and as we commit ourselves to carbon neutrality, the government of Trinidad and Tobago is working assiduously towards expanding the use of renewable energy in the national energy mix,” he added.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at destinydlb@gmail.com

Aerial view of a makeshift camp in Port-au-Prince. Apart from reports of cholera being introduced into Haiti by Nepalese peacekeepers following the 2010 earthquake, environmental problems were created by the distribution of tens of thousands of non-biodegradable tarpaulin tents which needed to be replaced every few months. Credit: UN Photo/Marco Dormino

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Oct 7 2014 (IPS)

Relief work done by emergency responders during natural disasters may inadvertently exacerbate problems caused by climate change and lead to further disasters, recent reports suggest.

When heavy rains caused nearly 20 million dollars in losses in Diego Martin, western Trinidad, in 2012, emergency responders moved rapidly to provide relief to affected residents, some of whom lost their homes.An estimated 50,000 trees would be needed to offset the carbon emissions from Haiti's discarded tents if they were left in landfills.

However, just under two weeks later, Diego Martin was again inundated, this time due to a tropical storm.

A newly released report by the Trinidad and Tobago Red Cross Society (TTRCS) raises the possibility that the second flooding may have partly been due to the relief work done by the emergency responders.

The report states “after the first flooding incident water supplies were distributed in individual disposable, non-biodegradable vessels such as plastic bottles and food supplies were distributed with plastic utensils.

“In addition to the intense rainfall, one of the major contributing factors to the Diego Martin flooding was the clogging of waterways. Waste collection services immediately following the disaster were restricted… Use of [eco-friendly, biodegradable] materials could have helped negate the possibility of flooding.”

The TTRCS’ report, entitled “Green Response: A Country Study”, was presented by the head of Trinidad and Tobago’s Office of Disaster Preparedness and Management (ODPM) to a recent meeting of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS).

It was prepared following a feasibility study “on how to reduce, in a sustainable way, the environmental impact of the products and technologies used in response to and recovery from disasters.”

Trinidad and Tobago decided to undertake the study following an ACS meeting in 2011 where the issue of greening the region’s responses to natural disasters was raised for consideration.

Greening disaster relief efforts has become a major concern internationally, since as the Green Recovery and Reconstruction Toolkit notes, while “DRR (Disaster Risk Reduction) seeks to reduce the risk of harm from disasters… the implementation of activities defined by disaster risk assessments, or by interventions presumed to reduce risk, itself has a risk of doing harm if the activities do not address environmental sustainability.”

Hence, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) report notes that organisations heavily involved in such work are “considering both current and future disaster and climate change risks and including various measures to address them, in recovery programming.”

The need for such considerations was particularly evident in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake that took more than 200,000 lives.

Apart from reports of cholera being introduced into Haiti by Nepalese peacekeepers who were deployed to help in recovery efforts following the earthquake, there was also the environmental problem created by the distribution of tens of thousands of non-biodegradable tarpaulin tents which needed to be replaced every few months.

The IFRC Practice Note Report on Haiti notes that 50,000 trees would be needed to offset the carbon emissions from the discarded tents if these were left in landfills.

“The key issue,” said ACS’s director of Transport and Disaster Risk Reduction, George Nicholson, “is having to find a way to ensure that regardless of the things we do, whether work activities or specific activities for disaster response, to ensure that the things have the least impact on the environment.”

The Trinidad and Tobago government is committed to incorporating climate change and  environmental considerations into all its programmes. So when the question of a green response to disaster management came up for consideration at the ACS, the country offered to do the feasibility study for what has been dubbed the Green Response.

The ACS has worked with the ODPM, which has lead responsibility for the initiative in the country, the IFRC, and the TTRCS on the study.

Nicholson said that pursuant to the study’s findings, other ACS member countries “may look to see what was done by Trinidad and Tobago and then adapt or adopt their mechanisms.”

TTRCS’ Stephan Kishore said greening disaster relief efforts would involve activities such as locally manufacturing and pre-positioning relief supplies, so as to reduce the carbon footprint involved in shipping items from China, where most of the country’s relief supplies now come from.

It would also involve simple procedures such as using paper, cloth, or buckets rather than plastic to wrap relief supplies, and wrapping items, like soap, in bulk rather than in individual wrappings. Further, green relief efforts would encourage recycling of items and use of solar energy rather than fossil fuels.

However, a major consideration in greening disaster relief efforts is the legislative framework governing disaster relief organisations. Nicholson said the feasibility study looks at Trinidad and Tobago’s “legislative processes, its operational systems to see where you can get benefits out of being more green in your approach.”

But introducing legislation that would green disaster relief efforts will not be easy, Kishore said. “To get legislation passed for any response is very difficult. The whole process of getting legislation is very difficult,” he said.

Further complicating matters, Nicholson said, is that the ACS’ members states operate under several different legislative frameworks since the countries include Dutch, French, Spanish, and English-speaking countries with different legal traditions.

“All of them have totally different legislative environments, so you cannot write one thing and say we can establish best practices. Countries will look at that checklist of best practices [from the study] and see how best they can adopt their own environment to suit.”

With the feasibility study phase complete, the next stage of the Green Response is to identify or develop green disaster response processes and products from the region, which may include encouraging local manufacturers to begin producing recyclable items that can be used during a natural disaster.

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at jwl_42@yahoo.com

Ruth Osman, a 35-year-old Guyanese migrant living in Trinidad and Tobago, is one of thousands of women to have taken advantage of CARICOM’s migration scheme for skilled workers. Courtesy of Ruth Osman

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Sep 25 2014 (IPS)

Ruth Osman is attractive and well-groomed in tailored slacks and a patterned blouse, topped by a soft jacket worn open. Her demeanour and polished accent belie the stereotypical view that most Caribbean nationals have of Guyanese migrants.

As a Guyanese migrant living in Trinidad, the 35-year-old is one of thousands of Guyanese to have taken the plunge over the past decade, since the free movement clause of the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME) regime granted skilled persons the right to move and work freely throughout the region.

According to a recent report, Trinidad and Tobago hosts 35.4 percent of migrants in the region. The United Nations’ ‘Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2013 Revision’ states that Latin America and the Caribbean host a total migrant stock of 8.5 million people.

“Although, historically it is persons at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale in Caribbean society that have been the main movers, the CSME has to date facilitated the movement of those at the upper end, the educated elite in the region.” -- CARICOM Secretariat Report, 2010
Women make up 51.6 percent of migrants in the Caribbean, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)’s 2013 figures.

For many Guyanese, the decision to move on the strength of promises made by Caribbean Community (CARICOM) governments to facilitate free movement of skilled labour within the region has met with mixed degrees of success and, in some cases, outright harassment and even threats of deportation from the Caribbean countries to which they have migrated.

A 2013 report by the ACP Observatory on Migration states, “Guyanese migrants in Trinidad and Tobago faced unfavourable opinions in the social psyche and this could translate into tacit and other forms of discrimination.”

The report, prepared by the regional consulting firm Kairi Consultants, goes on to state that migrants from Guyana were “assumed to be menial labourers or undocumented workers.”

Guyana is one of the poorest countries in the CARICOM region, with a gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of 6,053 dollars in 2011. This stands in contrast to Trinidad and Tobago’s per-capita GDP of 29,000 dollars, according to the 2010-2011 U.N. Human Development Report (HDR).

But Osman’s background is not one of destitution. She applied for a CARICOM skills certificate in 2005, having completed a postgraduate diploma in Arts and Cultural Enterprise Management (ACEM) at the St. Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Trinidad.

“I considered myself an artist, which is why I came to study here [for the ACEM] and I thought it a great stepping stone in my realising that dream of being a singer, songwriter, performer […]. Trinidad seems to be, in relation to where I came from, a more fertile ground for [what] I wanted to do,” she said.

Osman has her own band and performs as a jazz singer at nightspots in Trinidad and Tobago. During the day, she works as a speechwriter for Trinidad and Tobago’s Minister of Public Utilities.

Still, she misses the support network that her parents’ substantial contacts would have provided her in Guyana, and she acknowledges that her standard of living is also probably lower than it would have been if she were back home. But, she said, the move was necessary.

Osman’s story is in line with the findings of a 2010 CARICOM Secretariat report to “assess the impact of free movement of persons and other forms of migration on member states”, which found: “Although, historically it is persons at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale in Caribbean society that have been the main movers, the CSME has to date facilitated the movement of those at the upper end, the educated elite in the region.”

Limited educational opportunities also explain the wave of migration out of Guyana, a finding borne out by the experience of Miranda La Rose, a senior reporter with one of Trinidad and Tobago’s leading newspapers, ‘Newsday’, who holds a Bachelor’s degree in political science.

“I came here with the intention of working to help fund [my daughter’s] studies,” La Rose told IPS. “I was working for a fairly good salary in Guyana. My objective [in moving to Trinidad] was to improve my children’s education.”

She said the move to Trinidad was painless, since she was granted her CARICOM skills certificate within three weeks of applying, and she has amassed a circle of friends in Trinidad that compensates for the family she left behind in Guyana.

But not all stories of migration are happy ones. Some, like Alisa Collymore, represent the pains experienced by those with limited skills and qualifications.

Collymore, who now works as a nursing assistant with a family in Trinidad, applied for a CARICOM skills certificate under the entertainer category, because she had experience in songwriting and performing in Guyana.

However, she holds no tertiary qualifications in the field and only completed her secondary school education after she became an adult.

The Trinidadian authorities declined to grant her the CARICOM skills certificate and she has to apply for a renewal of her work permit every six months.

She said, “The treatment you get [is not what you] expected […] and the hand of brotherhood is not really extended. You feel like you are an outsider.”

Nevertheless, she said, the move has brought economic benefits. As a single, divorced, mother of three, she had struggled financially in Guyana. Since moving to Trinidad, her financial situation has improved, she said.

Though some studies have found negative impacts of the free skills movement on source countries, many are finding in the CARICOM scheme a chance to start a new – and often better – life.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

This story originally appeared in a special edition TerraViva, ‘ICPD@20: Tracking Progress, Exploring Potential for Post-2015’, published with the support of UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund. The contents are the independent work of reporters and authors.

Tourists prepare to board boats run by reef operators at Tobago's Store Bay beach, to take a trip to the world famous Buccoo Reef. Credit: Jewel Fraser/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
SCARBOROUGH, Jun 5 2014 (IPS)

An initiative to reduce the carbon footprint of Tobago’s tourism sector may be stymied by “bread-and-butter issues” and the failure of government authorities to vigorously pursue the initiative.

In 2012, the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) completed a pilot project for the Caribbean Carbon Neutral Tourism Programme (CCNTP) in four Caribbean countries, including Tobago, with the aim of enhancing the tourism sector’s resilience to climate change,

However, the initiative in Tobago has borne little fruit, with some who work in the sector saying they learned about the programme only from media reports.

Tourism is a vital part of Tobago’s life and economy, with reports stating that tourism provides more than 40 percent of Tobago’s employment and 90 percent of its export earnings.As it is now, everybody is going about business as usual. [Reducing carbon emissions] is not much of a concern. The greater concern is bread and butter issues." -- Dexter Black, president of the Reef Tour Operators

As such, tourism plays an important role in the island’s viability.

The tourism sector was the focus of the carbon neutral programme by the CCCCC “because of its economic importance to many of the Caribbean countries. The methodologies and lessons learnt under the program would be able to be applied not only to the tourism sectors of other countries but also to the other economic sectors,” the CCNTP project manager Earl Green told IPS.

“The specific objectives [of the carbon neutral programme] were to devise ways of attracting new sources of financing for (1) the scaling-up of low carbon investments in the tourism sector; and (2) reducing the sector’s vulnerability to climate change,” according to Green.

The initial phase of the CCNTP focused on assessing the carbon footprint of the tourism sector in four islands — the Bahamas, Belize, Barbados and Tobago. With that in mind, an online carbon footprint assessment tool was created that would allow persons working in the tourism sector in those islands to analyse how much carbon emissions their business was producing.

The Bahamas and Belize have since chosen to move forward to the next stage of the carbon neutral tourism programme. Green said that the Bahamas and Belize wish to make its tourism destinations, Harbour Island and Caye Caulker, “carbon neutral islands.”

On the other hand, according to an e-mailed response to IPS by Patricia Turpin, Honorary Director – Environment, for the Tobago Hotel and Tourism Association, “The Tobago House of Assembly – Division of Tourism has not shown any commitment to a low carbon footprint.”

Turpin added that it would be left up to the private sector and NGOs to move forward with any carbon neutral tourism programme in Tobago.

Alvin Benjamin, a taxi driver operating in Tobago’s tourism industry, told IPS that he heard about the carbon neutral programme “only on the radio.” “I think it was a good idea, but I still was waiting to see what would be the outcome.”

He and Victor Emily, who founded the Royal Taxi service, said that some of the recommendations from the CCNTP were not feasible in Tobago.

One of the recommendations coming out of the CCNTP was the “structuring of operations in land based tours, whereby operators collaborate to share vehicles and associated costs [which] allows for a reduced number of trips of vehicles and also helps to reduce the environmental impact on the local destinations [which may be protected areas, eco-sensitive areas etc.].”

The report added, “This mode of operations is being piloted in islands like Tobago, and is currently in use in more established destinations like Miami.”

Emily told IPS that many taxi drivers work for themselves. “It’s not a case where taxi drivers are working for a company and they get a salary. You have to make your money so that pooling in the transporting of tourists would be a no-no.”

Echoing similar concerns, Dexter Black, president of the Reef Tour Operators, told IPS: “People want to work by themselves.”

