标签： Trinidad and Tobago

The global environmental community is mourning the passing of John Agard, 71, the former chairman of Trinidad and Tobago’s Environmental Management Authority (EMA) and emeritus professor at The University of the West Indies (The UWI), who died on Friday.

Widely regarded as one of the most influential conservation voices and scientific minds across the Caribbean, Agard’s decades of groundbreaking work in sustainable development and climate action earned him respect from colleagues and leaders at home and abroad, with tributes flooding in from across sectors in the days following his death.

A decorated scholar and public servant, Agard was awarded the Order of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, the nation’s highest honor, in 2023. His international reputation was cemented through key contributions to global climate research: he served as a lead author for the “Small Islands” chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, a work that jointly received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize alongside former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.

Beyond the IPCC, Agard held critical roles in other landmark global environmental assessments. He led author teams for the “Small Island Systems” and “Scenarios” chapters of the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, work that earned him the prestigious Zayed Prize for the Environment. He also served as coordinating lead author for the “Scenarios” chapter of the United Nations Environment Programme’s 2007 *Global Environmental Outlook*, and co-led the 2007 Caribbean Sea Assessment (CARSEA) in partnership with the Cropper Foundation.

Closer to home, Agard left an indelible mark on Trinidad and Tobago’s environmental governance. During his tenure as EMA chairman, he played a central role in drafting the nation’s foundational National Environmental Policy, and shaped landmark local environmental legislation including the 2001 Certificate of Environmental Clearance Rules, Noise Pollution Rules, and Water Pollution Rules. He also spearheaded the designation of some of the country’s most critical protected areas: Matura National Park was named an Environmentally Sensitive Area in 2004 under his leadership, Nariva Swamp became a Managed Resource Protected Area in 2006, and the Aripo Savannahs received designation as a Strict Scientific Reserve in 2007.

Rose-Marie Belle Antoine, principal of The UWI’s St. Augustine campus, remembered Agard as a multi-faceted leader whose impact extended far beyond research. “A giant in the intellectual world, especially in relation to the environment and climate change sciences, he was committed to sharing his knowledge and worked just as tirelessly as a mentor,” Antoine said in an official statement. She added that Agard, a long-time faculty member at the university, was a brilliant, innovative public servant who gave immeasurably to The UWI, the local community, and the global environmental movement.

Courtenay Rooks, a veteran environmental conservationist and former president of the Trinidad and Tobago Incoming Tour Operators Association, honored Agard’s lifelong commitment to protecting Trinidad and Tobago’s unique natural heritage. “The country has lost a patriot whose life was dedicated to the future of Trinidad and Tobago,” Rooks said, describing Agard as one of the most generous and remarkable people he had ever encountered. “He was passionate about Trinidad and Tobago and always pushed to save our environment. His work at The UWI and the Institute of Marine Affairs was done selflessly, with the same passion and strong focus to help save the planet. The world has lost a giant.”

Colleagues who worked alongside Agard at the EMA and across the Caribbean environmental sector have called for greater permanent recognition of his contributions, particularly his foundational work in development planning, disaster risk reduction, and climate adaptation policy for Small Island Developing States, a group disproportionately vulnerable to climate impacts. They emphasized that his decades of work should not be forgotten by future generations.

Agard’s alma mater, Fatima College, also joined in paying tribute via a social media post, noting that the alumnus did not only transform academic environmental science but dedicated his career to leveraging research to improve quality of life for all. Agard was among the first group of inductees into the Fatima College Hall of Achievement in 2015, honored in the Pioneers category for his trailblazing work.

In its official announcement of Agard’s passing, The UWI reflected on his lifelong mantra, which summed up his core mission: his passion was “to make the world a better place. To make my country a better place. To make my region a better place.” The university remembered him first as a groundbreaking scientist, and above all, as a leader fiercely committed to protecting the planet’s natural environments for current and future generations.

