Mireille Linares (ELP 2003, 2024) | Ph.D. Student, Mexican Mora Research Institute, Mexico

This October 2024, I had the opportunity to travel to Saint Lucia for field trip research. For a week, I joined the extraordinary team of the Mexican Embassy in Saint Lucia. Inaugurated in 2005, this Embassy represents Mexico's interests before the governments of the Eastern Caribbean countries, such as Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada, the Commonwealth of Dominica, the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. It also represents Mexico before the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), which has its headquarters in Saint Lucia.

[Picture: Team of the Mexican Embassy in Saint Lucia. Ambassador Luis Manuel Lopez Moreno in the middle]

This Mexican Embassy works to increase dialogue with the countries from the region; develop and strengthen cooperative relations, especially through educational, cultural, technical, scientific and infrastructure projects, as well as to promote initiatives such as the Resilient Caribbean Initiative.

The Resilient Caribbean Initiative: “Cooperation for Adaptation and Resilience to Climate Change in the Caribbean” works with 14 Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries to improve resilience to the impacts of climate change, in order to safeguard livelihoods, ensure adequate access to healthy food, and ensure sustainable management of natural resources. During my field trip, I also had the wonderful opportunity to visit beneficiaries of this initiative, specifically through the subprojects “Resilient School Feeding Programme” for students' access to healthy and nutritious school meals produced by local farmers, and “Water-Energy-Food Nexus” where farmers and technical officers across Caribbean countries have been able to enhance their knowledge and tools to implement climate-resilient agricultural technologies and practices.

[Picture: Mr. Aaron Donovan, farmer beneficiary of Resilient Caribbean Initiative in Saint Lucia]

According to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), climate resilience is the ability of social, economic, and environmental systems to cope with climate-related events, trends, or disturbances. The IPCC defines climate resilience as the capacity to respond or reorganize while maintaining the system's essential function, identity, and structure, as well as to maintain the capacity for adaptation, learning and transformation. However, maintaining essential functions while adapting to climate-induced changes also involves strategies and actions to strengthen natural systems and foster harmony with nature. This includes efforts to protect nature, conserve, restore, and sustainably use and share both global and local biodiversity.

I share the vision in which humans take care of the natural resources and the biodiversity this planet offers to all of us. This is essential for our survival and well-being. Among other things, biodiversity is the foundation for healthy ecosystems that provide clean air, food, and other resources; it provides genetic diversity that helps organisms cope with environmental stressors and ensures a reliable food supply, but also it helps the planet to resist climate change. So, why do we continue supporting activities causing the climate problem, for example, with intensive industrial activity, large-scale extractive practices of natural resources, or the consumption of fossil fuels that generate the emission of Greenhouse Gases?

For me, this is the time for climate precaution, investment, ‘not harm’ solutions in peace with nature and empowerment. It is the time to expand the role of indigenous peoples and local communities in saving biodiversity and this is the perfect moment to groundbreaking agreements to invest in regional and local initiatives to make them more climate resilient.

NOTE TO THE READER: This article is for dissemination. Its objective is to generate a social impact through raising sensibility and creating awareness of climate change which affects the international community, including Mexican society.

*Mireille Linares is a phd student in Development Studies, Latin American Problems and Perspectives at the Mexican Mora Research Institute. She holds a Master's degree in International Cooperation for Development from that same institute, as well as a Bachelor's degree in Political Science and International Relations from the Mexican Center for Economic Research and Teaching, cide.