标签： Dominica

A sudden, unplanned power outage cut electricity service to thousands of customers across multiple regions of Dominica earlier on Wednesday, prompting swift mobilization of repair crews from the island’s main utility provider to bring service back online.

In an official public statement issued shortly after the outage began, Dominica Electricity Services Ltd. (DOMLEC) confirmed that power has started flowing back to customers in the capital city of Roseau, with surrounding communities set to regain connections step-by-step as repair work progresses across affected infrastructure.

Initially, the disruption was linked to an unexpected trip at the island’s geothermal power plant, but follow-up technical investigations have adjusted that initial finding. The utility clarified Wednesday that the geothermal facility was not the root cause of the full outage.

“After further investigations, it was determined that the cause of the outage did not originate from the geothermal plant, but rather a fault on DOMLEC’s Lower Goodwill Feeder,” the company confirmed in its updated statement.

DOMLEC’s explanation outlines a chain reaction that led to the widespread blackout: the fault on the Lower Goodwill Feeder triggered the initial disruption, which then caused the geothermal plant to trip offline. That secondary trip expanded the scope of the outage, pushing the interruption far beyond the initial affected area and leaving far more customers without power than the original feeder fault would have impacted.

As technical crews continue to assess and repair the damaged infrastructure, the utility is bringing power back in controlled, incremental phases to avoid further strain on the grid. Restoration work started in Roseau and will expand outward to adjacent communities as sections of the network are confirmed safe to reactivate.

“We continue efforts to restore power to all affected customers and thank you for your patience and understanding,” the company’s statement added. DOMLEC also issued a formal apology to customers for the inconvenience caused by the unplanned service interruption.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the utility had not released a formal timeline for when full power restoration would be completed across all affected areas. However, DOMLEC emphasized that all available teams remain focused on reconnecting every affected customer as quickly as work can be completed safely, with no compromises on public or infrastructure safety to speed up the process.

As the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season approaches, the Caribbean island nation of Dominica is launching a groundbreaking new educational initiative designed to equip its youngest residents with the knowledge and skills to address climate change and natural disaster risk. The Junior Climate Resilience Champions Program, developed and led by the island’s long-running non-profit Business Training Center (BTC), will kick off this July, with full funding supported by a $22,000 grant from the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility Segregated Portfolio Company (CCRIF SPC) through its Small Grants Programme.

The free program will welcome 125 young participants between the ages of 5 and 15 across two months of summer learning and hands-on community engagement. To ensure age-appropriate instruction aligned with each group’s developmental needs, BTC has split participants into two cohorts. For younger learners aged 5 to 9, core climate and disaster concepts will be introduced through playful, immersive formats including interactive storytelling, educational games, and hands-on group activities. Older participants, aged 10 to 15, will dive into more complex topics, ranging from foundational climate science and local disaster risk assessment to collaborative problem-solving for climate adaptation.

The program’s structured curriculum is organized around five core thematic areas: comprehensive disaster risk management, introductory principles of climate-resilient infrastructure engineering, climate literacy through creative and artistic expression, community-focused environmental action, and individual leadership capacity building. Unlike traditional classroom-only education programs, the Junior Climate Resilience Champions places heavy emphasis on practical, real-world application of learned concepts. Participants will take part in a range of community-focused projects, including native tree planting drives, watershed clean-up campaigns, the development of shared community food gardens, and educational visits to local sustainable farms.

In a nod to Dominica’s own recent history of devastating climate disasters, the program will also include guided educational tours to sites deeply impacted by past extreme weather events. Scheduled stops include the Hurricane Maria memorial in the coastal community of Pointe Michel, and several hard-hit communities in the Kalinago Territory, a decades-long experience with climate impacts that organizers say will help young participants connect abstract concepts to tangible, local experiences. These on-site visits are designed to reinforce the critical importance of disaster preparedness and long-term resilience building for the island.

BTC Managing Director Lucia Stedman emphasized the intergenerational impact of the initiative in a statement ahead of the program’s launch. “This program is about planting seeds of resilience in the next generation,” Stedman explained. “As hurricane season 2026 officially begins, Dominica knows firsthand the devastating effects of climate-related disasters. By equipping our young people with practical knowledge and skills, we are building communities that are better prepared, more aware, and actively engaged in protecting our environment.”