As the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations wrapped up on June 19, the head of one of Trinidad and Tobago’s leading volunteer search and rescue organizations is sounding a warning: historical data points to an upcoming uptick in reported cases of missing teenage girls, even as overall missing person statistics have dropped sharply so far this year.

Vallence Rambharat, leader of the Hunters Search and Rescue Team (HSRT), shared his analysis in an interview with the Sunday Express from Chase Village last month, noting that recurring patterns around major public holidays, seasonal events, and school break periods have consistently shaped missing person case volumes. From Christmas and Carnival to Point Fortin Borough Day and the annual August school vacation, Rambharat explained, these post-event periods almost always see an increase in young people leaving difficult home environments.

Current data already shows a dramatic downward shift in the share of missing person cases involving runaway teenage girls. In 2022, this group made up 38% of all missing person reports across Trinidad and Tobago. Through the first part of 2026, that share has fallen to just 14%, Rambharat said. The overall volume of missing person reports has also dropped significantly, averaging only 22 new cases per month this year compared to higher numbers in previous years.

But despite these encouraging trends, Rambharat emphasized that teenage girls who go missing remain the most widely misunderstood group of missing persons in the country. He pushed back against the widespread public perception that most of these young people run away from home simply to pursue romantic relationships, a harmful stereotype he said leads to premature judgment and underinvestment in resolving cases.

“Most people just say they run away with a man, and that is not the full story,” Rambharat explained. “While that may sometimes be the outcome, the root cause is almost always severe instability and hardship at home. These girls are dealing with chaotic, unsafe home environments, and they are just looking for a way out.”

Rambharat detailed the core underlying issues that drive many teenage runaways: physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, chronic neglect, incest, and persistent socio-economic hardship that makes home life untenable for minors as young as 16 and 17. In many cases, he added, vulnerable teenagers who leave home end up falling for manipulative relationships outside the home that compound their original problems, leaving them in far more dangerous situations than they left behind.

Because of these complex underlying issues, the HSRT often partners with the Children’s Authority and Child Protection Unit to conduct deeper investigations into cases of missing teenage girls, rather than treating them as routine runaways. Rambharat noted that many of these young people open up to rescue team members once they are located, confirming the pattern of domestic hardship that led them to leave.

Beyond teenage girls, Rambharat highlighted two other high-priority groups that require more public awareness and systemic support. The HSRT’s most concerning caseload involves adults between the ages of 20 and 50, the majority of whom are women who intentionally leave toxic situations and do not want to be located by family or authorities. When the HSRT locates these individuals, Rambharat said the team honors their requests for privacy, keeping their location confidential to allow them to build new, safe lives.

The second most misunderstood group, Rambharat added, is elderly adults, particularly those living with undiagnosed dementia. He urged family members to educate themselves on the early warning signs of cognitive decline and to seek regular medical check-ups for all relatives over the age of 60. Catching dementia early, he explained, can help families put safeguards in place to prevent elderly adults from wandering off and becoming lost.

When asked if Trinidad and Tobago is facing a hidden crisis of missing persons, Rambharat framed it as a manageable but underaddressed problem, not a full-blown crisis. He credited the HSRT’s widespread use of social media to publicize missing person cases with helping to bring broader public attention to the issue in recent years.

To improve the country’s overall response to missing person cases, Rambharat is calling on the Trinidad and Tobago government to establish a dedicated, centralized missing persons unit that unifies search and rescue resources across the Police Service, Fire Service, Coast Guard, and Defence Force. Currently, Rambharat argued, different agencies operate in isolated silos, creating unnecessary coordination delays and slowing response times for critical cases.

He also called for increased public investment in specialized search and rescue equipment, including upgraded drones, advanced sonar technology, purpose-built utility vehicles, and a dedicated emergency response helicopter. Rambharat pointed to a recent high-profile extraction of a hiker with a broken leg from a remote trail to illustrate the gap in current resources: it took the Defence Force 48 hours to deploy assistance, a delay that could have been avoided entirely if a dedicated helicopter was available for emergency response.

