Promoting resilience across the blue economy is the theme for this year's 3rd Blue Economy Climate Resilience Forum. They invited a dozen of stakeholders to participate in this year's event to share their concerns and solutions to issues affecting our blue space, and how it is being impacted by climate change. Here's what they were talking about:
Felicia Cruz, Director, Blue Economy
"So the third blue economy climate resilience forum is really an opportunity and a platform for key stakeholders to come together so that we can really discuss some of the climate risks and vulnerabilities that are impacting our seas and our oceans specifically in relation to our national jurisdiction. Today's forum really constitutes representation from different patterns including our ministry national climate change office and really our goal is to highlight the impacts of climate change in the blue economy and to look at it from different perspectives from the sectoral perspective in terms of tourism and fisheries, from the community perspective in terms of Red Cross and their efforts as well as the national emergency management organisation and really how they have helped in terms of preparedness in the face of hurricanes and other inclement weather that clearly has caused impacts to our coastal areas and our communities."
Andre Perez, Minister of Blue Economy
"But in essence it's just to put our hands together because dealing with climate change it is real it is happening you know hurricane season just started so its all how we can tackle and battle this change we are facing with climate change, rising water levels the shorelines disappearing, the sargassum across the entire region these are things we need to see how we can battle and how we can mitigate."
"I'm hoping that by the end of the day the panel discussions will be coming out with one comprehensive plan, one whereby it is important that we move forward as a small nation as a small island developing state we must come together and work as one body to tackle these things and everybody has so much to contribute putting our resources together our heads together that we come out as one unified plan for the rest as the time comes."
