The project “Building Climate Resilience through Community Led Rehabilitation” will have two main goals.
Under the first and primary goal, IAMovement will be supporting the IWEco National Project through training and relationship building with a “first cohort” of approximately 30 community members from Turure and surrounding areas to become certified “Quarry Rehabilitation Officers”, while working directly alongside the NGO Trust for Sustainable Livelihoods (SusTrust) to carry out different but complimenting activities, and collectively rehabilitating a total of two (2) hectares of land. This will lay groundwork for the rehabilitation of the full target 20 hectares under the multi-year IWEco Rehabilitation of Quarries (ROQ) project; where newly certified community members may be employed to carry out the goals of the national project, being managed by IAMovement and “SusTrust” or other appropriate and capable organizations. This particular [community training] component project may also be replicated, with a second cohort of participants, if this is determined necessary. The key activities under this component will include classroom education, the Vetiver System (VS) plants preparation, installation, nursery propagation and maintenance, and the gathering, transport and mulching of organic waste as a valuable means to building back topsoil. A handicrafts making aspect of the project will be included, where participants will expand on previously begun knowledge sharing about vetiver grass handicrafts making in T&T, where past participants from the Paramin VEEP project will assist with training under this project.
The second project goal ties to the first since a great deal of the activities are related; where the project intends to support the scaling up of the recently completed UNDP GEF SGP Vetiver Education & Empowerment Project (VEEP) which was designed and implemented by the same technical experts within IAMovement and partner organization Vetiver TT Ecological Engineering Solutions Ltd., whom will be leading this project. Many of the past VEEP activities (the implementation of the Vetiver System (VS), propagation of stock in nurseries, and creation of vetiver handicrafts) will be repeated under this project. Thus, by nature this project will already directly be supporting the scaling of VEEP to other parts of T&T. Additionally, where other potential partners (the IDB, and local Green Fund) have already received proposals from IAMovement and have shown interest to support scaling of the Vetiver System (VS) for degraded lands rehabilitation elsewhere in T&T, to tackle issues such as coastal erosion, and degraded public hillsides; and partnerships have also been created on several Caribbean islands who have shown interest in having VEEP come to their countries; a key connective and knowledge sharing digital platform (website) known as “The Vetiver Network West Indies (TVNWI)”,will also be partly supported through this project. TVNWI will feature most key educational information about the Vetiver System (VS), local and regional contacts for vetiver plants suppliers and expertise, the past VEEP in Paramin and current IWEco projects, and other upcoming VEEP expansions, and will have a blog section allowing all interested regional partners to interact and demonstrate commitment in facilitating VEEP replication for communities on their islands. In a key way to the overall IWEco initiative, the TVNWI platform will also lend itself to other regional IWEco projects, which could benefit from inclusion of the Vetiver System (VS) and other rehabilitation techniques which will be explored under this project.