Delivering change in Clarendon
Country Lead
- Prof. Terrence Forrester
Core Team
Dr. Donovan Campbell, Department of Geography, UWI Mona Campus …water and soils
Dr. Arpita Mandall, Department of Geography, UWI Mona Campus … water and soils
Dr. Adrian Spence, Centre for Nuclear Sciences, UWI Mona Campus…water and soils
- Farmers, both large, exporting and subsistence, market oriented,
- Parish Councils and local community
- Groups including women and youth
- The third sector
The focus is on delivering multilevel change in communities in Clarendon, by working with and through layers of local and central government, and non-state actors. Clarendon is a large agricultural parish, where three
decades of declining sugar cane cultivation and sugar manufacturing has left a complex legacy of negative impact on soils from agricultural monoculture, a near vacuum of land use strategies for the substantial acreages coming out of cane and a focus on national food security and nutrition, sustainable livelihoods against the reality and projections of decreasing rainfall, droughts, floods, coastal erosional and saline ingression.
Resilience building
As part of a larger move to build resilience and improve the ecosystem, Prof Terrence is also involved in a landmark project for mangrove restoration. The ‘Blue Carbon Restoration in Southern Clarendon’ project is designed to restore more than 1,000 hectares of degraded mangrove forests and will be the largest mangrove restoration project undertaken in Jamaica.
This comes out of recognition of the critical importance of mangrove forests in providing economic, ecological and social goods and services, including the provision of coastal protection, habitats for commercially important seafood, and the capture and storage of carbon dioxide.
The project has been enabled through a USD$2.45 million grant through the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) ,to be implemented by University of the West Indies’ (UWI’s) Solutions for Developing Countries (SODECO) led by Professor Terrence Forrester, chief scientist. The fund is provided by the UK Blue Carbon Fund.
Solutions for Developing Countries (SODECO) is a research organisation established by The UWI, mandated to provide opportunities to improve human health, wealth and well-being in developing countries.
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