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Citizens of OECS Member States urged to get involved in Climate Change dialogue as part of new project to improve regional response

As part of the ongoing effort to give a “voice” to citizens on the front line, the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) and the Agence Française de Développement (AFD) through it’s “Adapt’Action” program have launched the Citizen E-Participation Platform. This survey is designed to create a direct link between policy makers, planners and climate vulnerable communities, to deepen the understanding of local challenges and to stimulate the generation of endogenous ideas that will inform the regional response to climate change. 

Over the last year the world’s leading scientists have announced the results of the most thorough planetary health check ever undertaken and the prognosis is not good. In May, the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services concluded that human society was in jeopardy from the accelerating annihilation of wildlife and the related destruction of the ecosystems which support all life on Earth. A few months earlier in October the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC warned that carbon emissions would need to be halved by 2030 to avoid ever greater risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.  The commission prefers to see these reports and their dire conclusions not as a cause for despair but a call for action.

The Citizen E-Participation Platform is part of a broader project called Mainstreaming Ecosystem Based Adatation and Gender Equality into Climate Change Adaptation now being implemented across OECS protocol and associate Member States which aims to strengthen the capacity of stakeholders to mainstream Nature based solutions and gender considerations into action plans to address climate change.

The E-Platform is accessible via the OECS website and Facebook page or directly through the following link: https://citizen.succeed-together.eu/