The Sustainable Island Resource Management Mechanism (SIRMM) Project has as its overall objective the establishing of a comprehensive policy and institutional approach to the management of island biodiversity. To accomplish this objective one of the main outcomes of this project is the creation of a GIS mapping tool in order to assist government agencies in the country to access up-to-date data on specific environmental indicators. This is known as the Environmental Information Management and Advisory System (EIMAS).
Consultants were contracted to complete the “Mapping and Assessment of Antigua and Barbuda’s Ecosystem Resources” and in 2010 delivered the EIMAS which is to be used primarily to understand the distribution of existing natural resources and additionally to manage these resources in a sustainable manner. As stated in Annex 6 of the original project document, the initial set of data would have been provided by various government agencies and NGOs. However, one of the hurdles that had to be overcome by the consultants during the creation phase was gathering a good deal of existing data that was scattered everywhere with no central depository and no source or metadata for most of the information. For this reason one of their main recommendations was to develop a data repository for the EIMAS that will allow the data to be protected, shared, maintained and updated by a process that keeps it current.
A first training was offered to the technical staff from the pilot agencies in July, 2009 on GIS spatial analysis and data mining. A follow-up training exercise was conducted in November, 2010 in order to introduce the EIMAS. A subsequent training workshop was held in April, 2011 that focused on GIS Application Development in support of the EIMAS. Originally, the project suggested the establishing of six pilot agencies however, the number grew to 10 in order to accommodate other agencies that would have had a vested interest in the system. These 10 agencies participated in the training exercises and will have access to the EIMAS. The hub will be housed at the Surveys Division principally because they have the technical staff to manage GIS software and also the hardware resources. They are currently in the process of establishing a GIS unit and are constantly developing more capacity.
The next step is for the EIMAS to be updated with the digitizing of the 2010 aerial photos of Antigua and Barbuda. In June, 2011 the project will be co-financing two UWI undergraduate student interns to come to Antigua and Barbuda to conduct this work. This is a great priority for the results that it will yield. New layers of the various real-life features will be created and comparative analysis between data from 2004 and 2010 will be conducted. One of the main implications of these new layers will be their usage in the drafting of the Antigua and Barbuda Land Use Plan. The digitizing should be completed by August, 2011 allowing for work on activities that have been on standby on the project, to resume.
The potential of the EIMAS is immeasurable. This tool will have the ability to assist many government agencies in fulfilling their mandates at much greater capacities. Some of the many applications include assisting in development planning, identifying lands suitable for agriculture, watershed risk assessments, flood risk assessments, landslide risk assessments, land use impact assessments among many others. In order to maximize on the usage of this tool further trainings and investments into data collection is needed but unfortunately the budget allocated for this outcome is quickly being depleted. Further funding will inevitably ensure sustained use of the EIMAS and more application developments.
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