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Thursday, July 24, 2025

Moonilal launches green project

by

20100911

Trinidad and To­ba­go yes­ter­day took a gi­ant leap in "go­ing green", as En­vi­ron­ment Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal launched a sig­nif­i­cant pi­lot project. Mooni­lal gushed that the un­der­tak­ing was a "tem­plate and ex­am­ple for oth­er lo­cal and re­gion­al green projects."

In the midst of high-pow­ered sec­tor of­fi­cials, the min­is­ter ini­ti­at­ed Nar­i­va Swamp Restora­tion, Car­bon Se­ques­tra­tion and Liveli­hoods Project, which, he said, could give Trinidad and To­ba­go "glob­al vis­i­bil­i­ty as a com­mit­ted mem­ber of the green glob­al econ­o­my on four lev­els." The first, he said, per­tains to the re­plant­i­ng of 1,300 hectares of de­grad­ed land, which, he added, "will demon­strate our com­mit­ment to en­vi­ron­men­tal restora­tion in a sus­tain­able man­ner."

The restora­tion will see a re­turn of sev­er­al species of wildlife that had pre­vi­ous­ly at­tract­ed vis­i­tors, Mooni­lal said. Sec­ond­ly, the project will in­te­grate the com­mu­ni­ty as the chief source of labour and skills, he told the au­di­ence at the launch. He iden­ti­fied ex­am­ples of "liveli­hood gen­er­a­tion" as nurs­ery op­er­a­tors, tree plant­i­ng and tend­ing, fire pre­ven­tion, fish­ing, tour guid­ing and com­mu­ni­ty farm­ing. Fur­ther, the project has "ded­i­cat­ed sig­nif­i­cant re­sources to com­mu­ni­ty and pub­lic aware­ness and ed­u­ca­tion, and will fo­cus is­sues per­tain­ing to sus­tained use of the re­source," Mooni­lal said.

Fourth­ly, the flag­ship ven­ture rep­re­sents T&T's "first en­try in­to the car­bon mar­ket where the gains from new, hu­man-in­duced for­est growth rep­re­sent car­bon stock that can be mon­e­tised on the in­ter­na­tion­al car­bon mar­ket and en­hance rev­enue gen­er­a­tion." He added that this en­hances the coun­try's rep­u­ta­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly as a small is­land State seek­ing to ad­dress our in­ter­na­tion­al com­mit­ments in the cur­rent ef­fort to ar­rest and min­imise the im­pacts of cli­mate change." Mooni­lal said: "As the Min­is­ter with re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the en­vi­ron­ment, I feel the time is right to ex­plore the av­enues avail­able for green growth in the econ­o­my."

He added that "all in­di­ca­tors point that this is the right way to go and I am anx­ious to start hav­ing more dis­cus­sions with my min­istry's agen­cies to make this goal a re­al­i­ty." Of­fi­cials at­tend­ing the func­tion in­clud­ed Dr Joth Singh, CEO of the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty, Prof John Agard of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, and Ken­ny Singh, Deputy Con­ser­va­tor of Forests. Sym­bol­ic plant­i­ng of trees al­so took place.


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