分类： environment

Every September 19, communities across the globe unite for International Coastal Cleanup Day (ICCD), the world’s largest single-day volunteer initiative dedicated to protecting ocean and coastal ecosystems. This year, the Sandals Foundation — a Caribbean non-profit focused on driving grassroots environmental action and community stewardship — successfully mobilized more than 700 volunteers across the region to join the global movement, with a targeted cleanup effort drawing cross-sector participation in Grenada.

In Grenada, 70 participants representing a diverse coalition of stakeholders turned out for the event. The volunteer cohort included staff from host resort Sandals Grenada, the Grenada Airports Authority (GAA), local business McIntyre Bros. Limited, plus hundreds of students and faculty from six local primary and secondary schools: Gateway Christian Academy, Calliste Government School, Blessed Sacrament Catholic School, and Limes Mennonite Primary School. Working together, the group cleared accumulated trash and debris along a 3-mile stretch of coastline stretching from the airport top road to Devil’s Bay, a popular local coastal habitat.

Heidi Clarke, Executive Director of the Sandals Foundation, emphasized that ICCD is far more than a one-day cleanup — it is an opportunity to build long-term environmental responsibility across local communities. “ICCD is a dedicated moment when the entire world aligns to show solidarity and care for our shared oceans,” Clarke explained. “Our work through this event centers on mobilizing community members and empowering them to take tangible action to protect our coastlines. Every small action adds up to meaningful change, and we are continuously encouraged by the consistent support and collaboration from our institutional partners and local residents, who give their time freely to care for the natural spaces we call home.”

Elana Beckett, Health, Safety and Environment Manager at the Grenada Airports Authority, praised the Sandals Foundation for its coordinated organizing and highlighted the collective impact of cross-partner collaboration. “The event was extremely well organized from start to finish,” Beckett noted. “This initiative not only helps us deliver on our own institutional sustainability commitments, but the direct removal of litter from coastal environments delivers tangible, immediate benefits for marine life, native bird populations, and fragile coastal ecosystems. We are grateful to Sandals for reaching out to GAA, for prioritizing shared environmental responsibility, and for creating the space for us to work together as a broader regional community.”

Rohan Louis, General Manager of Sandals Grenada, commended volunteers for their dedication and the tangible results of their work. By the end of the day, the Grenada cohort had collected more than 600 pounds of non-biodegradable waste for proper disposal. “Kudos to every volunteer who came together and took time out of their schedules to remove hundreds of pounds of waste from our local environment,” Louis said. “Beyond the immediate impact of the cleanup itself, we achieved our core secondary goal: heightening public awareness of how daily human choices impact our natural ecosystems. This is a message we will continue to champion among our resort team and across the wider Grenadian community.”

The 2024 ICCD effort is just one part of the Sandals Foundation’s 15-year legacy of regional conservation work. Since launching its environmental programming in 2009, the foundation has mobilized nearly 200,000 people across the Caribbean to participate in a wide range of conservation initiatives, including marine sanctuary management, critical coral reef restoration projects, K-12 environmental education programs, and targeted biodiversity conservation work to protect threatened regional species. This long-term commitment aligns with the foundation’s core mission: building a culture of environmental stewardship that empowers local communities to protect the natural resources that support both livelihoods and tourism across the Caribbean.

It has been nearly seven decades since one of the most destructive tropical cyclones ever recorded in the Eastern Caribbean descended on the tri-island nation of Grenada, leaving an indelible mark on the country’s history. Between September 22 and 23, 1955, Hurricane Janet, an unusually powerful outlier storm system, tore through the small Caribbean archipelago with a ferocity that defied all prior regional storm expectations.

Local meteorological authorities and broadcasters did issue advance alerts of the approaching danger: the Windwards Island Broadcasting Service (WIBS) began rolling out official hurricane warnings starting at noon on September 22, ramping up the frequency and urgency of broadcasts as the storm drew closer. Despite the repeated alerts, the vast majority of Grenada’s population failed to grasp the imminent threat, adopting a complacent, blasé stance toward the incoming weather event.

That nonchalance evaporated instantly when Hurricane Janet made landfall just after 6:30 p.m. That evening, hurricane-force gusts and torrential downpours slammed into the islands, unleashing 11 and a half hours of unrelenting destruction that stretched all the way to 6 a.m. the following morning. Packing sustained peak winds of 130 miles per hour, the storm scoured the main island of Grenada, as well as the smaller sister islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique, flattening everything in its path.

When the skies finally cleared and the full scale of the disaster emerged, the human and economic toll was staggering. On the main island of Grenada alone, the storm claimed 120 lives, destroyed half of the country’s entire housing stock, and wiped out 70 percent of the nation’s nutmeg trees – the iconic agricultural commodity that has long been central to Grenada’s local economy. For the smaller northern islands, the devastation was even more complete: 27 additional lives were lost, another 500 people suffered storm-related injuries, and nearly the entire population of Carriacou and Petite Martinique was left homeless.

