Region agrees to establish action plan to tackle sargassum seaweed
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC) — A 26-point agreement to establish an action plan to address the influx of the sargassum seaweed in the region, was agreed to by representatives from 13 countries from the Caribbean and Latin America during a recent meeting in Cancun, Mexico.
It is hoped that the action plan will be in place before the next regional sargassum forum this October in Guadeloupe.
Signatories to the agreement include Belize, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and Trinidad and Tobago.
The agreement, established last week, outlines the need for cross-border information sharing on sargassum monitoring, science, education and entrepreneurship, among other topics.
The agreement also calls on participants to begin identifying financial mechanisms to mobilise resources, to map out control efforts to identify sargassum-related initiatives, and to involve cruise lines in the issue.
The Association of Caribbean States (ACS) will offer a formal structure to facilitate these efforts.
ACS Secretary General June Soomer explained that the realisation that sargassum would require regional collaboration came out of a 2015 symposium on invasive species.
Since then, she said, members have been working to address the masses of sargassum that began invading Caribbean beaches in 2011. Reports of sargassum influxes reach across the Americas, from the United States to Brazil.
“We realise that disasters, invasive species like sargassum, know no boundaries,” she said. “It does not matter which country you are from. … Sargassum doesn’t care whether it is in St Kitts and Nevis or in Mexico. The sea has no boundaries. And because the sea has no boundaries, we are seeing a major impact on our countries economically, socially, culturally.
“But we have not sat down and allowed it to happen to us. We have been speaking about it. We have been putting policies in our countries. We have been engaging with innovators, with scientists, with anybody who could help us to solve this problem.”
Soomer called on attendees to revisit the Cartagena Convention, the 1983 treaty that establishes environmental protections in the Caribbean region. Any of the convention’s signatories, Soomer explained, can call for an amendment to the treaty.