Black said he believes that “if everyone works together in a rotational system they could be allocated passengers,” instead of boats going out to Buccoo Reef without a full complement of passengers. “You could allocate passengers on a rotation basis where you have less boats going out. Instead of 10 boats you have three or four going and you will still have operators making more money because they have more passengers per trip.”

“As it is now, everybody is going about business as usual. [Reducing carbon emissions] is not much of a concern. The greater concern is bread and butter issues. But if people are sensitised and educated, they will respond. People are always willing to learn.”

Black said retrofitting of the boats used by operators for greater fuel efficiency, another recommendation of the CCNTP report, is indeed an option. He said he downsized the engine on his boat from a 75 hp to a 55 hp engine, “which burns half the amount of fuel” and takes just about two minutes longer to get from Store Bay to Buccoo Reef.

Black said that protecting Tobago’s environment “is very important, because Tobago promotes itself as an eco-friendly destination. We should strive to preserve what we have by producing fewer emissions.” However, he said, it was up to the island authorities to take the initiative on the matter, “so that everyone will fall in place.”

Gerard Alleng, an official of the IDB, which funded the pilot project of the CCNTP, told IPS that the programme would be helpful to islands when it came to branding their product.

“We are in a competitive environment and there is a lot of interest now by clients of tourism to be more conscious of the environment. If islands are able to transform their sector to a low-carbon sector, they would be able to attract those clients who are concerned about the carbon footprint, about climate change, about their impact on the environment.”

He said the carbon footprint assessment tool “was a way of giving these islands a tool they could use to move in that direction.”

There is also the issue of energy security, Alleng said. Since energy prices are high in the Caribbean, a low-carbon, more energy efficient tourism sector would bring “significant economic benefits.”

Erle Rahaman-Noronha cutting produce on his farm. Credit: Mark Olalde/IPS

By Mark Olalde
FREEPORT, Trinidad and Tobago, May 22 2014 (IPS)

Erle Rahaman-Noronha is not a revolutionary, not in any radical sense at least. He is not even that exciting. In truth, Rahaman-Noronha is merely a man with a shovel, a small farm, and a big dream. But that dream is poised to conquer the Caribbean.

Rahaman-Noronha wants to see ‘permaculture’ – short for permanent agriculture – take root and spreads across the Caribbean, and he is doing his part by teaching anyone who will listen about its benefits.

Joining him is a fluid group of permaculturalists working from their home islands and sharing the same goal: to harness permaculture as a solution to climate change, food and water insecurity, and rising costs of living.

“You can start in your backyard, so there’s no cost. You can implement certain parts of it in your apartment...If you have a porch with some sunlight, you can plant something there and start thinking about permaculture.” -- Erle Rahaman-Noronha, Kenyan-born permaculturalist.
“Here, this is the Bible,” Rahaman-Noronha tells IPS, laying a book on the table. Behind him, orange trees rustle in the wind, the sharp smell of Trinidadian cooking wafts out an open window, and white-faced capuchin monkeys screech in the distance. The cover reads, ‘Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual’, and the contents offer surprisingly simple solutions to modern problems through economically and environmentally sustainable living.

Author of the manual, Australian Bill Mollison, first used the term nearly four decades ago and since then the idea has spread to Europe and the U.S. Now, the developing Caribbean is beginning to embrace the philosophy of permaculture, especially since 2008’s global recession.

Born in Kenya, Rahaman-Noronha – whose work was recently highlighted in a TEDx talk – fulfilled a keen interest in the environment by studying applied biochemstry and zoology in Canada.

“I’ve always had a strong passion for the outdoors and conservation, but just doing conservation doesn’t make money,” he says with a chuckle. “Permaculture allows me to live on a site, produce food on a site, produce an income, as well as practice conservation.”

Wa Samaki is Rahaman-Noronha’s permaculture farm, and it has been his workplace, classroom, grocery store, and home since he relocated to Trinidad in 1998. Meaning “of the fish” in Swahili, Wa Samaki covers 30 acres in Freeport in central Trinidad.

Although he uses no fertilisers, herbicides, or pesticides, Rahaman-Noronha is able to make a living off the farm’s fruit, flower, lumber, and fish sales. His newest addition is a large aquaponics system, a closed loop food production system in which fish tanks and potted plants circulate water and sustain one another.

With his partner John Stollmeyer, Rahaman-Noronha works to spread awareness of permaculture across the Caribbean, home to nearly 40 million people who are particularly susceptible to climate change.

The pair consults Trinidadian businesses, teaches permaculture design courses (PDCs), and holds workshops everywhere from Puerto Rico to St. Lucia. “How are we going to create sustainable human culture?” Stollmeyer asks. “Discovering permaculture for me was a wake up call.”

Where environmentalism meets savvy economics

Berber van Beek studying the geology of Curaçao. Credit: Mark Olalde/IPS

The need for conservation is in no small part a result of climate change, especially when the Hurricane Belt covers nearly all of the Caribbean.

Trinidad and Tobago continues to compound the issue as both a major exporter and consumer of fossil fuels. The country produced more than 119,000 barrels of oil per day in 2012 and 1.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that same year, all the while boasting the second highest rate of CO₂ emissions per capita in the world, more than twice that of the United States.

United Nations data dating back to 2005, the last time such statistics were compiled, indicates that industrialised agriculture accounts for 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Latin America and the Caribbean.

In this environment, Rahaman-Noronha’s goal is to become an incubator of conservation start-ups that cannot secure necessary bank loans. Currently, he houses beekeepers and a wildlife rescue center on the farm for minimal rent, and he hopes that list will grow.

One such entrepreneurial mind that passed through Wa Samaki was Berber van Beek, a native of Curaçao who recently moved home after years of wandering the world. Before returning to the Caribbean, she practiced permaculture across Europe and Australia, but when van Beek wanted to develop her skills in a tropical climate, she came to Rahaman-Noronha.

“He gave me a lot of freedom on his farm to make and create a design,” van Beek says, describing a garden of banana trees she planted at Wa Samaki.

Erle Rahaman-Noronha’s closed-loop aquaponics food system. Credit: Mark Olalde/IPS

In Curaçao, van Beek uses permaculture as more than simply a food source. She realises its social potential and is working to start after-school programmes for at-risk youth who can learn useful gardening skills and the responsibility and respect for nature that come with caring for their own gardens.

In addition, she is soon opening her first large-scale organic gardening class, closely resembling a PDC.

Such initiatives are urgently needed in Curaçao, which is facing a stagnant economy and is currently nursing a youth unemployment rate of 37 percent.

According to van Beek, shifting global climates and markets have major effects on her own island in which nearly everything must be imported. “If you go to the supermarket, look where your food is coming from. Is it coming from Venezuela or is it coming from the U.S. or is it coming from Europe?” she says. “People could be more aware of what to buy and what not to buy.”

The problem, experts say, is regional. According to the Food Export Association of the Midwest USA – a group of nonprofits focusing on agricultural issues – around 80 percent of food consumed in the Caribbean is imported.

The beauty and purpose of permaculture is that it is a system of solutions that can be practiced at any level to combat environmental issues.

“You can start in your backyard, so there’s no cost. You can implement certain parts of it in your apartment if you really need to,” Rahaman-Noronha explains. “If you have a porch with some sunlight, you can plant something there and start thinking about permaculture.”

Naturally, van Beek took his message to heart, keeping a perfectly groomed permaculture garden in her own tiny backyard, using dead leaves as fertiliser and recycled rain and shower-water to sustain the plants.

“Seeing is believing,” she says. It’s her own quiet mantra, spoken when she describes her approach to spreading permaculture, and vocalised when she needs the energy to keep pressing on and to convince others that this is the right path.

Rahaman-Noronha, too, has worked to convert non-believers. From schools who tour the wildlife center and his farm to the several thousand people who watched his TEDx talk online, he is adamant that he has traded in misconceptions for progress.

“I think [the reason] I don’t get challenged…is that I’m not just preaching permaculture,” he says. “I’m actually practicing it.”

(END)

Petrotrin pumping jacks at its oilfields in Trinidad. Courtesy of Petrotrin.

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, May 5 2014 (IPS)

Trinidad and Tobago holds the dubious distinction of being among the top 10 emitters of carbon dioxide per capita in the world, much of it due to the petrochemical industry that is the main driver of its economy.

According to the University of Trinidad and Tobago, the country’s petrochemical sector is responsible for 60 percent of those emissions."There are also positive social impacts through job creation and utilisation of services and materials from the local energy sector." -- Melissa Mohammed-Rajkumar

Melissa Mohammed-Rajkumar, a business analyst at the state-owned oil company, Petrotrin, told IPS that six percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) are from its own operations.

But now Petrotrin is eager to reduce its carbon footprint.

It has succeeded in registering a Programme of Activities (PoA) project that would bundle together projects by several petrochemical companies in Trinidad and Tobago and require only one validation process for all of them – the first such project in Trinidad to be registered under the U.N.’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

It seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by recovering and utilising methane-rich natural gas currently vented in the fields.
This PoA project was registered with the CDM in August 2013.

According to the CDM Programme Design Document Form issued in 2012, “Venting and flaring of associated gases from oil wells is commonplace, in Trinidad and internationally. This PoA will improve the economics of collecting associated gases from both onshore and off-shore oil fields in Trinidad.”

Venting involves controlled release into the atmosphere of unburned gases that are a byproduct of oil production. The venting ensures that associated natural gas can be safely disposed of in an emergency.

Oil companies resort to venting when they cannot store or use gas commercially, to reduce the risk of fire and explosion.

Mohammed-Rajkumar, a member of Petrotrin’s CDM team, told IPS, “Sustainable development of the country will be enhanced by the project as valuable resources that would have been wasted through venting will contribute to economic development when captured and utilised for productive end-uses.

“There are also positive social impacts through job creation and utilisation of services and materials from the local energy sector,” she said.

Trinidad and Tobago’s PoA is one of the few CDM projects in the English-speaking Caribbean to achieve registration.

Though some countries have expressed an interest in launching CDM projects that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and thus make them viable players on the Carbon Emissions Reduction (CER) market, only four projects in the English-speaking Caribbean have achieved registration under the CDM – two in Jamaica, one in the Bahamas, and one in Guyana.

Of the 18 CDM-registered projects in the Caribbean, 12 are in the Dominican Republic and two are in Cuba.

There are two CDM-registered PoA projects in the Caribbean, the one in Trinidad and Tobago and one in Haiti.

Whereas the Wigton windfarm project in Jamaica has achieved a measure of success, the CDM project in Guyana has failed to achieve its targets under the CDM, according to Sharma Dwarka, the factory operations manager of Guyana Sugar Corporation Inc., otherwise known as GuySuCo.

Though the Caribbean is not a major source of GHG emissions, GuySuCo chose to get involved in the CDM because of its commitment to reduce its carbon emissions.

GuySuCo. chose to launch a bagasse cogeneration project under the CDM, Dwarka said, “because it fits directly into GuySuCo.’s operations. The processing of sugar cane to produce sugar produces bagasse [a fuel] which is utilised for power generation for the operations.

“The quantity of power produced from bagasse is more than adequate for the operations. As such, excess power is available for sale to the national grid.”

The hoped-for effect was the reduction of Guyana’s dependence on fossil fuels for energy and, hence, of its carbon emissions.

Unfortunately, Dwarka told IPS that there have been no financial gains to Guyana or GuySuCo. to date from registration with the CDM.

This was mainly “due to non-achievement of design parameters of the sugar plant. The main issues at the sugar plant include non-achievement of cane throughput (tonnes of cane processed per hour) and frequent stoppages due to breakdowns, no cane periods due to poor weather conditions, etc.”

However, he said, “GuySuCo. remains committed to reducing its carbon emissions. Having identified the root cause of problems at the sugar factory, corrective action is currently being taken such that the factory can achieve the original design parameters.

“Once this is achieved, the cogeneration plant will be positioned to generate carbon emission reductions (CERs) and tap into the carbon credit market.”

Mohammed-Rajkumar told IPS that Petrotrin’s PoA project is now in the implementation stage. “Tenders have been issued and we are awaiting responses,” she said. The project is approaching its study and design phase.

Regarding funding, she said, “Commercial arrangements are in the process of being drafted and their form will depend on the outcome of the engineering estimates.”

The initial CDM project, in its first year of operation, is expected to remove approximately 90,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e).

“For the next nine years, the project is expected to remove an average of 78,000 tCO2e per annum, but this estimate is subject to further engineering studies to be conducted.”

Mohammed-Rajkumar said that the initial phase will focus on its wells in the Fyzabad, Grand Ravine, Parrylands, Palo Seco and Barrackpore fields.

She said the company has no qualms regarding the project’s financial feasibility, even though prices on the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme market, to which it has access, are very low. It “is also exploring options in other markets where prices range from five to 10 dollars.”

“We can hold and trade the carbon credits when prices are higher,” Mohammed-Rajkumar said. “In any event, Petrotrin remains committed to implementing the CDM project because of the net environmental and social benefits to be derived.”

The Caribbean Debt Network meets in Grenada. Credit: Bernard Lauwyck

By Eric LeCompte
WASHINGTON, May 5 2014 (IPS)

Last Fall, I witnessed the Grenada Council of Churches insert themselves into negotiations between their government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) around the island’s debt restructuring and presumed austerity policies. Religious leaders called from pulpits across the tiny island for a “Jubilee” or national debt cancellation.