In total, preliminary damage assessments from the aftermath pegged total economic losses at approximately $20 million U.S. dollars in 1955 valuations. In the immediate response phase, public health officials moved quickly to prevent post-storm disease outbreaks, vaccinating 80 percent of the country’s total population against typhoid fever. As international aid poured into the storm-ravaged nation, prefabricated emergency housing units donated from Suriname arrived to shelter displaced residents. These sturdy, pre-built structures became permanently embedded in Grenada’s built landscape, earning the nickname “Janet Houses” that they still carry to this day, a lasting reminder of the 1955 catastrophe.

A large-scale luxury hotel and golf course development funded by Grenada’s Citizenship by Investment (CBI) programme has ignited fierce controversy after a senior industry expert exposed deeply flawed regulatory processes and hidden environmental threats to the island’s northern Levera region.

Under Grenadian law, any major construction project must complete and receive official approval for an Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) before ground is broken. The ESIA framework is designed to identify and mitigate harm to ecosystems and communities during the planning phase, when adjustments to project design can still be made easily. But in this case, regulators at the Planning and Development Authority (PDA) flipped the process upside down, allowing the Singaporean developer Heng Sheng (Grenada) Development PTE Ltd to start building the golf course — one of the project’s highest-impact components — without any approved ESIA in place.

It was only after a successful legal challenge from local advocacy group Grenada Land Actors (GLA) that the PDA finally ordered an ESIA to be conducted. By that point, the golf course was already more than half complete. S Brian Samuel, a GLA board member with decades of experience in project finance consulting alongside the World Bank and Caribbean Development Bank, says this reversed process is unprecedented and nonsensical. “You cannot do an EIA on a project that is already more than half-built,” Samuel explained. “By the time construction is this far along, it is far too late to address fundamental design flaws that cause environmental harm.”

The 500-room resort and 180-acre 18-hole golf course place unprecedented strain on Levera’s already limited natural resources, starting with water. Local residents and utility providers have long confirmed that the region is naturally arid: both the National Water and Sewerage Authority (NAWASA) and power utility Grenlec have publicly ruled out providing additional water for the project. To fill this gap, the developer has quietly outlined plans to build a 2.5-kilometer pipeline that would pump freshwater from the La Fortune River estuary in Sauteurs to the Levera site. Most alarmingly, hidden in fine print of the low-resolution plans included in the ESIA is a provision for a 6,500-cubic-meter reservoir to be built on top of Welcome Stone — a beloved, culturally significant local landmark that residents consider sacred.

“This is a travesty and must be stopped,” Samuel said. Beyond the threat to Welcome Stone, the developer’s entire infrastructure plan is riddled with unaddressed gaps and violations of regulatory protocol. Water abstraction from the La Fortune River requires its own independent ESIA and approval from the national Water Resources Management Unit (WRMU), but the WRMU is not yet operational after the legislation creating it was only passed in 2025. The coastal pipeline route requires land acquisitions via easements, leases or purchases that could take years to resolve, and no separate approval process has been completed for that work. The ESIA also omitted any details of a planned desalination plant, leaving the public in the dark about its size, location and potential environmental impacts. Even the project’s power plan, a 30-megawatt solar farm with battery storage that would require 220 acres of additional land, has not undergone a required independent impact assessment.

Despite these massive, glaring deficiencies, the ESIA’s final conclusion claims the project can proceed with only minor adjustments to mitigate harm. Samuel called this conclusion indefensible, noting that many of the project’s biggest harms are already irreversible because construction started before the assessment could flag problems. Beyond the flaws in the assessment itself, Samuel condemned the lack of transparency around the project, saying key details about the reservoir and desalination plant were intentionally buried in hard-to-read documents to avoid public pushback.

“It is totally unacceptable for the consultants to bury the potential for destruction of Grenada’s iconic Welcome Stone within an illegible figure in the document,” Samuel said. “In fact, it is downright shameful.”

GLA is calling on the PDA to reject the current substandard ESIA in its entirety until all major flaws are fully addressed. In a subsequent article, the group plans to expand its analysis to cover unreported ecological and social impacts of the project and additional weaknesses in the assessment. The full ESIA is available as a public document from the PDA, and GLA is urging all interested Grenadians to access the document and share their concerns with regulators.

Grenada has taken a major step forward in its national waste management and recycling strategy with the official launch of a commercial-grade glass pulveriser, a EC$486,000 investment delivered through the Grenada Hotel and Tourism Association (GHTA) and its dedicated Tourism Enhancement Fund (TEF). The new equipment has been handed over to the Grenada Solid Waste Management Authority (GSWMA) to expand the country’s glass recovery infrastructure, cutting down the volume of recyclable glass that ends up in general landfills and waste streams.