Building resilience for adaptation to climate change and climate vulnernabilities in agriculture in Saint Lucia

Saint Lucia’s agricultural sector provides the main source of livelihood security, household food security and incomes for 22% of the population. The productivity of the livelihood base is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, such as hurricanes, intense rainfall, floods, droughts and temperature changes. Even normal rainfall can a trigger multiple landslides with extensive soil erosion and heavy sedimentation, which results in devastating losses to the farms. Small livestock farmers experience mortality in the herds, particularly among the young in goats and sheep, with cooler weather from prolonged rainfall, and small aquaculture farmers frequently experience losses, as the ponds go into disuse from siltation.

The project goal is to build resilience in Saint Lucia’s the agriculture sector for livelihoods security through enhanced adaptive capacities for climate change and climate variability. The project objective is to increase the resilience of rural farm communities, increasing farm productivity, water and livelihood security and reducing vulnerability to natural hazards, climate vulnerability and change.

The following three integrated components are proposed to capture the interventions of the project:

• Building resilience and sustainability of farming systems through interventions for water security, soil conservation and management
• Establishing green agro-parks, including the use of solar energy, for increased efficiency in resilience farming systems
• Knowledge management and transfer for capacity building to institutional and local level adaptive capacities.

Project Documents