When I recently returned to the Spice Isle, I was awed by what I saw – the religious experiment in Grenada was spreading like wild fire to other Caribbean countries."Our churches are on the front lines of fighting poverty in the Caribbean. We see how the debt crisis is hurting the poorest people on the islands." -- Presbyterian Minister Osbert James

At Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, overlooking the Caribbean Sea, the Caribbean Council of Churches, four Catholic Dioceses and various religious leaders from across the region gathered to launch the Caribbean Debt Network.

They came from St. Vincent’s and The Grenadines, Barbados, Dominica, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and Grenada, knowing their unity is more vital than ever.

Out of the 20 most heavily indebted countries in the world, six are Caribbean countries.

The islands are dotted with makeshift shacks, where depending on the island, 20 percent to 50 percent of the population lives in poverty. Various islands see high unemployment rates from 30 to upwards of 50 percent.

Like dominoes, island after island is going through International Monetary Fund IMF debt restructurings that demand austerity policies that hurt millions of people living in extreme poverty.

Among most Caribbean tourist areas, you can’t avoid the working poor.

In fact, the plight of the vulnerable along with infrastructure challenges are so palpable on the small islands, you scratch your head wondering why the IMF calls these countries “Middle Income.” When a poor country is defined as Middle Income, they cannot apply for existing debt relief processes such as the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative or HIPC.

The process by which economists define a country as Middle Income is by averaging the total income of everyone in the country (per capita). In other words if 99 people make one dollar and one person makes 100,000 dollars, the average income per person is 1,001 dollars.

In a place like Grenada, where the poverty rate ranges from 38 to 50 percent, the income levels are skewed. The religious community uses the words “social sin” to describe how income inequality is hidden from us as struggling Caribbean economies are denied relief because of what they are called.

Even with HIPC, any poor country will tell you it’s not a walk in the park. The IMF and other international financial institutions acknowledge that the process offers too little debt relief, too late, with too many benchmarks. However, when struggling economies go through the painful act of debt restructuring without even the framework of HIPC, it’s wrangling a hurricane.

And real hurricanes are real threats. In 2004, 200 percent of Grenada’s GDP was wiped out in three hours by Hurricane Ivan. With powerful hurricanes landing every 10 years and financial crises in other parts of the world impacting the Caribbean’s primary industry of tourism, countries across the region seem destined for never-ending cycles of austerity and debt.

“Our churches are on the front lines of fighting poverty in the Caribbean. We see how the debt crisis is hurting the poorest people on the islands,” notes the new chair of the Caribbean Debt Network, Presbyterian Minister Osbert James.

James’s historic cathedral, among many structures unrepaired since the 2004 Hurricane, still lacks a roof.

While it’s still too early to assess Grenada’s debt restructuring, we can see that the Jubilee model is opening up shop on other Caribbean islands.

At Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, the regional Caribbean religious leaders launched the new coalition in a conference room aptly named The Upper Room. For Christians, it evokes Pentecost when the Holy Spirit empowered religious leaders to inspire others. Pentecost is derived from the more ancient Jewish holiday, Shavuot, which celebrates the gift of our covenant with God and God’s abundance.

At the founding conference last week, the religious community sought to spread Pentecost and Shavuot. They resolved the following:

1. To raise the awareness of the effects of the sovereign debt on Caribbean Countries

2. To establish a structure within which our countries can resolve indebtedness fairly

3. To build a Jubilee coalition to achieve debt resolution, sustainable development and fiscal responsibility at all levels

4. To illustrate how sovereign debt impacts issues of concern, such as human trafficking, drug trafficking, climate change and HIV/Aids.

5. To work with governments and with our international partners on all aspects of debt

6. To encourage the Governments of Grenada and Antigua & Barbuda to champion the cause of a special initiative for resolving Caribbean indebtedness to achieve a sustainable debt level

Eric LeCompte is the Executive Director of Jubilee USA Network and serves on UN expert working groups that focus on debt restructuring and financial reforms. He recently returned from Grenada where he supported the launch of the Caribbean Debt Network.

Ancel Bhagwandeen with his hydroponic unit for growing vegetables indoors. The unit makes use of smart electronics. Credit: Jewel Fraser/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Feb 27 2014 (IPS)

Industrial engineer Ancel Bhagwandeen thinks that growing your food indoors is a great way to protect crops from the stresses of climate change. So he developed a hydroponic system that “leverages the nanoclimates in houses so that the house effectively protects the produce the same way it protects us,” he says.

Bhagwandeen told IPS that his hydroponic project was also developed “to leverage the growth of the urban landscape and high-density housing, so that by growing your own food at home, you mitigate the cost of food prices.”

The hydroponic unit can also run on solar energy. Credit: Jewel Fraser/IPS

Hydroponics, a method of growing plants without soil using mineral nutrients in water, is increasingly considered a viable means to ensure food security in light of climate change.

His project is one of several being considered for further development by the Caribbean Climate Innovation Centre (CCIC), headquartered in Jamaica.

The newly launched CCIC, which is funded mainly by the World Bank and the government of Canada, seeks to  fund innovative projects that will “change the way we live, work and build to suit a changing climate,” said Everton Hanson, the CCIC’s CEO.

A first step to developing such projects is through Proof of Concept (POC) funding, which makes available grants from 25,000 to 50,000 dollars to successful applicants to “help the entrepreneur to finance those costs that are related to proving that the idea can work,” said Hanson.

Among the items that POC funding will cover are prototype development such as design, testing, and field trials; market testing; raw materials and consumables necessary to achieve proof of concept; and costs related to applications for intellectual property rights in the Caribbean.

A POC competition is now open that will run until the end of March. “After that date the applications will be evaluated. We are looking for ideas that can be commercialised and the plan is to select the best ideas,” Hanson said.

The CCIC, which is jointly managed by the Scientific Research Council in Jamaica and the Caribbean Industrial Research Institute in Trinidad and Tobago, is seeking projects that focus on water management, resource use efficiency, energy efficiency, solar energy, and sustainable agribusiness.

Bhagwandeen entered the POC competition in hopes of securing a grant, because “this POC funding would help in terms of market testing,” he explained.

The 48-year-old engineer says he wishes to build dozens of model units and “distribute them in various areas, then monitor the operations and take feedback from users.” He said he would be testing for usability and reliability, as well as looking for feedback on just how much light is needed and the best locations in a house or building for situating his model.

“I would then take the feedback, and any issues that come up I can refine before going into mass marketing,” he said.

Bhagwandeen’s model would enable homeowners to grow leafy vegetables, including herbs, lettuce and tomatoes, inside their home or apartment, with minimal expense and time.

The model uses smart electronics, meaning that 100 units can run on the same energy as a 60-watt light bulb, he said. So it differs from typical hydroponics systems that consume a great deal of energy, he added. His model can also run on the energy provided by its own small solar panel and can work both indoors and outdoors.

Bhagawandeen said his model’s design is premised on the fact that “our future as a people is based more and more on city living and in order for that to be sustainable, we need to have city farming at a family level.”

A U.N. report says that “the population living in urban areas is projected to gain 2.6 billion, passing from 3.6 billion in 2011 to 6.3 billion in 2050.” Most of that urban growth will be concentrated in the cities and towns of the world’s less developed regions.

To meet the challenges of climate change adaptation, the CCIC “will support Caribbean entrepreneurs involved in developing locally appropriate solutions to climate change.”

Bhagwandeen said that support from organisations like the CCIC is critical for climate change entrepreneurs. “From the Caribbean perspective, especially Trinidad and Tobago, we are a heavily consumer-focused society. One of the negatives of Trinidad’s oil wealth is that we are not accustomed to developing technology for ourselves. We buy it.

“We are a society of traders and distributors and there is very little support for innovators and entrepreneurs.”

He said access to markets and investors poses a serious challenge for regional innovators like himself, who typically have to rely on bootstrapping to get their business off the ground.

Typically, he said, regional innovators have to make small quantities of an item, sell those items, and then use the funds to make incrementally larger quantities. “So that if you get an order for 500 units, you cannot fulfill that order,” he said.

Fourteen Caribbean states are involved in CCIC: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago.

The Caribbean CCIC is one of eight being developed across the world.

A cleric prays with Colleen James in Cane Grove, St. Vincent hours before it was confirmed that James' sister had died in the Christmas Eve floodwaters. Her two-year-old daughter was still missing. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Jan 31 2014 (IPS)

The rise in natural disasters in the Caribbean due to climate change has led to increased suffering for both men and women, much of it as a consequence of socially constructed roles based on gender, experts say.

So although women typically suffer more during natural disasters, gender policies that specifically focus on helping men when disasters strike are also needed, according to a disaster management official in the Caribbean."[Women] connect to the whole concept of social capital - relying on each other, family connections and friends." -- Elizabeth Riley

“In the Caribbean region, discussions on gender are relegated to conversations on women,” Elizabeth Riley, the deputy executive director of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA), told IPS.

However, she said, experience of natural disasters in the region show that there is a need for psycho-social support programmes for males following a disaster.

A report prepared for the United Nations Development Programme entitled “Enhancing Gender Visibility in Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change in the Caribbean” noted that men often lacked coping skills in the aftermath of a hurricane and were prone to alcohol abuse, stress, and anger.

Riley said reports from regional disasters showed women, on the other hand, responded to such events “by connecting to the whole concept of social capital – relying on each other, family connections and friends.”

She said women in these disasters occupied themselves with consoling children through story-telling, communal cooking and “encouraging people toward a place of recovery.” Other reports showed that men did show some resilience in tackling the reconstruction of their homes.

Reports of natural disasters in the region highlight other male vulnerabilities.

Riley said other reports show that “elderly men are abandoned and incapable of fending for themselves.”

“It is very closely connected to a culture where men have multiple partners and when they reach old age they do not have social capital for support,” she said.

“That is the result of the socially constructed role of men being macho” by having children with several women, she said. “It puts a level of burden on the state because the support for older men is significantly less than that for women,” she said.

In its 2004 macro-economic and social assessment of the damage wrought by Hurricane Ivan in Grenada, the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States noted that “69 percent of the victims were males, and 70 percent of all deceased were over 60 years old.”

Men may be more likely to suffer physical harm in a natural disaster, said Dr. Asha Kambon, a consultant who worked for 20 years with UN-ECLAC, specialising in natural disasters and their impact on small island developing states. “We women are not as prone to risk-taking as men,” she noted.

Though women typically die in greater numbers than men in a natural disaster, Kambon told IPS the ratio of male to female deaths depended very much “on the environment, on the circumstances.”

For example, in the recent floods that occurred over the Christmas holidays in St. Vincent, Dominica, and St. Lucia, all six of the deaths in St. Lucia were of men, most of whom were attempting to drive through the floods.

She recalled that during floods in Guyana in a recent year, several men died from leptospirosis because of walking through flood waters, whereas no women died from this illness. Kambon said this was because the women took the recommended medication and avoided contact with the flood waters.

Nevertheless, natural disasters do place a special burden on women in the region in ways that mirror the experiences of women worldwide.

In the Caribbean, schools and churches are the most likely buildings to be used as shelters following a natural disaster. This increases the women’s burden of care, said Kambon, since “women are responsible for the children and the elderly, and very often the schools are not reopened rapidly following a disaster. So they have to look after those children, and they cannot go out and look for work.”

According to “Making Risky Environments Safer,” published by the U.N. Division for the Advancement of Women, “Domestic work increases enormously when support systems such as childcare, schools, clinics, public transportation and family networks are disrupted or destroyed” due to natural disaster.

Many poor women in the Caribbean are employed at the lowest end of the tourism industry, and since disasters typically do severe damage to the industry, many are left unemployed because their skills are not easily transferable.

“Men are able to get into the marketplace faster because the skills they possess are transferable. Also, men often have some construction skills so they can get jobs in those sectors and earn an income,” Kambon said.

Women are less likely to be employed in the “cash for work” programmes that are frequently implemented following a disaster to rebuild a country’s infrastructure and to provide paid employment, said Riley, since men have the advantage of greater physical strength.

Kambon said that women are also less likely to be employed in such rebuilding programmes because of being restricted to the home in caring for elderly relatives and children.

Perhaps “a cash for care” programme could be implemented, she said, with a view to providing an income to women who would look after dependent members of the community, thus freeing other women to go out and look for work.

She said such considerations underscore the importance of knowing the gender ratio of the community when devising disaster response programmes.

According to “Making Risky Environments Safer”, “Emergency relief workers’ lack of awareness of gender-based inequalities can further perpetuate gender bias and put women at an increased disadvantage in access to relief measures and other opportunities and benefits.”

Further, in the aftermath of recent regional disasters, there was the issue “of the safety and well-being of women and children,” Kambon said, since there is often a breakdown of law and order.

Bathroom facilities also presented a problem for women in emergency shelters.

“What was adequate for men was completely inadequate for women, in terms of cleanliness, safety, location and the ability to use them,” Kambon said.

Kenneth Kerr, climate meteorologist at the Trinidad and Tobago Meteorological Service, explains how computer modeling is used to provide agrometeorology services to farmers. Credit: Jewel Fraser/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Dec 31 2013 (IPS)

In the southwest peninsula of Cedros, one of Trinidad’s driest areas, Jenson Alexander grows the cocoa used for many years by the British chocolate giant Cadbury.

Dry conditions mean that he frequently faces bush fires, a challenge compounded by increasing climate variability that makes it difficult to predict when an extended dry season, and the fires that accompany it, are likely to occur.“We are dealing with a science that has large uncertainties and 10 days ahead is very long in terms of how the atmosphere may or may not change." -- Kenneth Kerr

So in May, when the Trinidad and Tobago Meteorological Service (TTMS) began issuing weather bulletins specifically to keep farmers updated on expected weather conditions, he found a measure of relief.

