The gov­ern­ment of Saint Lucia award­ed DE and Caribbean coali­tion part­ner Mona Geoin­for­mat­ics Lim­it­ed the con­tract to design a web-based GIS (Geo­graph­ic Infor­ma­tion Sys­tem) to help them man­age their envi­ron­men­tal mon­i­tor­ing and man­age­ment data. Var­i­ous agen­cies in Saint Lucia col­lect envi­ron­men­tal data and this is a nec­es­sary process to under­stand the sta­tus of nat­ur­al resources and also any risks that their coun­try is exposed to.

Issues such as the impact of high ener­gy storms, inun­da­tions, land­slides, pest infes­ta­tions, and degra­da­tion of nat­ur­al sys­tems are becom­ing more and more impor­tant to under­stand as pop­u­la­tion pres­sure and fre­quen­cy of nat­ur­al haz­ards increase. This sys­tem is to serve as an inte­grat­ing plat­form for envi­ron­men­tal data and will be focused on help­ing report­ing pro­ce­dures to three key mul­ti­lat­er­al envi­ron­men­tal agree­ments to which Saint Lucia is a sig­na­to­ry: The UNFCCC (Unit­ed Nations Frame­work Con­ven­tion on Cli­mate Change), UNCCD (Unit­ed Nations Con­ven­tion on Com­bat­ting Deser­ti­fi­ca­tion), and the UN CBD (Unit­ed Nations Con­ven­tion on Bio­log­i­cal Diver­si­ty).

Cli­mate change, land degra­da­tion, and the loss of bio­di­ver­si­ty are glob­al prob­lems and mul­ti­lat­er­al coop­er­a­tion is need­ed to address them. Plat­forms such as this will be crit­i­cal for all coun­tries to effi­cient­ly and effec­tive­ly man­age their envi­ron­men­tal and socio-eco­nom­ic data and assist with evi­dence-based deci­sion mak­ing at the local, nation­al, and inter­na­tion­al lev­els. The DE team has an eleven year his­to­ry work­ing on such inter­na­tion­al man­dates and under­stands that each sit­u­a­tion has a unique bio­phys­i­cal socio-cul­tur­al, and eco­nom­ic con­text and our team brings this mul­ti-faceted knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence to each project. We wel­come con­tact from oth­er coun­tries or orga­ni­za­tions seek­ing to do sim­i­lar work.

This work is an exten­sion of DE’s work with the Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty Cli­mate Change Cen­tre and the Inter Amer­i­can Devel­op­ment Bank on the C-READ project. DE’s work with IICA (Inter Amer­i­can Insti­tute for Col­lab­o­ra­tion on Agri­cul­ture) on agri­cul­tur­al risk map­ping in the Caribbean also informs this work. For more infor­ma­tion please con­tact us.

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