A small group of Indigenous women in northern Guyana are the latest weapon in the fight against climate change in this South American country where 90% of the population lives below sea level.
Armed with drones, the women are scanning mangrove forests for illegal cutting and expect to soon start collecting soil samples and mangrove litter to measure the carbon held in remote coastal ecosystems that have long been out of reach for scientists. Such data could nudge the government to create policies and programs to protect critical areas.
A World Bank report has cautioned that "the impact of rising sea levels and intensified storm surges in Guyana would be among the greatest in the world, exposing 100% of the country's coastal agriculture and 66.4% of coastal urban areas to flooding and coastal erosion." "We've never done a blue carbon baseline in Guyana before," Arjoon-Martins said. "We want to quantify how much carbon this entire landscape stores, not just the trees."
Guyana Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo, who helped launch the 2009 low-carbon development strategy when he was president and has long led the fight to protect the country's forests and mangroves, dismissed environmental concerns tied to oil production and greenhouse gas emissions. He called the oil production a "little operation" and criticism from environmentalists as "nonsense.
"It is me giving back to the environment," said Shakira Yipsam, 19, who leads the drone team and lives in the Amerindian village of Aruka Mouth, located near a river that drains into the Atlantic.
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