“Before, it was difficult when you were expecting to have rain and [instead] you were having drought…and bush fires,” Alexander told IPS.

The 10-day bulletins for farmers that the TTMS issues have considerably reduced the uncertainty, he said. “Now we have updates, we can plan better, if we are having an extended dry season. So bush fires won’t affect us” as they did before, he said.

Kenneth Kerr, a climate meteorologist at TTMS, told IPS that “cocoa farmers have indicated that they found the bulletins very useful.”

Trinidad boasts some of the finest cocoa in the world and the makers of Cadbury chocolate once owned and operated a cocoa estate in the island.

Kerr is one of two meteorologists in Trinidad and Tobago who produce 10-day forecasts geared specifically to the farming community. The other, Arlene Aaron-Morrison, is a trained agrometeorologist as well as a climatologist.

Aaron-Morrison explains that the work of a meteorologist differs somewhat from that of an agrometeorologist. “The focus is different,” she said. “A meteorologist focuses on aviation meteorology while the agrometeorologist focuses on agriculture.”

The decision to provide climate forecasts specifically for farmers came out of a joint initiative launched in 2010 by the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology, the World Meteorological Organisation, the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute, and the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services of 10 Caribbean countries.

This initiative is known as the Caribbean Agrometeorological Initiative (CAMI).

Its objective is to increase and sustain farm productivity in the Caribbean region “through improved applications of weather and climate information using an integrated and coordinated approach.”

CAMI’s website states that support for agriculture is a priority since the  sector not only contributes to food security but also helps to reduce poverty and stimulate economic growth.

CAMI acknowledges that, “The Caribbean region is vulnerable to a wide range of natural hazards, ranging from catastrophic events such as floods, droughts, and tropical cyclones to pests and diseases in plants, animals and humans.

“Especially in poor rural areas, these disasters cause much suffering, infrastructure and environmental damage, aggravate food insecurity and slow down or even reverse development gains.

“Climate variability, climate change and land degradation are intimately linked and are generating unexpected effects, e.g., an increased occurrence of extreme weather conditions in the Caribbean region,” states CAMI’s website.

Against this background, a number of meteorologists around the region have been trained in agrometeorology. They now provide regular updates to farmers regarding the weather conditions expected in the days or month ahead.

“Those updates are very beneficial,” Alexander said. “Now, we can plan our programme better in the field, whether it is harvesting or planting.”

Kerr explained that the TTMS provides both a two to three-page Agromet Forecast and a four to five-page Agromet Bulletin. The forecast gives a 10-day prediction of rainfall and temperature for the north, south, east, west and central areas of Trinidad and for Tobago, with a brief summary at the end as to how these expected conditions will affect the work of farmers.

The Agromet Bulletin discusses at length the preceding 10 days’ weather, as well as  the next 10 days’ forecast. It includes data on wind speed and expected humidity. It also analyses in detail how farmers can best respond to the expected climate conditions.

Both the forecast and the bulletin provide the forecasts in terms of percentage probability.

“We are dealing with a science that has large uncertainties and 10 days ahead is very long in terms of how the atmosphere may or may not change. That is why we use probability,” Kerr said.

The forecast and bulletin provide definitions of the terms used and of the likelihood associated with a particular percentage probability. A probability greater than 70 percent means there is a very good chance that the forecast will prove true.

Kerr added, “The further away from the day the forecast was made, the less accurate it is. Ten days is the maximum for any degree of credibility.”

Kerr explained how farmers may use the forecast: If two of the 10 days are expected to be wet, the weather will hamper fieldwork. On the other hand, “it provides an opportunity for the farmer to harvest rainwater or may reduce the need for irrigation during those two days. Or it may act as a buffer for drier days or reduce heat stress for newly planted or germinating crops.”

Such analysis on how farmers can work with the impending weather conditions is routinely provided in the Agromet Bulletins.

The forecasts are done through computer modelling. “We use several models to look at what is happening and to see what is most likely to occur. Then using our subjective judgement based on our training and experience along with the climatology of the various locations, we arrive at a forecast for the different districts,” Kerr explained.

The findings are supplied to farmers through e-mail, the media, and one-on-one, said Aaron-Morrison.

The bulletin and forecast are also made available through agricultural extension offices and other agriculture-based organisations, including the Agricultural Society of Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute and the Tobago House of Assembly.

St. Vincent Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves (centre) chairs a meeting to discuss reconstruction following deadly floods on Dec. 24. At left is his Antiguan counterpart, Baldwin Spencer. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent, Dec 30 2013 (IPS)

Ralph Gonsalves fought to hold back tears as he shared how his cousin was killed the night before Christmas.

Raymond Gonsalves was buried alive when a slow-moving, low-level trough dumped more than 400 mm of rain on this island in a less than 24 hours and triggered massive flooding and huge landslides.

“People have lost their lives; families are suffering. I was with a family which lost five in one household,” Gonsalves, the prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, told IPS.

His cousin Raymond, he recounted, “was in his house, in the bedroom, and a landslide came down and buried him on his bed.”

“I have it in my family too,” he said. “I feel the pain, I feel the anguish of people.”"Climate change...has to be given the prominence and the priority that it deserves."
--Baldwin Spencer, Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda

Gonsalves told IPS that St. Vincent and the Grenadines is “on the frontline of climate change”, explaining that his cousin had been among several the government moved from their homes beside the sea following Hurricane Ivan in 2004.

New houses were built for them but even then “the ravages of wave action were too severe, so we moved them to [another] place.” They had been moved, he said, “from one disaster point to another.”

The prime minister said that while the country is not a disaster area as a whole, several areas have been declared disaster areas.

Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer of Antigua and Barbuda, who serves as chairman of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), a sub-regional grouping, arrived here on Saturday to see the destruction first-hand. He will also visit St. Lucia on Sunday.

A deadly event

The trough on Dec. 24 brought torrential rains, death and destruction not only to St. Vincent and the Grenadines but to St. Lucia and Dominica as well. Disaster officials in St. Vincent have so far recovered nine bodies, and the search continues for three more people reported missing and feared dead.

In St. Lucia, five people were killed, including Calvin Stanley Louis, a police officer, who died after a wall fell on him as he tried to help people stranded by floods.

Spencer told IPS he is convinced that there is a link between climate change, global warming and the erratic weather being experienced in the region.

“What has happened in these three member states of the OECS clearly demonstrates that the issue of climate change and associated weather issues can no longer be treated as a backburner issue,” he told IPS. “It…has to be a front burner issue and has to be addressed collectively.”

“I would say that this has to jolt all of us into the recognition that climate change is not something that we can continue to take lightly. It has to be given the prominence and the priority that it deserves.”

He hastened to point out that climate change has not skipped the attention of governments of the OECS.

“Policies and programmes have been developed in conjunction with regional and international bodies involved with this process to introduce…practicable measures,” he said. “But these devastating situations would urge us…to move more expeditiously in putting into place whatever is required to assist in combating the effects of climate change.”

Ronald Jackson, the executive director of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA), said he could not give a scientific answer connecting climate change and the Christmas Eve storm, but he strongly believed climate variability issues and climate change issues were involved.

“There is going to be a change in the culture of how we deal with these things, how we monitor the meteorological information that is being presented because we are living in very uncertain times,” he said.

A boy clears debris from his home in St. Vincent following flooding Dec. 24. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

Serious damage

Gonsalves said that during a helicopter overview of the country’s forests, the minister of works and chief engineer observed massive landslides, rivers that had spread, and land that had been denuded.

“The extent of landslides suggests the figure of about 10 percent, which is a huge number,” he told IPS, adding that the practical implications of the landsides are huge as well. “If we are seeing these logs in the lower end of the river, you could imagine the damage which is caused in the upper end. If the logs are not cleared and if we don’t deal properly with river defences, we have a time bomb” where the next heavy rains will simply add to the buildup.

The capacity of the state to respond to a disaster of this magnitude it is not at the level it ought to be, Gonsalves added.

“There are profound limitations. In the ministry of social development, we just don’t have enough persons in that area to deal with the extent of the social problems which have arisen,” he told IPS.

Two decisions regarding immediate reconstruction were reached during a six-hour meeting at the prime minister’s office Saturday. They involved financial institutions, contractors, local and regional disaster management agencies, representatives of CARICOM, and the governments of Antigua, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago.

The prime minister said all financial institutions have indicated that they will try to help provide the financing for the work to be done.

The island’s water authority has said that by Tuesday, the country should be up from what is now 50 percent of the population with access to water to 85 percent.

“The issue of the water is the most critical, immediate human need,” Gonsalves said. Even the country’s 42 water trucks “are still not enough to deal with the problem.”

“We will work to make our country better than it is and to use this challenging period to lift ourselves and to carry ourselves to higher heights,” Gonsalves concluded.

Volunteers aid an oil-slicked seabird. Photo Courtesy of Papa Bois Conservation

By Peter Richards
PORT OF SPAIN, Dec 23 2013 (IPS)

Whether it is a case of sabotage or simply poor management practices by the state-owned PETROTRIN, as the union claims, a mysterious oil spill in south Trinidad is wreaking havoc on homes and wildlife in the area.

PETROTRIN claims it has no idea as to the source of the spills, and Energy Minister Kevin Ramnarine, who toured La Brea and other affected areas on Sunday, said “the mystery remains where this oil is coming from.”"Shut it down, if you don’t know where it is coming from." -- Gary Aboud

The Environmental Management Authority also said it had been unable to ascertain the source and that its immediate concern was the protection of life and the environment.

Gary Aboud, president of Fishermen and Friends of the Sea, told IPS that the only solution was to shut down all oil production in the area.

“As we speak, more and more oil is being pumped into the sea. Why doesn’t the minister order the shutdown of all oil being transported in the Gulf of Paria? Shut it down, if you don’t know where it is coming from,” he said. “We find it totally unbelievable.”

According to the head of the La Brea Fisherfolk Association, Alvin La Borde, “[Local] fishermen cannot go out to work. They need to buy things for their families for Christmas. They would not be able to leave until this oil is cleared.

“The fishermen have also lost nets and ropes used to secure their boats,” he told IPS.

In a statement, the EMA said it “will continue to closely monitor clean-up efforts and ensure that environmental best practices are carried out.

“Once the source of the spillage is determined, the EMA will be assessing the situation from a legal and compliance perspective to ascertain whether there is any breach in environmental legislation.”

Fitzgerald Jeffrey, the member of Parliament for the La Brea region, which is known for having the largest natural deposit of asphalt in the world, told IPS that he is hoping the evacuation is carried out “as quickly as possible”.

“There are young people and it is difficult for them to breathe…and as much as 24 families are directly affected. In addition, there are fishing vessels contaminated with oil. We are seeing crabs and dead fish along the beach.

“Yesterday I was down there and there is a very strong gas scent and people have been advised not to do any cooking in the area,” he added.

On Monday, the environmental group Papa Bois Conservation issued an urgent appeal for paper towels, dishwashing liquid and other supplies to aid birds that are covered in oil.

The Wildlife Orphanage and Rehabilitation Centre (WORC), which is also trying to rescue animals affected by the oil spill, reports “oil in the mangrove as well as a strong hydrocarbon smell”. The WORC also posted on its website a picture of an oil-slicked dead pelican at La Brea.

PETROTRIN, which has been in operation for 100 years, has acknowledged that there are installations across the country engaged in refinery activities and that some of its pipelines may still contain hydrocarbons that can be hazardous to health.

Ramnarine said the authorities were now seeking international assistance in dealing with the oil spill, even as the Oilfield Workers Trade Union (OWTU) maintained that PETROTRIN should shoulder the blame for the environmental disaster.

“We do not concur with the company’s offering of the excuse that it is some kind of sabotage or otherwise,” OWTU president general Ancel Roget told a news conference on Sunday.

“We want to say there is a massive cover-up of the PETROTRIN management to shield their friends, the lease operators, who they invited to and in fact gave away some of the lucrative acreage of PETROTRIN assets, and therefore a cloud of silence and secrecy has shrouded the lease operators in the La Brea situation,” he said.

Roget has accused the company of knowingly reducing the level of security in the fields, allowing thieves to roam freely.

“The reduction and removal of morning tower shifts…these shifts provided as a monitoring effort and additional security effort so that if there are any oil spills throughout fields they were reported in real time.”

Roget said PETROTRIN had no emergency response contract to deal with the latest series of oil spills, saying “they violate their own investigation policy which states that investigations of that nature ought to take place within the first 24 hours.”

But Ramnarine said that unmanned platforms were part of the industry globally.

“We can’t put people on every single platform,” he said, adding “in the Gulf of Mexico, there are unmanned platforms.”

Over the weekend, PETROTRIN’s president Khalid Hassanali said one of the company’s lease operators, Trinity Oil and Gas, had discovered several valves open at its operations in Rancho Quemado, allowing oil to flow out of the tanks onto the lands.

“This is of concern because the other spills have been marine. It is extremely disturbing because…the valves were found opened which doesn’t normally happen. All these things happened together,” he said, saying that the company was now investigating whether the oil spills were acts of sabotage.

“To reach that conclusion one needs to go through a process of investigation. It’s early, we can’t reach that conclusion without being fair and without investigating fully,” he told a news conference.

The company issued a statement informing residents in nearby villages that oil had been sighted along the coastline near shore and on land and that they should avoid venturing in or near the sea.

