A two-day consultation relating to climate change and land management was held at La Vue Conference Centre in Anguilla on Monday and Tuesday this week.
A release stated that the event “was aimed at identifying institutional, technical, and human gaps to be addressed under the Global Climate Change Alliance Project on Climate Change Adaptation and the Sustainable Land Management Project”. It is an undertaking involving all of the sub-regional islands grouped in the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States.
The consultation was attended by a number of participants from key Government departments in Anguilla. The consultants are members of a team mainly from the University of the West Indies, the Engineering Institute of the St Augustine’s Campus in Trinidad and Tobago, as well as other experts from Jamaica teaming up with them.
The two consultants who visited Anguilla were Eleanor Jones and Winston Macala who are both working with the University of the West Indies.They were assisted by Mr Chamberlain Emmanuel who explained the project to the participants. Speaking afterwards to The Anguillian he said that the project was being financed by the European Union in cooperation with the OECS Commission. “The purpose of this project is essentially to ensure and enhance resilience in our land resource, given the onset of climate change and to help us through proper sustainable land management,” he explained.
He continued: “We are looking at assisting Anguilla in terms of its legal institutional framework to ensure we have the right capacity of staff, training and tools, thus ensuring that we have good public awareness to assist us in managing this very critical resource of land. This is very important for all areas including residential, tourism, environmental and cultural, so land is indisputably close-cutting and everyone can relate to that. But because of the issues of climate change, and some issues of poor land management, we sometimes do not get the best results.
“This project brings those two issues together across the islands of the OECS. The project has resources available and after we have identified the issues, and potential solutions, we will design a programme of activities so that we can roll these out from the middle of next year. The consultation is therefore a very important exercise and we are happy for the participation of the various stakeholders including the Permanent Secretary [in the Ministry of Home Affairs and Lands, Ms Aurjul Wilson], so that the project can really deliver some outcomes for Anguilla.”
The entire project is being funded by the European Union in the amount of 10.6 million Euros (approximately 40 million East Caribbean dollars). Currently, a sum of 1.6 million Euros is available to finance the preliminary exercise. The balance will be available from the middle of next year.
