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By Amy Li Baksh

When it comes to tackling the issues surrounding the increasingly important climate resilience of the Caribbean region, it is vital that good ideas have life beyond the span of one single project. This was the intention of the HIT RESET Caribbean team (Harnessing Innovative Technologies to support Resilient Settlements on the Coastal Zones of the Caribbean), which is overseen by The UWI’s St Augustine Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (STACIE).

In 2023, HIT RESET Caribbean started supporting nine projects designed to build climate resilience in coastal communities.

The projects aimed to help create positive changes across the region—like a Habitat for Humanity Trinidad project that assessed coastal vulnerability in communities, and a project in Dominica out of Smith Warner International, creating a model to predict coastal erosion. But once the project ideas were successful, data was collected and research was complete, what should happen next?

“A major problem we continue to see is that after the funded life of the donors, the outputs of the projects come to an end,” said Jaymieon Jagessar, an economist and UWI researcher looking at scaling up climate resilience projects in the region—and part of the HIT RESET Caribbean team. “We are trying to bridge the gap of scaling over from pilot or innovation to more of a programme across the region.”

STACIE was one of two UWI teams (the other being run by Dr Deborah Villarroel-Lamb in Civil Engineering) that won grants from the Irish Aid: Our Shared Ocean Programme, funded by the government of Ireland to help Small Island Developing States finance projects to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Hosted over November 5-6, the STACIE scaling workshop brought together stakeholders from the HIT RESET team, as well as members of the communities involved, so they could discuss what barriers they may have faced so far, and the lessons they could take forward.

“Those projects all focused on harvesting innovative technologies of coastal management and planning and to mitigate some of climate change’s effects across the region,” says Jagessar. “The workshop was to bring together the project managers so that we could discuss the scaling up and how these projects could be sustained after the funding life of current projects.”

As climate change continues to have dramatic effects on the Caribbean region, it is crucial that initiatives to strengthen our climate resilience consider a long-term approach when it comes to visualising what their goals should be and how they can take projects from good ideas, to fruition and beyond.


Amy Li Baksh is a Trinidadian writer, artist and activist.