Ramgopaul Roop explains how sustainable farming, including conservation farming and a water harvesting system, has allowed him to run a successful business despite unpredictable climate conditions. Credit: Jewel Fraser/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Nov 25 2013 (IPS)

Even as weather extremes bedevil Caribbean farmers, Ramgopaul Roop has turned his three-acre fruit farm into a showcase for how to beat climate change.

His conservation farming methods include water harvesting and growing lemon grass as mulch. Since the grass is also a weed, it discourages the growth of other harmful weeds without the use of herbicides.“Farmers always asked, ‘When do we plant? When is the rain going to start?’” -- Dr. Leslie Simpson

“Because of the system using lemon grass and pommecythere trees growing lower than the lime trees, my land is covered with vegetation, so that we can adapt to climate changes,” Roop told IPS.

“If it is hot, we have this natural mulch under the crop. If it is raining, it helps to reduce the soil erosion,” he explained.

Roop is now the regional administrator for the Caribbean Agribusiness Association (CABA), an organisation mandated by the 15-member regional grouping Caricom to work with regional farmers’ groups to find agroprocessing opportunities.

CABA serves as a collective voice for farmers in the region through advocacy and assistance with trade negotiations.

Roop, who has farmed in Trinidad for 25 years, said that compliance with a country’s environmental regulations is key to success. This has proven true in the case of his own property, Rocrops Agrotech, which is used as a model farm by Trinidad and Tobago’s Environmental Management Authority.

His strategies have enabled Rocrops to supply agroprocessors with 10,000–12,000 limes weekly, 52 weeks a year, over the past five years.

“If farmers adopted the methods that I have implemented, they would be able to develop small holder farms to produce year-round to increase their level of production so that they could fulfil commitments to processing facilities,” he said.

“Small-holding farms can be developed into a sustainable unit that can be passed on to the next generation,” Roop added.

Across the region, Caribbean farmers are seeking reliable climate data to help them make better decisions when planning their crops. To meet this demand, the European Union and African, Caribbean and Pacific group (ACP) are training meteorologists to interact directly with farmers to provide accurate, timely information on weather patterns.

Monthly or trimonthly agricultural bulletins also discuss the possible effects on agriculture of the weather forecasted by the agro-metereologists.

Jamaica has also launched a website dedicated to providing twice-daily weather forecasts for farmers. Farmers can plug in the name of their location for detailed information on temperature, humidity, windspeed and other relevant data.

The training of the agrometereologists and the publishing of the bulletins are part of a larger EU-ACP project known as the Caribbean Agrometereological Initiative (CAMI), whose aim is to improve agricultural productivity in the region through the “improved dissemination and application of weather and climate information using an integrated and coordinated approach.”

CAMI’s partners include the Caribbean Institute for Metereology and Hydrology and the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI), among others.

Dr. Leslie Simpson said that Caribbean farmers have been in dire need of “access to information about what is happening and what is expected to happen with regard to climate change, and then information on how they can deal with these changes and risks.”

Farmers at workshops co-sponsored by CARDI “always asked, ‘When do we plant? When is the rain going to start?’” said Dr. Simpson, who is the natural resources management specialist with responsibility for climate change at CARDI.

The region’s increasing climate variability and the effects of climate change are making it difficult for farmers to determine when best to plant their crops, since the type of crop planted at a given time of year depends on the amount of rain expected then.

Region-wide discussions with farmers revealed that the foremost needs were for seasonal and inter-annual climate forecasts, forecasting for crop disease and pest incidence, and user-friendly weather and climate information.

Dr. Simpson said that “dealing with the variability of the present weather situation is the first step [for farmers] in dealing with any future climate change.”

CAMI notes that, “Short-range forecasts are normally available one day in advance, but modern agricultural practices …require weather forecasts with higher lead time which enable the farmers to take ameliorative measures.

“Thus, for the agricultural sector, location-specific weather forecast in the medium range (three to 10 days in advance) is very important. These forecasts and advisories should be made available in a language that farmers can understand.”

A second CARDI project now underway to help Caribbean farmers deal with climate change is being sponsored by the European Development Fund and administered by the ACP. This project is to help identify strains of crops that would be resilient to climate variability and climate change.

Dr. Arlington Chesney, CARDI’s executive director, told IPS that the project would focus firstly on starches and vegetable protein since “those are critical components of the diet of the majority of people in the region.”

Among the crops identified for research are sweet potato, cassava, corn, peas and beans. Dr. Chesney said the project has done a review of the soil types and changes in temperatures and rainfall patterns in various islands over the past 20 years, preparatory to selecting the crop varieties for investigation.

“We would try to characterise these varieties morphologically and genomically. We are looking at their DNA to determine if there are some inherent characteristics that are more resilient to climate change so that we could, with time, have a group of these varieties that we could say have a better than average chance of doing well under these new [climate] conditions,” Dr. Chesney said.

Much of the DNA work will be done by CARDI’s European partner in the project, the Wageningen University in Holland, which is considered one of the foremost agricultural universities in that country.

The university “will also do matching between the DNA crop performance and ecological measurements, temperatures, and rainfall,” said Dr. Chesney. CARDI will be providing mainly logistical and technical support on the project.

Dr. Chesney, like CAMI, stresses that his organisation’s work on equipping farmers to cope with climate change seeks to ensure the region’s food supply by improving farmers’ standard of living.

President of Fishermen and Friends of the Sea (FFOS) Gary Aboud is arrested near the International Waterfront in Port of Spain. Credit: Peter Richards/IPS

By Peter Richards
PORT OF SPAIN, Nov 21 2013 (IPS)

The demonstration took place on land and sea simultaneously. In the end, police had arrested three people, including Gary Aboud, president of the Trinidadian NGO Fishermen and Friends of the Sea (FFOS), but protesters were undaunted. They would be back.

“We are going to re-assemble and go back to the drawing board. The action gave the government a clear indication of how serious we are,” Aboud told IPS. He now faces charges of resisting arrest, obstructing the police and protesting without permission on Nov. 13."Each air gun is emitting almost double the sound of a single jet and is equivalent to sound that occurs when you use explosives." -- Gary Aboud

At the centre of the dispute are the seismic surveys in which energy companies searching for oil and hydrocarbons in the seabed deploy air guns, which are towed behind ships and release intense impulses of compressed air into the water.

According to the U.S. -based Natural Resources Defence Council, seismic surveys have been shown to cause catch rates of some commercial fish to plummet – in some cases over enormous areas of ocean.

“What we are asking is for is the same thing every country in the world has asked for,” Aboud said, noting that the issue has become controversial enough that the International Maritime Organisation and U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) will convene a meeting in London next February to highlight ways of minimising the impact of seismic surveys.

FFOS also says a government-appointed committee is skewed heavily in favour of people closely affiliated with the energy sector here.

“It only has two fisherfolk representatives and 14 government representatives – that is an imbalance. We are recommending one scientist be appointed by the fisherfolk, one scientist by the government and the two scientists appoint a third scientist,” he said.

“The government has appointed a lot of yes men and people who work for the energy sector. If you work for the energy sector we can’t expect justice,” Aboud told IPS.

Food Production Minister Devant Maharaj, speaking at the end of the weekly cabinet meeting, disputed these assertions.

“Seismic surveys are routinely conducted as part of the exploratory process in an effort to obtain information on the location and the quantum of raw hydrocarbon in the various strata of rocks,” he said.

Maraj said that several studies have been done regionally and internationally, and documentation on the effect of seismic surveys on different species of fish can be found in a policy document titled “The National Seismic Operations of Trinidad and Tobago.”

“A draft version developed in July 2010 was circulated to committee members and other major stakeholders for comment. The policy document was also submitted to the Ministry of Energy for its consideration,” Maharaj said.

Critics argue that there should be a moratorium on seismic testing while the government creates a regulatory framework that will include making it mandatory for companies to submit an independently-conducted Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) before testing.

“All the oil companies know that the EIA is a standard procedure…so it is not just something we are saying, it is standard procedure around the world,” Aboud told IPS.

He added that a judge in Mexico recently ruled “that you cannot do seismic bombing where the fishes are spawning (and) where there is a migratory path”.

The fisherfolk here have directed their anger mostly at British Petroleum (BP) and the state-owned Petroleum Company of Trinidad and Tobago Limited (PETROTRIN). Aboud said he has already started talks with the trade union movement here.

He also plans to hold talks with religious leaders in the hope they would empathise with what he called the “national plight” of the fishing industry.

But PETROTRIN has hit back, saying that its plans for an Ocean Bottom Cable (OBC) seismic survey was being undertaken in “conformance with the licence requirements” from the relevant authorities as well as putting in place “measures to ensure that the seismic survey is conducted in conformance with international safety and environmental best practices”.

In a full page-newspaper advertisement this week, PETROTRIN said that research has indicated that the “effects of seismic surveys on fish stock have indicated little or no negative impact” and that the mortality caused by air-emitting devices on fish eggs and larvae might amount to an average of 0.0012 percent a day.

“In comparison to the natural mortality rate of 5-15 percent per day, the seismic induced damage is insignificant,” the oil company asserted, adding “we stand by our statement that the decibel levels of the underwater pulses are similar to the naturally occurring sounds in the ocean.

“The sound from the survey does not exceed 250 decibels which can be compared to a ship sound, close to the hull, which emits 200 decibels and a bottlenose dolphin click which emits 229 decibels.”

At the start of the year, BP conducted a 275-million-dollar seismic study that the company’s regional president Norman Christie said “has given reason for even more confidence in the future of Trinidad and Tobago’s hydrocarbon industry.

“This survey will allow us to improve our understanding of our existing acreage to ensure we are maximising the recovery of the resources. The survey has stirred up quite a bit of excitement as it is the first time we are using this specialised seismic technology in the BP world,” he added.

Aboud says the oil companies’ arguments simply don’t hold water.

“They are saying they are not using explosives. We never say they are using dynamite. We say that the air gun blasts are 260 decibels. A jet aircraft is 140 decibels and human ordinary pain is 130 decibels.

“We are also saying the seismic ships are using 20 to 35,000 individual air guns and each air gun is emitting almost double the sound of a single jet and is equivalent to sound that occurs when you use explosives,” he told IPS.

Rainwater harvesting is practised in the rural areas of Trinidad, though this open, unfiltered method poses hazards that the design promoted by the Global Water Partnership-Caribbean seeks to avoid. Credit: Jewel Fraser/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Oct 27 2013 (IPS)

A centuries-old system for ensuring water security is making a comeback in the Caribbean.

It’s known as rainwater harvesting, and it is now becoming a formal part of the region’s strategic planning in the face of not only more and stronger storms, but droughts as well. By 2100, there could be a 20 to 30 percent decrease in precipitation, research shows, making every drop count."The first thing to go in hurricanes is the water." -- Lovaan Superville of NIHERST

“Rainwater harvesting is, in fact, seen as one of the important tools to ensure resilience and redundancy in Caribbean water supplies, in particular to augment existing municipal water supplies,” Dr. Natalie Boodram, manager of the Global Water Partnership-Caribbean (GWP-C), told IPS. “Rainwater can provide a backup water supply in case of disruption.”

One advantage is that the technology is already in place, with many householders, especially in rural areas, creating catchments for rainwater running off of their roofs to supply them with water for daily household use. In the Virgin Islands, slightly more than half of homes use RWH to supply all their water needs.

An estimated 500,000 people in the region at least partially depend on RWH, with the heaviest users including Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, the U.S. and British Virgin Islands, the Turks and Caicos and the Grenadines.

Earlier this month, ministers from the Caribbean Community meeting in Barbados launched a Water, Climate and Development Programme for the Caribbean (WACDEP) that promotes rainwater harvesting as one of the approaches to secure the region’s water supplies.

While RWH has existed for hundreds of years, Boodram says that municipal systems which depend on surface water supplies have displaced it in many parts of the Caribbean, so there’s a need to “re-establish a rainwater harvesting culture in the region.”

The GWP-C has undertaken a number of Caribbean rainwater harvesting projects, as part of its parent body’s worldwide initiative to support the integration of water security and climate change adaptation into development planning.

The aim was to eliminate some of the common problems associated with rainwater harvesting, such as “exposure to air pollution, animal droppings, contaminants from poorly maintained roofs, among other debris,” Boodram explained.

The technology promoted by GWP-C with the help of its partners, particularly the Caribbean Environmental Health Institute, involves a first-flush diverter.

“The first-flush system which forms the bottom part of the downpipe is used to divert the initial water with pollutants from the roof, ensuring that these do not enter the water tank/storage device being used. The first flow of water containing roof debris would then settle at the bottom of the downpipe with the cleaner water settling on top, allowing clean water to enter the storage component,” she explained.

That design was used by Trinidad and Tobago’s National Institute of Higher Education, Research, Science and Technology (NIHERST), which partnered with GWP-C to introduce rainwater harvesting technology to rural communities in Trinidad “with a focus on outfitting disaster shelters, namely, schools,” said NIHERST Senior Project Officer Lovaan Superville.

“Because of climate change, we need to be disaster prepared,” she said, adding that “the first thing to go in hurricanes is the water.”

NIHERST outfitted 15 schools with the rainwater harvesting technology, and provided a few of them with solar panels as a backup energy source as well. To ensure maintenance, Superville said they trained about 25 persons in each community, that is, Toco, Moruga, and Barrackpore.

“The materials used to make the rainwater harvesters are easily available, easy to clean. It’s out of local materials and so it is not expensive,” she said. “Any plumber or electrician, once trained in how our system works, can easily duplicate them.”

