Cayman’s Blue Iguana programme is set to take centre stage on Thursday morning, 29 June, at London Climate Action Week in the UK with the debut of a special government-produced documentary.
Cayman Representative to the UK and Europe Tasha Ebanks-Garcia, in a Zoom interview with the Cayman Compass this week, expressed excitement at the milestone launch of the second instalment in the One Planet Insights series, titled ‘Saving the Blues – The Road Back from Extinction’.
“I think the story of the environment and the story of our longstanding history of protecting and preserving and stewarding and safeguarding the environment really speaks to who we are as a people and as a culture,” Ebanks-Garcia said.
The documentary was produced in partnership with the Cayman Islands Department of Environment and National Trust for the Cayman Islands and features interviews from experts on local conservation efforts.
The first episode of the documentary series, focused on migratory birds and Cayman’s critical role in being part of their flight path, premiered last year during London Climate Action Week.
“This year, now we’re focusing on the blue iguana”, Ebanks-Garcia said.
She said, in next year’s installment, “we’ve got our sights set on focusing on the oceans and on our marine protected areas, and the importance of the biodiversity that sits in the waters around our country”.
The One Planet Insights airs for the first time on Thursday at 9am Cayman time, and will be live streamed here.
Environment, a part of the Cayman story
Ebanks-Garcia, who hosts the series, said it was produced by the Cayman Islands Government Office in the UK and Bryant Media.
It began as a way for the team “to have some digital asset that we could share as a way of starting to build that relationship with our stakeholders in the UK,” she said.
“It was really, really successful in doing that last year and we’re kind of building on that success this year and focusing on the blue iguana,” she added.
This series, she said, was important because there is a lot about the Cayman Islands that people don’t know.
“They know who we are as a international financial centre, and we’ve done a great job of sharing that story. The work that is produced by that industry speaks for itself. But we are more than financial services. So we wanted to create an opportunity to expand the narrative, to share with people in the UK and around the world that we are more than that,” she said.
Once numbered in the tens of thousands in the Cayman Islands, by 2001 there were fewer than 30 blue iguanas estimated to be living in the wild, and the species was listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
As a result of the blue iguana conservation programme, the animals were downgraded from the IUCN’s ‘red list’ to endangered in 2012. In 2018, the 1,000th iguana was released into the wild.
According to the series description, that through interviews, commentary and a panel discussion, the one-hour episode will showcase the blue iguana as an “ecosystem engineer”.
It continued, “Experts will discuss the ongoing challenges to saving the blue iguana and make the case, from a biodiversity perspective, for the importance of preserving planetary species more broadly.”
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