A dedicated unified unit and upgraded equipment, Rambharat said, would drastically cut response times and improve outcomes for the most urgent missing person and search and rescue cases across the country.

A deliberate act of cable vandalism in Princes Town, Trinidad and Tobago, left hundreds of residents across multiple local communities without power for nearly a day between Friday and Saturday, marking the second major attack on national electricity infrastructure in less than a month. The sabotage targeted critical high-voltage power infrastructure at the intersection of Seebalack Avenue and Pagee Trace, where perpetrators severed cables connected to a 12,000-volt circuit breaker. The damage also cut four primary high-voltage cables that feed 30 pad-mounted transformers serving the Housing Development Corporation’s (HDC) large-scale Fairfield housing development, triggering a widespread blackout that extended far beyond the development itself.

The affected areas included the full Fairfield Housing Development, as well as adjacent neighborhoods of Craignish, Indian Walk, Buen Intento, Mathilda and New Grant, leaving approximately 450 residential and commercial customers without power, according to an official statement released Saturday by the Trinidad and Tobago Electricity Commission (T&TEC). T&TEC emergency working crews deployed immediately after the outage was reported, working overnight through Friday and into Saturday to fully repair the damaged distribution hub. Power restoration was rolled out in phases: the first disconnected neighborhoods regained service four hours after crews arrived, the second phase of the Fairfield development had service restored by 11:05 a.m. Saturday, and the first phase of the development was fully reconnected by 12:30 p.m.

Local and national officials have issued urgent appeals for public assistance to identify and apprehend the perpetrators, warning that vandalism of critical public infrastructure carries severe risks for both the community and the vandals themselves. Dr. Aiyna Ali, Member of Parliament for Princes Town, emphasized that attacks on public utilities disrupt essential services that all residents rely on, and called on anyone with information about the responsible parties to contact Crime Stoppers anonymously at 474-TIPS (8477). “Together, we can help protect our communities and the services we all depend on,” Ali noted.

T&TEC echoed the appeal, adding a critical safety warning for the public: any tampering with high-voltage power infrastructure carries extreme risk of severe injury or fatal electrocution. The commission advised residents to avoid all unauthorised access to overhead lines, substations and related power equipment, and urged anyone with details of the vandalism to call T&TEC’s anonymous tip line at 474-8467.

Latchmi Narine, a local government councillor, described the incident as a total blackout that upended daily life across the affected region for hours. Speaking to the *Sunday Express*, Narine pointed out that vandalism against public infrastructure has become an increasingly serious problem across Trinidad and Tobago. She noted that the perpetrators appeared to have prior knowledge of power systems, as they managed to tamper with live high-voltage cables without being electrocuted – a dangerous coincidence that Narine called “really a sad situation for the country.” To prevent future attacks, Narine revealed plans to install permanent security cameras across vulnerable communities to deter potential vandals.

Many affected residents expressed frustration over the disruption to their daily routines. Kelly Williams, a Fairfield resident, told reporters he was in the middle of watching a World Cup football match when the neighborhood suddenly went dark, after he heard a loud bang that sounded like a transformer explosion. Williams said local rumors indicate the vandals targeted the cables to steal copper wiring, adding that outsiders were almost certainly responsible for the disruption. The outage left him particularly worried about the aquarium fish he keeps for relaxation, which rely on electric-powered filtration systems to survive.

Another resident, Anton Layne, called for harsh legal action against vandals to deter future attacks. “The authorities need to put strict laws and measures in place against vandalism. When they pick up with them, put them inside and throw away the keys,” Layne said.