Interviews with the principals of some of the schools in Trinidad’s southeast communities of Moruga and Barrackpore confirm that the rainwater harvesters have thus far been a success.

Benjamin Santoo, the principal of Rochard Douglas Presbyterian school, told IPS that when the school cleaned the tap water tank, “it has four inches of slush. When we clean the rainwater tanks, we have no such problem.”

“Water used to come once a month [through the mains],” he added. “We depended on water trucks to give us water Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Because of the school population, 500-plus, the water that we had was not enough for both drinking and flushing toilets.”

In many instances, schools received pipeborne water from the municipal supply only twice a week, sometimes less. With the installation of the rainwater harvesters, they have been able to save the pipeborne water for drinking and use the rainwater for flushing toilets, watering gardens, and carrying out school projects.

Dr.  Henry Smith is director of the Water Resources Research Institute, University of the Virgin Islands, where low groundwater resources have made it difficult to ensure a steady water supply.

“Rainwater harvesting at individual installations allows users access to a source that they can manage independently to their benefit as they develop a good understanding of their own needs, what they can expect from rainfall in their local area, and also what other sources of water might be available to them,” he told IPS.

“Harvesting can be a low-cost alternative, or supplement, that is based on relatively simple technology that could make a major difference to many people who might otherwise not be provided for as a result of climate change.”

Tractors have already begun clearing parts of Trinidad's Orange Grove Savannah watershed for a sporting complex. Credit: Peter Richards/IPS

By Peter Richards
PORT OF SPAIN, Oct 7 2013 (IPS)

Trinidad’s Orange Grove Savannah sits at the foothills of the Northern Range, whose watersheds provide copious volumes of fresh water into the aquifers – natural underground water storage areas – lying below these green spaces.

“This natural savannah plays a key ecological function in reducing flooding to surrounding communities, as surface waters are absorbed through grass fields into the aquifer providing a 24/7 water supply to thousands of households in east Trinidad,” Dr. Carol James, a retired United Nations policy advisor who specialised in sustainable development, told IPS."We have to do a simple thing and go in front of the tractors and let them run us over." -- Prof. Selwyn Cudjoe

James says plans by the government to build a multi-million-dollar sporting complex there “would spell disaster” for an area which many view as the lungs and principal water source of East Trinidad.

“Indeed, it is the only uncontaminated set of aquifers of this size anywhere along the east-west corridor responsible for supplying water needs of significant communities,” she said.

James added that nearby Aranguez “has already been contaminated with saltwater and pesticides due to a lack of critical planning in that ecologically sensitive water-storage area.”

The Orange Grove Savannah has served as a major sport and recreational space for an estimated 250,000 residents of Tacarigua and nearby communities for more than 125 years.

Peter Burke, chair of a group called Save our Green Space, told IPS, “London has its Hyde Park, New York its Central Park and Port of Spain its Queens Park Savannah. Orange Grove Savannah represents an oasis and mecca for hundreds of persons daily.”

In recent years, local residents have watched the savannah dwindle from its original 125 acres to 39, with the construction of several sporting facilities and private homes.

James said significant development in greater Tacarigua over the last 50 years has caused occasional serious flooding as the capacity of the savannah’s aquifer to absorb rapid runoff of water from roads, roofs and driveways has been compromised.

“Thousands of roofs shed water more rapidly than through vegetation, but with the existence of the savannah the severity of flooding disasters has been minimised,” she said.

“The community needs to understand, appreciate and protect this rich natural inheritance if its quality of life is to continue,” she told IPS.

Sports Minister Anil Roberts defends the decision to construct the community sporting complex, insisting that the project would actually enhance the green space.

“This facility is going to serve over 200,000 citizens,” he said on a recent television programme, denying that consultations were not held with the community.

Roberts said that the thousands of residents who signed a petition against the project had been misled by James and others because they were not told that what was being constructed would “enhance their sporting facilities and their family lives”.

“I would sign something that says do not take away my green space. It is not taking away anything,” Roberts said, noting that the project at Tacariqua is one of nine to be constructed across the country.

Meetings involving Save our Green Space, the Sports Company of Trinidad and Tobago and Minister Roberts have so far failed to forge a compromise.

“We are not opposed to this project at all but we are opposed to the site, given the history, given the impact it is going to have,” Burke insists. “We have a mandate from the residents of the area.”

Selwyn Cudjoe, a prominent lecturer and historian based in the U.S., is also vehemently opposed to the project.

“My family and I have lived all of our lives in Tacarigua,” he told IPS. “My great-grandfather, Jonathan Cudjoe, and my great grandmother, Amelia Cudjoe, were born in Tacarigua in 1833 and 1837, respectively. This means that my family has been a part of this community even before slavery ended.

“As a scholar, I have devoted my entire life to documenting the importance of Tacarigua and its savannah to the village, the country, and the world,” he said.

In 1995, to mark the 350th anniversary of Tacarigua’s founding as a village, Cudjoe wrote the book “Tacarigua: A Village in Trinidad” arguing “about the importance of our common green space that is so necessary for the mental, physical, and aesthetic development of our people.

“We have had many fights to maintain our green spaces,” Cudjoe told IPS.

“We are saying we do not want this and the government is saying in spite of what we say, they are our bosses. Then we have to do a simple thing and go in front of the tractors and let them run us over,” he said.

The remains of shade houses that one farmer attempted to build to protect his crops from the effects of climate change. He subsequently abandoned the project after the Trinidad and Tobago government withheld the anticipated subsidy for completing them. Credit: Jewel Fraser/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Sep 23 2013 (IPS)

Dalchan Singh, a root crop farmer and board member of the Agricultural Society of Trinidad and Tobago, says the past year has seen drastic changes in the weather of this twin-island Caribbean nation.

Normally, the rainy season starts in June and continues during the months of July and August, he explained, then eases up until November when the rains start again.“As a region we do little to collect, preserve and improve our local germplasm." -- Dr. Humberto Gomez of IICA

“But this year was not so,” Singh told IPS. “For two months, we had a lot of sun and very little rain. It is only about August that we started to get rain.” He added, “This year when you get rain, it is very powerful, and when you get sun, it is very dry, hot sun. This year is very different.”

Crops grow more slowly when they do not get enough rain at the correct time, he said. Conversely, the heavy, powerful showers the country experienced this year killed some of the crops such as the pigeon peas and caused some of the root crop to rot.

Local farmers say the unpredictability of the weather is making it almost impossible to determine what crops can safely be planted when.

Climate change is also creating an additional challenge in terms of the pests farmers have to deal with. Khemraj Singh, president of the Felicity Farmers Association in Chaguanas, Trinidad, explains that when there are two or three weeks of steady rain, any attempt to eradicate pests using chemicals is useless since the rain washes away the pesticides.

At the same time, said farmer Hudson Mahabir, “there are some positives to climate change” in controlling pests, since “heavy rainfall reduces thrips”, a winged insect that feeds on crops.

However, when there is a mix of heavy rainfall and hot sunshine, “it creates the ideal situation for fungus and bacteria to multiply,” he added.

Farmers throughout the Caribbean are seeing changes in seasonal weather patterns, which began to become apparent about eight years ago, and now find themselves battling more intense flooding, on the one hand, and dry hot weather, on the other.

But strategies exist to minimise these negative effects of climate change.

When Ramgopaul Roop started to work his small farm in North Freeport, Trinidad, the soil was very acidic, sterile and compacted. During the rainy season, he had to contend with flooding and during the dry season with the challenge of drought.

Roop decided to lime his farm’s soil and increased the amount of organic material in it to improve its fertility. He also made a pond and adjusted the farm’s topography in such a way that during the rainy season the excess water flowed smoothly into the pond, thus preventing flooding; during the dry season, he began using that same water to irrigate.

The result is that Roop now makes a good living out of farming.

Though Roop’s work in sustainable agriculture began before the impacts of climate change became noticeable, Dr. Humberto Gomez, a technological innovation specialist of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), cites it as an example of what can be accomplished when farmers take a proactive approach to dealing with the problem.

“For example, with improved soil and water management practices, such as irrigation and drainage,” he told IPS. “Also, crop varieties can be bred to require less water, complete their cycle faster or slower, to have tolerance to pests and diseases.

“Plants could also be bred to use smaller spaces, to absorb and metabolise nutrients more efficiently, etc,” Gomez said.

The Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) report, “Farming’s Climate-Smart Future: Placing Agriculture at the Heart of Climate-Change Policy”, also suggests growing crops under cover as a useful technology specifically for farmers in the Caribbean.

The Trinidad and Tobago government offered to subsidise such technology, known as shade houses, promising to pay half of the cost of building them, according to Khemraj Singh.

However, Singh said, those promises were not fulfilled. He said that he began the project of building shade houses to protect his crops. However, such construction is expensive: two and a half acres required 10 shade houses covering roughly 10,000 square feet each, at a total cost of approximately 340,000 dollars.

Failure by government to subsidise the construction made the shade houses untenable. “A shade house is a long-term investment,” he said. “I cannot take TT two million dollars and say that the shade houses would make enough money to pay for themselves.” Singh has since abandoned his efforts to implement this technology.

He said that local farmers also see the value of drip irrigation and plastic mulching to help cope with local climatic conditions. Among the strategies farmers are using to cope with intense flooding, he said, was the building of many more water channels to ensure that their fields drained properly after heavy rainfalls.

Farmers are also building their plant beds smaller and higher to allow for faster runoff of water, he said.

IICA’s Dr. Gomez said governments can bring relief to farmers by“educating our industrialists, merchants and people at large to improve the management of residues, first by generating fewer residues, then by recycling a large proportion of these so that we can minimise the amount of waste that ends up going into the water courses.”

The IICA and other regional research organisations are helping by introducing improved germplasm that undergoes testing before it is released for commercial use. Germplasm comprises seeds and genetic material for more resilient crop varieties that can better cope with extreme weather conditions.

Unfortunately, Dr. Gomez said, only a fraction of the introduced germplasm makes it to the farms.

“As a region we do little to collect, preserve and improve our local germplasm,” he said. “A well thought-out plant breeding programme…will be a strategic and valuable asset, currently absent for all but a few crops. This is an area with plenty of room for improvement.”

Trinidad's artisanal fishers have welcomed the ban on shrimp trawling. Credit: Courtesy of Fundación Proteger/IPS

By Peter Richards
PORT OF SPAIN, Sep 18 2013 (IPS)

Dianne Christian Simmons recalls the days when she would head out with her husband on fishing expeditions in the Gulf of Paria, a 3,000-square-mile shallow inland sea between Trinidad and Tobago and the east coast of Venezuela.

“We would come back with at least five barrels filled with fishes,” Christian Simmons, the president of the Fish Market Association, told IPS. “Now if we are able to fill one, it is a miracle.”"What you are doing is killing your future catch of shrimp." -- Gary Aboud of Fishermen and Friends of the Sea

Gary Aboud, an environmental activist and secretary of a local group called the Fishermen and Friends of the Sea (FFOS), blames the industrial shrimp trawlers, which he says use methods banned in many countries, for creating “deserts” in Trinidad and Tobago’s territorial waters.

Aboud said that as far back as 1996, the U.S.-based World Resources Institute was warning that shrimp trawling was comparable to dynamite fishing in terms of sustainability.

“In other words, shrimp trawling kills everything. Shrimp trawling is the most destructive and unsustainable type of fishing in the world,” he told IPS, applauding the decision earlier this month by the government to ban trawling in local waters.

Minister of Food Production Devant Maharaj, worried at the declining seafood stocks and the environmental damage associated with shrimp trawling, said the government is considering an amendment of the Fisheries Act to give teeth to the new measures.

He said a committee would be appointed to consider a “relief package” for displaced fishers who will be affected by the ban.

Late last year, the president of the Trinidad and Tobago Trawlers Association, Shaffi Mohammed, said his members were prepared to call it quits if the government came up with an adequate compensation package. The group, which has vigorously protested the ban, now has until Oct. 26 to submit a proposal on sustainable fisheries management to the government.

Christian Simmons believes the estimated 5,000 people working in the industry must accept the necessity of halting the outdated mode of catching shrimp.

“We are not saying to stop catching shrimp, we are saying to change your method. There are other more sustainable methods of catching shrimp,” she added.

Trawling involves the manual or mechanised towing of a “trawl net” through the water or along the sea bed. Nets vary in size but can span tens of feet and run behind the boat for miles (drift nets), indiscriminately dredging the water and sea bed.

“This state of affairs has resulted in serious conflicts amongst competing fishers and has also been used by environmentalists as compelling justification for immediate and strong action to be taken to address trawling activities,” Maharaj said.

Aboud told IPS the nets attached to the industrialised trawlers are heavily weighed down and dig deep into the seabed, capturing everything.

“The depth they are fishing at and the fact that they are such large and powerful vessels, they cover an area the size of 50 football fields in a day. That is a lot of desert they are creating so the destruction is immense,” he added.

He said the nets also capture minnows and juvenile fish, resulting in a drastic reduction in the fish population.

“So what you are doing is killing your future catch of shrimp,” he said. “You are also killing the food source of all the other fishes.”

Studies have shown that Trinidad and Tobago has the highest rate of discard of babies caught compared to any other part of the world, he added.

“We have 14.73 pounds of babies caught and discarded for every one pound of shrimp,” Aboud said, adding that sea grass, which provides shelter and food for small fish, is also destroyed.

The practice has been banned or restricted in several countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada and Malaysia.

A major proportion of the discards includes commercially important species, such as carite, king fish, snappers and groupers, Maharaj said. As a result, he noted, “Conflicts have arisen between artisanal and non-artisanal trawl fishers concerning habitat destruction resulting from the dragging of the trawl gears on the sea bed during trawling operations.”

