The St. Augustine Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (STACIE) participated in the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB) Group’s Knowledge Week 2026: From Insight to Impact - Knowledge Market Place, held on the 23rd June at the Hyatt Regency Trinidad. The Knowledge marketplace brought together innovators, development agencies, policy makers, researchers as well as private sector stakeholders from across the Caribbean and Latin America to exhibit initiatives that are reconstructing knowledge into tangible economic and social outcomes.
Significant international efforts and funding from DEFRA allowed our region to design and harmonise a MRV mechanism for tracking and monitoring Blue Carbon sequestration within mangrove ecosystems. The IDB was key to this initiative as the executing arm of the project in collaboration with the UWI STA. These alliances drove the success of the Regional Blue Carbon Monitoring, Reporting and Verification Mechanism project. It is now imperative that we sustain these efforts that define resilience and innovation inherent in this MRV mechanism.
A featured project was the Blue Carbon Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) Project, which illustrates the growing role of emerging technologies in environmental sustainability and climate resilience. Both the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) are home to some of the world’s most abundant costal and mangrove ecosystems which are critical for climate change adaptation. The AI model for blue carbon projection from maps were showcased by Dr. Letetia Addison, Lecturer at the University of the West Indies, to track changes in carbon capture.
Significant knowledge was generated during this project which have been captured and can be leveraged for long-term policy-planning to support both regional, national and community-based environmental conservation, as well as financial returns. This was captured on the Blue Carbon module on the Sustainable Islands Platform which was officially launched during this event. https://sustainableislands.iadb.org/blue-carbon
The event also highlighted the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration as a catalyst for innovation. During a panel discussion, Mrs. Cheryle Dubay-Tewarie, Director of STACIE, emphasized the value of partnerships among academia, industry, government, and communities. The nomenclature used to define the aforementioned is the Quadruple Helix Model. Her words underscored the importance of the model in creating sustainable innovation ecosystems capable of addressing complex societal and economic challenges.
