Productions: Panoscope

Panoscope . Media Briefings . Island Beat . Our Own Voice . Le P'tit Nouvelliste
Order Publications

Panoscope Articles Index

Caribbean Environment Programme to boost regional water quality monitoring

 By Indi Mclymont, Panos staff reporter

Kingston, February 6, 2006 (Panos) Just how clean is the water that you swim in at the beach? Who monitors the water quality and what is being done to make sure that it remains at a level that does not adversely affect human health?

Those are questions that the Caribbean Environment Programme (CEP) of the United Nations would like to make pretty clear through its proposal of a regional effort to monitor recreational water quality and other issues related to coastal pollution.

“We are exploring the creation of a network of technical agencies to improve the collection of data for decision-making in the areas of coastal pollution, tourism, shipping and recreational water quality,” said Christopher Corbin, Programme Officer for the Assessment and Monitoring of Environmental Pollution (AMEP) at CEP. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) administers CEP from its regional office in Kingston , Jamaica .

“We have to examine whether water quality standards are effective. We have to explore healthy bathing. People have a right to a standard of water quality that will not affect them when they bathe in it,” he said, during a break at a meeting held in Mexico to discuss an intergovernmental legal agreement – the Protocol concerning Pollution (of the marine environment) from Land Based Sources (LBS Protocol).

He explained that based on several presentations made at the meeting on harmonizing methods, standards, technologies and other related aspects of water quality monitoring, UNEP had decided to start an assessment of what measures were already in place.

“We will be working with agencies such as the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), the Caribbean Environmental Health Institute (CEHI), the Florida International University (FIU) and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) to see what systems are already,” he said. “We need to look at where the resources such as the laboratories are, the links between them, the capacities for individual work as well as the standards used.”

He explained that the harmonisation of standards would be key for the success of the network.

“ We have to make sure that the standards that St Lucia uses to test their water quality would be the same used in Jamaica . The countries would have to use the same methods and standards to be able to compare data and set regional standards,” he explained, while adding that he hoped the initial assessment would be complete within the next six months.

Studies have shown that while recreational areas are generally safe for water contact activities in the Caribbean region, bacterial density in excess of several international criteria are consistently recorded in harbours.

According to Corbin, close and consistent monitoring of water quality would be one of the critical keys to the success of the initiative.

“To determine the quality of water, we would have to be consistently monitoring it. Monitoring is an expensive process and it would be hard to expect one country or agency to do so. So we would have to look at whether it would be necessary to have a series of labs doing this sort of work,” he said.

At the meeting in Mexico which pulled together 60 participants from nearly 40 states and territories in the Wider Caribbean region, institutions such as FIU, PAHO and the Oceans and Water Unit of France expressed their interest in supporting the network.

“We would like to help with building a cohesive network for long term water quality monitoring in the wider Caribbean ,” said Rudolf Jaffe, Director of the Environment Research Centre at the Florida International University . “We would love to be able to help provide an early warning system for coastal water quality degradation as well as providing environmental quality data for informed decision-making and management.”

Jaffe was making a presentation to the meeting on what his organisation would be able to offer the regional cooperative effort. In response to his presentation, Pan American Representative (PAHO), Teofilo Monteiro said that PAHO would also assist.

“We have been working with countries on recreational water quality since 1996 when the World Health Organisation launched its guidelines,” said Monteiro. “We would be interested inS a project to compile a database of recreational water quality standards for the Wider Caribbean region.

At the same time the French representative at the meeting, Sylvie Ravalet said that France was about to start a similar water-monitoring project and could also collaborate with the efforts.