Aboud believes that an environmentally friendly way of catching shrimp without disturbing the environment would be the use of shrimp pots, small traps that resemble wire cages.

The president of the Trinidad and Tobago Unified Fisher-folk (TTUF), Peter Glodon, sent a letter to Maharaj stressing that the 52,000 artisanal fishers of the twin-island state welcomed the crackdown on shrimp trawling, which has “completely destroyed the ‘battalie’ species of turtles in the Columbus Channel and many more species are on the brink of extinction”.

But he said that the ban should not be only for industrial trawlers, but should cover the “semi-industrial and the artisanal fleet that indulge in shrimp trawling”.

“By not doing so you will hasten the collapse of the fishing industry. Whether big medium or small, they all contribute to the mauling of juveniles,” he wrote.

St. Kitts (pictured here) and its northern neighbour Jamaica are increasing their energy efficiency with solar streetlights. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Peter Richards
BELMOPAN, Belize, Aug 23 2013 (IPS)

Every year, the Caribbean’s electric sector burns through approximately 30 million barrels of fuel. Overall, the region imports in excess of 170 million barrels of petroleum products annually.

Dr. Al Binger, technical coordinator for the recently launched multi-million-dollar Energy for Sustainable Development (ESD) in Caribbean Buildings Project, said that the region must now focus on ways to reduce the amount of fuel used to generate electricity, and in the process save millions of dollars.

He told IPS that building modifications, such as replacing windows and doors, installing solar water heaters and other retrofitting activities, are among the major components of the EDS project, which he hopes will eventually be embraced by all 15 members of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM).

“Improving the efficiency of energy use in the building sector is a project priority. We’re looking for a 10 to 15-percent improvement across the whole electricity sector in this pilot project, which means we could save the equivalent of about 400,000 dollars per year for the pilot project [in five countries]. So you see, energy efficiency pays back quickly. It’s a good investment,” he told IPS.

Belize will be the first to begin implementation of the ESD project, which seeks to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent in the near term and increase the use of renewable energy.

Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada, St. Lucia, and Trinidad and Tobago are next in line to participate in the four-year, 12.4-million-dollar project that was launched by the Belize-based Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) this week.

“The participating countries expressed interest in collaborating, which is exceptional as countries usually do these activities individually,” said the CCCCC in a release, noting that each country will establish a national steering committee, a project manager and an executing agency.

The centre says the EDS project will do a range of things to support the Implementation Plan, the landmark policy document that guides the Caribbean’s climate change response. This includes boosting capacity to perform audits, introducing new building codes, labelling appliances as energy-savers, and creating best practices for how the private sector can reduce its energy consumption.

A major focus is resilience, and helping economies adapt to new weather conditions.

Binger noted that Jamaica, for example, had to give up its banana industry after 100 years because it became unsustainable due in part to climatic changes.

“Jamaica built an entire railroad just to grow banana… So the Implementation Plan is about the economy of tomorrow, what will it look like, and that starts with the energy sector,” he said.

Earlier this month, the architect Brian Bernal, addressing a workshop hosted by the Jamaica Institute of Architects in association with the Caribbean Architecture Students Association of the University of Technology (UTECH), said that overhauling the island’s energy use profile would not be enough to protect it from rising sea levels, increased air temperature and more intense storms and hurricanes.

He argued that the effort has to be coupled with a deliberate move to ensure that buildings can withstand the anticipated shocks.

“We need to change the way we use energy resources to reduce our CO2 emissions, while simultaneously increasing our ability to resist the effects of climate change,” Bernal said.

“Robust and enforced building codes are highly effective in ensuring a better quality of building and when employed in conjunction with green building standards or practices will significantly increase the functional resilience of our buildings,” said Bernal, whose company serves as the lead consultant of the multi-disciplinary team for the “Build Better Jamaica — Developing Design Concepts for Climate Change Resilient Buildings project”.

That project is sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank and the Institute of Sustainable Development and is aimed at helping Caribbean countries prepare for climate change, particularly in the design and construction of buildings that are more resilient to disasters, but which do not compromise the natural environment.

The CCCCC said that the main aims of the ESD project, the “first regional project of its kind in CARICOM”, are to increase the number of successful commercial applications of energy efficiency and conservation in buildings as well as expand the market for renewable energy technology applications for power generation.

“We will be primarily using photovoltaics, [and] some wind energy to a lesser extent,” said Binger.

At a 2010 Caribbean conference, the Climate Studies Group at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Jamaica, noted that small-scale wind for domestic use offers an advantage over total reliance on grid-supplied electricity if net metering is allowed and also for standalone systems where the wind is fairly consistent.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden in Port of Spain, Trinidad on May 28, 2013. Credit: Peter Richards

By Peter Richards
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, May 30 2013 (IPS)

First it was U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, who travelled to Trinidad and Tobago Tuesday to speak with “our friends” in the Caribbean.

And on Friday, China’s newly elected president, Xi Jingping, will arrive in Port of Spain for talks with eight Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders that Beijing says will “further increase political trust and consolidate friendship and cooperation with the entire region”.

Biden left here on Tuesday after a 21-hour visit during which time he held “frank and cordial” discussions with leaders of the 15-member CARICOM grouping, a precursor to a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama.

“I am hoping that the meeting with President Obama will take place this year,” St. Kitts and Nevis Prime Minister Dr. Denzil Douglas told IPS.

“The Caribbean has never downplayed the importance of the United States to its growth and development and I think direct conversations with President Obama will also signal our importance to our big neighbour up north,” said Douglas.

He will not be among those attending the meeting with the Chinese leader as his twin-island federation, despite China’s insistence on a “One China” policy, maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a renegade province.

Newly re-elected Grenadian Prime Minister Dr. Keith Mitchell said that in talks with both Biden and Obama, officials will bring up the issue of deporting Caribbean-born criminals back to the region.

“Clearly this is an issue we have to deal with but we have accepted the fact the U.S. government made that decision and we are not going to get that changed,” he told IPS, adding that “Mr Biden wants a serious story to go home with.”

Biden has made it clear that Washington wants to “able to play a part in the overall development of the region” and that the trade investment framework agreement (TIFA) which he signed before his departure should be viewed “as a vehicle that would overcome special specific practical barriers to trade and investment and accommodate those changes as rapidly as possible.

“Our goals are not simply growth but it is growth that reaches everybody, and we spoke today from poverty measures to support for small businesses to greater opportunities for all citizens regardless of their gender and their sexual orientation,” Biden said.

Washington has promised the region assistance in a wide range of areas including security, immigration and renewable energy, as well as dealing with the impacts of climate change.

“There is probably no group of nations better situated to take advantage of renewable energy possibilities than here in the Caribbean,” Biden said.

On the issue of security, Biden said he made it clear to the regional leaders that Washington approaches “this as a shared responsibility” even while acknowledging that the “successful” policies of the past may now be forcing those involved in the illegal drug trade to target the Caribbean.

The United States has spent more than 200 million dollars through the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative (CBSI) launched in 2009 and 30 billion dollars on reducing drug demand.

“We were so successful collectively in the decades of the 80’s and 90’s that the preferred route to get to the United States from South America of cocaine, and some heroin and other products was no longer through the Caribbean but through the Isthmus and Central America,” he said.

“Now because of the significant initiatives we have with our Central American friends, the concern legitimately served by many is that it may move back into the Caribbean and on a greater scale than they exist now.”

The Chinese president, who will also travel to Washington for talks with President Obama on Jun. 7, is hoping that his discussions with the Caribbean leaders will further promote cooperation and inject new vitality into their bilateral ties.

“China always holds that all countries, no matter big or small, rich or poor, strong or weak, are equal members of the international community,” the Chinese Embassy said in a statement ahead of the visit, adding that Beijing would “like to expand our exchange and cooperation in politics, economic, culture, etc, so as to advance bilateral relations in a sound and healthy way”.

Beijing said that its “friendly relations with the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region have been growing significantly stronger in the past ten years” and President Xi’s visit comes at “an important time for both China and the LAC region, and even more so for the English-speaking Caribbean Community (CARICOM) region”.

“China-LAC ties are also flourishing multilaterally in the new global dispensation. LAC states can today access new forms of bilateral and multilateral China aid through the recently established Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), as well as through wider regional economic and financial entities such as the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB). China is a contributing and non-borrowing member of both institutions.”

Professor Andy Knight, director of the Institute of International Relations at the University of the West Indies (UWI), said that the visits of the two leaders send a strong signal.

“The U.S. better realise that if it ignores the Caribbean and Latin American region, China is prepared to fill the power vacuum right in America’s backyard,” he told a local newspaper.

“What is interesting about these visits is that they are occurring within days of each other. The U.S. can be accused sometimes of neglecting the Caribbean…China, in its quest for energy sources wherever it can find them, is paying attention to Trinidad specifically because of this country’s oil and gas deposits.”

Trinidad and Tobago’s Energy Minister Kevin Ramnarine said that while the United States and China are two of the largest consumers of energy in the world, Biden had indicated that the United States had shale gas reserves for 100 years and was on the way to becoming self-sufficient.

Ramnarine said with 63 percent of methanol, 85 percent of ammonia and 39 percent of outputs from the local refinery going to the U.S. last year, Port of Spain will now have to find new markets and that energy issues will feature prominently in the discussions with president Xi.

Trinidad and Tobago’s Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Dookeran, speaking, with CARICOM Secretary General Irwin La Roque (seated right).

By Peter Richards
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, May 18 2013 (IPS)

Whether by accident or coincidence, recent days have seen a variety of Caribbean leaders and journalists question whether the region is failing to pursue leadership roles within international organisations – and thus losing its voice in global issues like trade, climate change, and peace and security.

“These days, it is difficult to find CARICOM citizens in top positions, except for Dr. Carissa F. Etienne of Dominica who is director general of PAHO [the Pan American Health Organisation]; Albert Ramdin of Suriname, who is assistant secretary general at the OAS [Organisation of American States]; and Judge Patrick Robinson of Jamaica, who is president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia,” the Jamaica Observer said in an editorial this week.

The paper went on to blame “the complete lack of strategic planning by the political leadership and Caricom Secretariat in positioning our regional citizens for top jobs.”

Earlier in the week, the country’s former prime minister P.J. Patterson, speaking at the launch of the book “Multilateral Diplomacy for Small States” by former Guyanese foreign affairs minister Rudy Insanally, also lamented the fact that few from the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) were occupying high-profile positions outside the region itself.

In defence of the 15-member bloc, Trinidad and Tobago’s Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Dookeran, who chairs the CARICOM Council for Foreign and Community Relations (COFCOR), said the issue was among “strategic matters” discussed during the two-day meeting of Caribbean foreign ministers that ended here Wednesday.

“At the level of Caribbean personalities in international organisations we are conscious of it and we had a long discussion on that and we are devising a process by which we are trying to improve that presence,” he told IPS.

Dookeran, who in his own address to the foreign ministers had also questioned whether “diplomacy in the Caribbean has lost its magic”, said that Caribbean countries need to make “the political statement as necessary in the councils of those bodies that we need to have a higher presence”.

CARICOM Secretary General Irwin La Rocque told IPS that Caribbean countries, despite their seemingly low profile, are still viewed as “prized assets” globally, and points to the presence at the meeting here of delegations from as far away as Japan and New Zealand.

“I am not so sure we have lost our charm, I think it is there. A number of political personalities have expressed an interest in coming to the heads of government meeting in Trinidad in July and I think that in itself speaks volumes,” La Roque said.

He added that there have been recent bilateral discussions with the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Chile, arguing “the outside world seems to recognise the ability of the CARICOM countries to punch above its weight.

“I don’t think we have lost the charm, I think what we have to do is to be a little certain in terms of harnessing and leveraging our collective voices in the international forum,” he told IPS.

Caribbean diplomacy is expected to benefit from the decision of the Trinidad and Tobago government to fund a diplomatic academy at the University of the West Indies (UWI) that “would provide current and future diplomats, government officials, non-state actors with training and learning facilities on issues and processes that are relevant to the discharge of our diplomacy and the conduct of our foreign relations”.

Dookeran, who has been calling for a “new frontier for Caribbean convergence”, said the academy, which opens in September with an international conference, “will establish a network of cooperation with similar training and learning institutions to benefit from the benefits and offerings from other countries,” and that interest has been shown by countries in North America, Asia, Europe and Latin America.

“We are realising the limitations of being a one-language country,” he conceded. “It will take time to change that…this is part of our British inheritance.”

The CARICOM foreign ministers have also vowed to pursue reforms in the United Nations Security Council to better take into consideration the positions of developing countries.

“Clearly that’s an issue that is very troubling,” Dookeran said, adding that the membership should be “placed on the agenda squarely and frontally at the next [General] Assembly”.

“We have in fact begun to talk with some major countries in the world in order to make sure we have the necessary political clout to make a start,” he said.

The communiqué issued at the end of the meeting here said Japan’s candidature for a 2016-2017 non-permanent seat and reform of the Security Council had been discussed with Minoru Kiuchi, the parliamentary vice-minister for foreign policy, and “welcomed the commitment expressed by Japan to drastically increase assistance” to the region.

Nonetheless, Dookeran insists that small states “should have a political presence in the Security Council”.

“We are not saying in what ways it should be done at this stage, and we are saying that the continent of Africa should definitely be part of that process,” he said. Such changes would be a reflection “of the return to political and moral legitimacy of the body and therefore there is need to establish that so that its views cannot be ignored.

