Earth Today | CANARI launches knowledge platform, financial product to support local ‘green-blue’ businesses | News

THE CARIBBEAN Natural Resources Institute (CANARI) has launched the Caribbean Local Green-Blue Enterprises Knowledge Platform and the Root Capital Financial Product to support Caribbean businesses with the potential to positively impact the global or local environment, community, society and/or economy.

CANARI – a regional technical non-profit institute which has been working across the region for 30 years to promote and facilitate stakeholder participation in the stewardship of natural resources in the Caribbean – has been supporting local green-blue enterprises as they strive to meet triple-bottom line returns, namely, economic, environmental and social, for a decade.

They include informal and formal businesses which use ‘green’ business models, develop green products, or green their business practices. Community ecotourism, craft, small-scale fisheries and agro-processing are nature-based businesses that are very important in rural communities across the Caribbean and types of local green-blue enterprises.

“Local green-blue enterprises are a key pathway to environmentally sustainable, inclusive, and resilient economic development in the Caribbean, but are an invisible and underserved sector,” said Nicole Leotaud, CANARI’s executive director, in a release to the media.

“The Caribbean Local Green-Blue Enterprises Knowledge Platform seeks to catalyse and facilitate enhanced support for these unique enterprises through building awareness and understanding of the needs and opportunities for this sector. This platform will benefit these enterprises and their networks, green marketplaces, policy and regulatory agencies, business support organisations and financial institutions,” she added.

Limited access to finance is a main challenge facing local green-blue enterprises in, for example, Trinidad and Tobago.

“The Root Capital Financial Product was developed as a fund operated by an LGE co-operative, which aims to provide tailored support to local green-blue enterprises (LGE) through the provision of finance, capacity-building, mentorship and community,” Leotaud noted.

Development of the platform and financial product was led by CANARI, with input and advice from a multi-stakeholder Action Learning Group on Financing Local Green-Blue Enterprises (LGEs Finance ALG) in Trinidad and Tobago, with representation from key government agencies, private-sector financial institutions, civil society, and businesses.

The work was carried out under the project, ‘Civil society participation for sustainable finance reforms: global coverage’, funded by the European Union and managed by the Green Economy Coalition.