This latest incident is not an isolated one: less than a month prior, on June 10, a would-be vandal suffered severe burn injuries after being electrocuted while attempting to tamper with infrastructure at T&TEC’s Brechin Castle substation. The intruder made contact with a 132-kilovolt breaker, triggering a system-wide voltage dip across large parts of the country at 9:45 a.m. that day. Security camera footage from the substation captured the man being stunned by the shock and falling to the ground, before he recovered, fled the scene and left his tools behind. He was apprehended shortly after the incident and taken for emergency medical treatment for his severe burns. T&TEC noted at the time that the national grid’s protective safety mechanisms worked as designed to prevent widespread outages, and the grid remained stable after the incident. The commission repeated its longstanding public safety warning following the June incident, reminding the public that any interference with power infrastructure carries potentially fatal risks.

Top law enforcement leaders in Trinidad and Tobago are calling for urgent systemic changes to address a growing crisis of chronic understaffing, widespread officer burnout and unaddressed mental health strains across the national police service. Speaking at a press conference held Thursday at the Police Administration Building in Port of Spain, Police Commissioner Allister Guevarro detailed how persistent manpower gaps have stretched the service’s personnel to their breaking point, a crisis that has worsened dramatically since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic six years ago.

Guevarro explained that over the past half-decade, officers have worked almost continuously, repeatedly called on to exceed their regular duty obligations to provide security for a packed calendar of major national events and public gatherings year-round. Even during extended periods of national state of emergency, officers have been required to maintain full public presence during peak holiday and celebration periods including Christmas, Trinidad and Tobago’s world-famous Carnival, and Independence Day observances, placing unrelenting pressure on the existing limited workforce.

This sustained strain is the core motivation behind Guevarro’s long-running campaign to expand the TTPS’s authorised officer headcount. He emphasized that the crisis demands both immediate interventions and long-term structural solutions, rather than the ongoing government delays that have kept the service understaffed.

Addressing widespread reports that officers have been denied vacation leave due to operational demands tied to the current state of emergency, Guevarro clarified that the TTPS has not implemented a blanket ban on leave. Instead, all leave requests are reviewed and approved on a case-by-case basis, a policy designed to balance the force’s operational readiness with officers’ critical need for rest and recovery. “One of the decisions I made, I spoke to the Deputy Commissioner of Police Administration…We have not been restricting vacation leave to officers, even though the state of emergency exists,” Guevarro said. “We are trying to manage the leave of the officers in a manner that will still allow them the opportunity to get that much-needed refresh and reflection.”

The Commissioner’s comments came on the heels of two back-to-back traumatic deaths of serving officers that have rocked the law enforcement community, underscoring the urgency of addressing unmet mental health needs. Last week, one officer was fatally shot in Sangre Grande, and a second officer died in prison custody just days later; Guevarro noted that both tragedies have weighed heavily on TTPS leadership, with investigations still ongoing to clarify the circumstances of the second death. Most recently, a suspected suicide on June 16 left Corporal Yohanis Joseph of the Sangre Grande Police Station dead, and a member of the Inter-Agency Task Force wounded, bringing the crisis into the public spotlight.

These incidents, Guevarro said, reinforce how critical it is to prioritize mental health support for law enforcement. He added that mental health struggles are not unique to policing, cutting across all sectors of Trinidad and Tobago society, urging anyone showing signs of distress to reach out for professional help without delay. The Commissioner also raised concerns about the additional toll that constant public criticism, particularly unregulated attacks on social media, has had on rank-and-file officer morale.

Ishmael Pitt, president of the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service Social and Welfare Association and an Assistant Superintendent of Police, echoed Guevarro’s warnings in comments to local outlet *Express* on Wednesday. Pitt renewed the association’s longstanding call for greater investment in officer mental health and stronger protections for work-life balance, noting that the suspected suicide of Corporal Joseph has highlighted the severity of long-unaddressed issues the association has flagged for years.

“We are deeply concerned as to the mental health of our officers. We have been seeing a lot of strange developments recently, and this incident yesterday [Tuesday] emphasises the consistent call we have been making regarding the work-life balance of police officers,” Pitt said. He noted that policing is inherently an emotionally and physically demanding occupation, but officers also carry private personal responsibilities, family obligations and personal struggles that must be accommodated. Pitt closed by urging any officer overwhelmed by personal or professional challenges to reach out for available support services.