Beyond educating the 125 direct participants, the program is structured to amplify its impact across entire communities through its “Climate Champions” model. Young participants are encouraged to share the lessons and skills they gain with family members, neighbors and peers, extending climate literacy far beyond the program’s direct cohort.

With nearly 30 years of experience designing and delivering youth development and community empowerment programs across Dominica, BTC brings deep institutional knowledge and local trust to the initiative, positioning the organization to successfully cultivate a new generation of environmentally conscious, disaster-ready Dominican citizens.

A landmark international agroecology project has already empowered more than 10,000 small-scale farmers across four nations in Africa and Latin America, expanding their access to cutting-edge sustainable knowledge, climate-resilient technologies, and tailored professional agricultural support. Now entering its next phase of expansion, the Rural Advisory and Agroecology Project (known as AERAS) has spent two years supporting producers to adopt regenerative agroecological models that deliver balanced benefits across environmental health, economic stability, and community well-being, according to an official announcement from the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA).

From its launch, the initiative has centered its mission on strengthening regional food systems while lifting incomes and quality of life for vulnerable rural communities. It operates as a multi-stakeholder partnership between IICA, the Latin American Network of Rural Extension Services (RELASER), and the Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services (GFRAS). AERAS forms a core component of the broader Global Programme for Small-Scale Agroecology Producers and Sustainable Food Systems Transformation (GP-SAEP), which receives core funding from the European Commission, Belgian Development Cooperation, and Access Agriculture.

The project targets persistent systemic barriers that have slowed widespread adoption of agroecological practices in four focus countries: Costa Rica and Ecuador in Latin America, and Madagascar and Uganda in Africa. Over its first two years, participating producers have received hands-on training and ongoing technical guidance across a wide range of high-priority agricultural sectors, including livestock management, specialty cash crop cultivation for cocoa and coffee, small-scale vegetable production, Musaceae crops such as bananas and plantains, and tropical root crop farming.

Beyond direct technical support, AERAS has worked to break down silos between producers, government agricultural agencies, academic research institutions, and private sector partners. This collaborative framework is designed to help farming communities build greater capacity to adapt to growing climate-related environmental pressures and volatile global market uncertainties.

To mark the transition into the project’s next implementation phase, key stakeholders, partner institution representatives, and rural extension officers gathered recently for a focused strategy meeting at IICA’s headquarters in Costa Rica. During the meeting, participants reviewed progress achieved to date, documented key lessons from early implementation, and aligned on long-term strategies to lock in the initiative’s impact for years to come.

Laura Ramírez Cartín, AERAS Project Coordinator and representative of Foro Relaser Costa Rica, outlined the multifaceted benefits the program has delivered to participating producers. “AERAS has enabled farmers to acquire knowledge in areas such as the reduction of external inputs, soil health, biodiversity, synergies, economic diversification, joint knowledge creation, food security, impartiality, connectivity, land governance, and resources,” she explained.

Kenneth Solano, IICA’s Project Management and Agribusiness Specialist based in Costa Rica, emphasized the critical role of sustainability-focused initiatives at a moment when smallholder farmers face intensifying competitive pressures in global agricultural markets. “These environmental, social, and economic sustainability projects are fundamental in tackling the challenges of an increasingly competitive agriculture sector; and they require proper support to generate a long-lasting impact,” Solano noted.

He added that structured reflection and ongoing evaluation are key to the program’s long-term success. “These reflective and evaluation exercises are vital in laying the foundation for our work and defining the next steps of the project, to ensure that this effort will endure and continue to create positive results in the region,” he said.

Oswaldo Páez Aponte, a project consultant, echoed this focus on long-term systemic change, noting that the initiative’s true success will not be measured by short-term output alone but by its lasting impact after the project’s formal funding timeline ends. “The most valuable changes stemming from AERAS are those that will extend beyond the duration of the project. The most significant thing is to ensure that these agroecological practices do not remain on paper but gain traction in the organizations that are providing extension and consultancy services in rural areas,” he explained.