“There is [also] need to have more diplomatic dialogue with international financial institutions” such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) so as to get them to change their lending policies to small island developing states (SIDS), he said.

In this vein, the Caribbean is working on developing new strategic partnerships with other SIDS “so that we can improve the strength of the voice of the small economies of the world.”

Disaster officials are blaming the floods in Trinidad on the denudation of hillsides by builders and "slash and burn” farming. Credit: Peter Richards/IPS

By Peter Richards
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, May 12 2013 (IPS)

Officially, the Caribbean’s rainy season begins in June, coinciding with the start of the hurricane season. But recently, heavy rains have signalled an early start to the rainy season, flooding streets, swelling rivers and causing widespread damage to crops.

“With global warming, you have to expect anything these days,” Shiraz Khan, president of the Trinidad and Tobago Farmers’ Association (TTFA), told IPS.

He said the situation has been further complicated by the fact that during the dry season, many people were harming “greenery”, destroying water paths and hurting lands farmers use for planting."With global warming, you have to expect anything these days."
-- Shiraz Khan

“This is basically what is happening throughout the country,” he said, warning consumers to brace for increased food prices as helpless farmers watch their crops being destroyed by floods.

Dhano Sookho, president of the Agricultural Society of Trinidad and Tobago, told IPS that the “water channels are not being maintained”. He is calling for the establishment of an inter-agency group including the government to work out solutions to the problem.

The government, which in the past has had to compensate farmers to the tune of millions of dollars for lost crops due to floods, says it will undertake an early assessment of the situation and that “the timely submission of claims will ensure a speedy disbursement of relief”.

Devant Maharaj, food production minister, said that as soon as claims are lodged with the necessary authorities, then a schedule of payments will be made, even as Khan noted that in some areas, farmers’ losses were as high as 100 percent.

Harmful practises

But disaster officials are blaming the floods on the denudation of the hillsides by builders and on the practises of so-called “slash and burn” farmers to clear lands for cultivation.

Hills have a natural cycle of replenishment during the dry season, said Stephen Ramroop, head of Disaster Preparedness and Management (ODPM), while addressing a meeting of the Inter-Governmental Coordination Group for the Tsunami and other Coastal Hazards Warning System for the Caribbean here last week.

Because of this natural cycle, fires cannot be stopped altogether, he said, adding that people must not be allowed to build their homes illegally and in a manner that allows them to be in the path of danger.

He told the meeting of a recent aerial reconnaissance of the hillsides in Trinidad and Tobago.

“What we saw was that a lot of the water that was spilling onto the roads because people put gravel and sand in the drains… clogging waterways and causing flooding,” he said, noting that in the past few months, the authorities cleared several waterways only for the situation to be repeated.

“We can’t keep clearing the drains that people are blocking up,” he warned.

The coalition People’s Partnership government has warned that it will adopt a tough stance against those building structures and not following to various codes.

Those “bad developers” would have no choice but to adhere to the standards once the National Spatial Strategy is developed and implemented, said Bhoendradatt Tewarie, the minister of planning and sustainable development.

“When I became minister, I did not want to go for any kind of heavy enforcement because the situation was unclear, the rules were not clear, [and] it was so arbitrary,” he said. Now, he said, once national and regional strategies are in place, “we are going to be very strict about new development and the standards they adhere to.”

“I am not joking about this,” he told IPS.

Tewarie said that 12 new enforcement officers and other officials have already been employed and are in training to “align” enforcement with “the new spatial development strategy and the new regional and community development strategies”.

He has warned that if contractors behave “like citizens who do not care,” then strong action will be taken.

The government intends to introduce a planning and development bill that would focus on “big development”, such as those projects undertaken by the state or private developers. It would also hand local governmental bodies approvals for housing developments in the communities.

The greenhouse option

But even as the authorities grapple with the causes of the floods here, a local marketing and distributing company says it can provide the technology that would allow farmers to produce higher quality and increased food crops throughout the year.

The company says it has teamed up with the U.S.-based Atlas Manufacturing to install affordable greenhouses following requests from farmers who had been exposed to the technology before.

“The farmers told us the problems they were having. They wanted us to retrofit a greenhouse suited to our climate,” said Fareed Rahaman, the technical director within the agricultural and industrial department of the local company M&D.

“[The] greenhouse will have a tonne of opportunities and benefits to farmers,” he told IPS.

Speaking during a demonstration exercise last week, he said a single farmer can produce roughly 1,000 pounds of tomatoes weekly from 1,000 plants, indoor production that significantly outweighs that of the outdoors.

“In the rainy season, what you find is that prices of crops tend to go up. If you want to maintain crops at reasonable prices throughout the year, you would have to go undercover,” he said. He pointed out that during the rainy season, soil nutrients diminish and erosion increases, factors that work against farmers and decrease overall output.

Ricardo Bharath-Hernandez, like most citizens of Trinidad and Tobago, has probably lost count of the millions of dollars being spent to renovate the Greek revival style “Red House” that serves as the parliament building in the oil-rich twin island republic.

In fact, renovation work began more than a decade ago on the building, constructed in 1907 to replace the one destroyed in the 1903 water riots. Recent government estimates put the cost of restoring the original architectural design at 100 million dollars by the time the work is completed in 2015."We have for too long paid only lip service to our multiculturalism." -- Dr. Kris Rampersad

But a few weeks ago, Bharath-Hernandez, who is the head of the Santa Rosa First Peoples Community and can trace his ancestry to the first inhabitants of the Caribbean – the Caribs and the Arawaks – took a renewed interest when workers discovered pottery artefacts and bone fragments possibly linked to the Amerindian heritage dating back to AD 0-350.

Bharath-Hernandez, whose community is 600 strong, has already visited the renovation site in the heart of the capital, Port of Spain, and told IPS he is “prepared to perform the necessary ancestral rituals once it is confirmed that the fragments are indeed Amerindian”.

The discovery has come at a time when the Carib community here is moving to construct a modern indigenous Amerindian Village at Santa Rosa, east of the capital, on the 25 acres of land provided by the government.

“We want to keep the village as authentic and traditional as possible but with all modern day amenities,” Bharath-Hernandez said.

“It will comprise a main centre to be used as a meeting and cultural space which will be located in the centre of the village. Spiritual rituals will also be conducted there. There will also be an official residence for the Carib Queen, Jennifer Cassar,” he added.

Arrangements are now being made to send the bones to France for further analysis.

Last week, the Carib chief and representatives from other indigenous groups here met with officials from Parliament and the Urban Development Corporation of Trinidad and Tobago (UdeCOTT), which is carrying out the renovation work.

“We were told that as soon as the results are in we would be called back for another meeting and they will wait on our proposal on how to proceed,” Barath-Hernandez told IPS following the meeting that was also attended by archaeologist Dr. Peter Harris, who had earlier told a local newspaper that the receptacles found in the pits are similar to those used by the Amerindians.

Heritage consultant Dr. Kris Rampersad said the recent finds of skeletal remains and artefacts point to the need for a comprehensive archaeological survey of Trinidad and Tobago.

She is hoping that universities here take the lead to establish an “all-encompassing programme in heritage studies that incorporate research, scientific, conservation, restoration, curatorial and forensic study among other fields that would advance the knowledge and understanding of Trinidad and Tobago’s prehistory and multicultural heritage.

“This also has value to the region and the world. We have for too long paid only lip service to our multiculturalism. The find under the Red House of bones potentially dating to the beginning of this epoch points to the significant need for a proper survey and actions to secure and protect zones that are of significant historical and prehistoric importance,” she told IPS.

Rampersad referred to the neglect by the authorities of another famed Banwari historical site south of here, and hoped that in the case of the discovery at the Red House, history does not repeat itself.

The Banwari Site is said to have been the home of the Banwari man, whose remains date back 7,000 years and which is considered one of the most significant and well-known archaeological treasures of the region.

Discovered some 40 years ago, little has been done to preserve and promote the site.

The Archaeology Centre at the University of the West Indies (UWI) said that in November 1969, the Trinidad and Tobago Historical Society discovered the remains of a human skeleton at Banwari Trace.

“Lying on its left-hand side, in a typical Amerindian ‘crouched’ burial position along a northwest axis Banwari Man was found 20-cm below the surface. Only two items were associated with the burial, a round pebble by the skull and needlepoint by the hip. Banwari Man was apparently interred in a shell midden and subsequently covered by shell refuse.

“Based on its stratigraphic location in the site’s archaeological deposits, the burial can be dated to the period shortly before the end of occupation, approximately 3,400 BC or 5,400 years old,” the UWI noted.

In 1978, Harris hailed the Banwari man as the oldest resident of Trinidad and an important icon of the country’s early antiquity.

“Why, 40 years later, as one of the richest countries in the region, must we be looking to other universities from which to draw expertise when by now we should have full-fledged – not only archaeological, but also conservation, restoration and other related programmes that explore the significance of our heritage beyond the current focus on song and dance mode?” Rampersad asked.

“While scholarly collaborations are important, certainly we could be more advanced, and a leader rather than a follower in these fields in which several other less-resourced Caribbean countries are significantly more advanced,” said Rampersad, who has been conducting trainings across the Caribbean on available mechanisms for safeguarding its heritage.

The discovery at the Red House coincides with recent findings by the U.S.-based National Geographic Genographic Project that the indigenous people may have had strong ancestral links to Africa and to Native American Indians.

Utilising DNA, the U.S.-based organisation tested 25 members of the community in July last year. Bharath-Hernandez says the results will hopefully put to rest questions that have been raised regarding the community’s identity in the past.

The results of the project were released to Bharath-Hernandez late last month by Dr.Jada BennTorres from the University of Pennsylvania.

“We have completed preliminary analysis of the mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome (NRY markers). These analyses will tell us about the maternal and paternal lineages of the community members,” wrote BennTorres in her letter thanking the Santa Rosa Karina community for its participation.

She said the findings of the genetic ancestry of community “indicate a complex ancestry that includes Africans, in addition to a very strong Native American ancestral component” and that all of the 25 individuals tested would receive their information at a later date.

Ruth Dreifuss, the former Swiss president and chancellor of the University for Peace, may never have heard of Dennis Ramjattan, and vice versa, although they occupy opposite sides of a longstanding debate in this twin-island state.

“My mother didn’t deserve to die like this,” he told IPS shortly after 70-year-old Carmen Ramjattan was bludgeoned to death on Feb. 20. “My mother never got into any trouble with the law, never even a parking violation. I would like them (the government) to stop talking and put their money where their mouths are.”

The brutal killing was just one of many in Trinidad and Tobago, where drugs and gang-related violence prompted the government to declare a state of emergency in August 2011, and the national security minister ordered the police to stop releasing murder statistics last fall.

While capital punishment remains popular, no one has been executed here since 1999.

But opinions could be slowly changing, at least as far as mandatory application of the death penalty is concerned.

At a debate on abolition at the University of the West Indies (UWI) organised by the British High Commission this week, Dreifuss noted that that “for 100 years slavery was accepted, for 100 years forced labour was accepted, for 100 years torture was accepted.

“If a country is part of an international treaty which does not accept the mandatory death penalty, then it’s something the government of that country should look at,” she added.

The coalition People’s Partnership government of Prime Minister Kamla Persad Bissessar needs the support of the opposition to revamp existing legislation so it can try to bypass the London-based Privy Council, the country’s highest court, on hangings.

“The Privy Council has been viewed by some critics as a court that actively frustrates the execution of the death penalty, which, at least nominally, remains on the books of most Caribbean territories, despite very few hangings in recent decades,” said David Rowe, an adjunct professor of law at the University of Miami School of Law and a member of the Jamaica Bar Association.

“In a sharp contrast to Europe, capital punishment often finds wide support from Caribbean voters due in part to high murder rates in the region,” he said.

Writing in the Miami-based Caribbean Journal on Tuesday, Rowe argued that some commentators regard the Trinidad-based Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), established in 2001 to replace the Privy Council, “as an institutional strategy to re-introduce hanging”.

In 2011, the Trinidad and Tobago government tabled the constitutional amendment (capital offences) bill which would have provided for different categories of murder.

“It was intended to reserve the death penalty for the most heinous of murders, which is similar to what obtains in the United States where you have murder in varying degrees. So for example, crimes of passion and so on and where you have extenuating circumstances could be dealt with in a different way,” said Attorney General Anand Ramlogan this week.

A 2011 study found that 89 percent of the population in Trinidad and Tobago supports the death penalty, although a majority also believes that judges should have discretion in sentencing. Twenty-six percent favour the current law, which makes the death penalty mandatory for all murders, whatever the circumstances.

Interestingly, 36 percent of those who supported the mandatory death penalty and 54 percent of those in favour of a discretionary system also said that more executions were the least likely policy to reduce violent crime.

UWI Law Faculty lecturer and a member of the Rights Advocacy Project, Professor Arif Bulkan, said that three-quarters of those interviewed did not support the mandatory death penalty after it was explained to them.

The researchers concluded that the findings of the survey, taken in conjunction with two previous studies, strongly supported the abolition of the mandatory death penalty and its replacement by a discretionary system.

The European Union is lobbying countries impose a moratorium as a first step towards abolition. British High Commission political officer here Matt Nottingham acknowledged the EU is on a worldwide campaign to abolish the death penalty, with a strong focus on the Caribbean. Nottingham told the conference the EU’s drive is tied in with its human rights objective.

Law student Antonio Emmanuel strongly opposes the death penalty. “I believe if we have proper sentencing, proper prison systems, proper reform systems in place we can take a better handle on crime,” he told IPS.