A Trinidadian blue-collar worker has secured a significant legal victory against the state, after a high court judge ruled he was wrongfully arrested, imprisoned and maliciously prosecuted over a 2016 drunk driving charge that was ultimately thrown out due to fatal police evidence errors.

Thirty-eight-year-old Narace Dwarpaul, a welder by trade, was pulled over on June 11, 2016, during a routine roadside traffic enforcement operation on the M2 Ring Road in La Fortune. Police arrested him on charges of failing to provide a valid breath specimen for alcohol testing, in violation of the country’s Motor Vehicle and Road Traffic Act. But when the case went to a lower magistrate’s trial, law enforcement submitted a breath test result slip that was clearly erroneous: it carried a woman’s name and was dated 2015, a full year before the stop. The magistrate subsequently dismissed the charge, finding Dwarpaul not guilty, and he launched a civil claim against the state for damages in 2019, three years after his arrest.

Dwarpaul, represented by attorneys Ramesh Deena and Christian Deena, laid out his account of the 2016 incident in his witness testimony. He told the court he had not consumed any alcohol that evening before he was stopped, and he complied fully with officers’ instructions to blow into the breath testing device. Instead of processing the result correctly, Dwarpaul said officers accused him of wasting their time. He claimed he was never shown any test reading, was handcuffed, transported to a local police station, and held in a dirty holding cell for roughly seven hours, where he was also denied access to a telephone call.

The state, defended by attorney Rachael Jacob, called two witnesses to support its case: the Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) who oversaw the traffic operation, and the constable who filed the original drunk driving charge against Dwarpaul. The constable’s testimony painted a very different picture. He claimed Dwarpaul admitted to having consumed alcohol, a field sobriety test returned a reading of 91 micrograms of alcohol per 100 milliliters of breath – nearly three times the 35 microgram legal limit – and that the welder deliberately manipulated the breath test mouthpiece, leading to three consecutive void readings on subsequent tests. The officer also asserted he showed Dwarpaul every invalid result, allowed the claimant to make four phone calls from the scene of the stop, and held him in a newly painted, well-kept single cell.

The ASP’s account contradicted the constable’s testimony on key points: under cross-examination, he said Dwarpaul was never handcuffed, and that all four of his phone calls were made from the police station, not the roadside. These conflicting statements became a central pillar of the high court’s eventual ruling.

Delivering judgment in the case, Justice Robin Mohammed highlighted that the inconsistencies between the two state witnesses were not minor errors – they touched on the core facts of Dwarpaul’s arrest and treatment in custody. The judge also emphasized that the submission of the incorrect test slip, bearing another person’s name and the wrong year, raised serious red flags about the prosecution’s conduct.

Mohammed ruled that Dwarpaul had successfully proven the prosecution against him lacked any reasonable or probable cause. He pointed to a series of failures in the constable’s investigation and evidence: inconsistent witness testimony, no accurate contemporaneous records, the missing valid test slip, the failure to call the officer who initially stopped Dwarpaul to testify, and the submission of the erroneous test document all confirmed the prosecution was not built on legitimate grounds.

“The court finds that the claimant has proved on a balance of probabilities an absence of reasonable and probable cause,” Mohammed wrote in his judgment. The judge further ruled the constable had acted with malice, finding that “the inference is that he was prepared to use questionable means – including an erroneous test record – to secure a conviction. I find that it is an improper and wrongful motive.”

In terms of damages, the judge awarded Dwarpaul $85,000 in general damages, with 2.5% annual interest accruing from 2020 through 2026. He also ordered the state to pay $7,500 in special damages, with 1.5% annual interest running from 2017 to the present. While Mohammed declined to award aggravated or exemplary damages, he ordered the state to cover all of Dwarpaul’s legal costs in the case. Total compensation, including accrued interest, exceeds $100,000.

The Deena brothers were instructed on the case by attorney Vishwanath Rambaran, while Jacob was instructed by attorney Sara Muslim.