Looking forward, the AERAS leadership plans to deepen cross-sector partnerships between public and private institutions, building a more robust interconnected network to share resources, technical expertise, and shared commitments to sustainable agriculture. Organizers note that these expanded collaborative efforts will preserve the progress already achieved and scale up adoption of agroecological practices across all participating countries in the coming years.

Across the Caribbean, irreplaceable cultural heritage — from centuries-old wooden architecture to unwritten ancestral histories — faces growing threats from accelerating climate change, unregulated development, and decades of systemic neglect. In response to this urgent regional challenge, cultural practitioners from four Caribbean territories gathered recently for a cross-regional dialogue hosted at the launch of *Artefacts of Jamaica*, a landmark digital heritage initiative supported by the Caribbean Culture Fund (CCF).

The CCF, a regional organization that backs community-led cultural work through grant funding and skills-building opportunities, has made expanding public access to Caribbean arts and protecting at-risk heritage central to its mission. The gathering brought together heritage workers from Jamaica, Dominica, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Saba to collectively explore collaborative strategies for protecting the Caribbean’s diverse cultural memory, with a particular focus on the region’s distinctive architectural history.

Three CCF grant finalist projects, each taking unique approaches to preservation, took center stage at the event, all tied to the shared goal of centering community ownership of Caribbean history. The first, the Resilient Houses Project led by Sharifa Balfour, investigates the shared traditional architectural heritage of Saba and Dominica. Balfour’s work examines how generations-old wooden construction techniques are inherently tied to climate resilience, cultural identity, and sustainable development — far more than just historical relics.

Through cross-community research exchanges, public exhibitions, hands-on restoration work, and digital storytelling, the project documents how traditional building methods evolved to let communities adapt to extreme local environmental conditions over hundreds of years. “It’s not just safeguarding our history and culture,” Balfour explained at the launch. “It’s really saving our identity.”

Alongside Balfour’s project, Jamaican visual artist and CCF grantee Idris Veitch debuted *Artefacts of Jamaica*, a pioneering open-access digital archive dedicated to documenting Jamaica’s threatened architectural history. The initiative prioritizes recording historic buildings that are deteriorating, at risk of demolition, or already lost to extreme weather. Veitch noted that one landmark documented in the archive, Waterloo House, was completely destroyed by Hurricane Melissa in late 2026, underscoring the urgent need for rapid documentation. Too often, he argued, historic structures are overlooked by local communities who pass them daily without recognizing their cultural significance. “People walk past them as if they’re in the background, when there’s so much history behind them,” he said.

The third project featured at the dialogue was presented by Stephanie Chalana Brown, a photographer and cultural archivist from the U.S. Virgin Islands. Her work, *Claiming Spaces: The African Story of the Sugar Mill*, reframes the history of St. Croix’s historic sugar mills by centering the experiences of the enslaved African people who built and operated them. Combining documentary photography, oral history interviews, genealogical research, and community engagement, Brown’s work challenges the colonial narratives that have long dominated interpretations of these iconic sites. “The tangible and material evidence provides a framework for us to say that we built this,” Brown said. “Because our ancestors were able to endure, we still exist.”

While the three initiatives range from architectural research to digital archiving to diaspora narrative reconstruction, participants emphasized that all share a core mission: deepening the connection between modern Caribbean communities and the histories, landscapes, and traditional knowledge that define the region’s shared identity.

The dialogue also surfaced a key practical barrier to long-term preservation work: participants agreed that consistent, sustained institutional funding and support remain largely out of reach for most independent cultural practitioners, who often carry out critical documentation and research with limited resources.

As the CCF press release summarized, the gathering made clear that Caribbean cultural workers do far more than just record the past. They actively help communities reclaim their heritage, assert ownership of their own histories, and carry these traditions forward for future generations. As Veitch noted, artists often act as translators, making complex cultural and historical narratives accessible to broad audiences and ensuring that the stories, places, and practices that shape Caribbean identity remain visible for coming generations.

The CCF reaffirmed its commitment at the event, stating that cultural preservation will remain a central priority for its regional programming moving forward. More information on all projects and CCF grant opportunities is available at caribbeanculturefund.org.