Land restoration is a proven and cost-effective strategy that can jumpstart a green economic recovery. It delivers significant co-benefits for human health, biodiversity, and climate change. In a growing population healthy lands and fertile soils are essential to ensure food security and climate resiliency.

In Barbados, the Walkers Institute for Regenerative Research, Education, and Design (WIRRED) understands this issue very well. In partnership with Slow Food Barbados, the Caribbean Permaculture Research Institute (CPRI), local food foragers and organic growers, the organization is responsible for the largest regeneration project of the region – the Walkers Reserve. An extension of 277 acres of land, a place previously known as the Walkers Quarry, this area was previously a sand extraction mine destined to become a landfill and now is a natural reserve and living laboratory for climate resilience.

The Walker’s Reserve has completely transformed this environment while becoming a place for economic development which contributes to food sovereignty, eco-tourism and education, as it hosts university students globally and offers permaculture design courses throughout the year. WIRRED has established a model of turning challenges into opportunities through nature-based solutions, agroforestry, and permaculture. These include using key regenerative practices such as composting, protecting and maintaining healthy watersheds, increasing biodiversity, building wildlife habitats, establishing mycorrhizal networks, bio engineering, slope stabilization, windbreaks, syntropy and holistic animal management. The NGO is leading the way to climate resilience and serves as a model of positive impact for other Small Island Developing States (SIDS) to follow.  
 

SIDS are among the most climate vulnerable regions of the world due to sea level rise, remoteness, exposure to natural hazards, and other effects of the climate crisis even though they account for only 1% of the total GHG emissions.
  
A strong defender and advocate of SIDS challenges is Mia Mottley, Barbados Prime Minister and UNEP Champion of the Earth, 2021,whose leadership and pursuit for the protection of the environment are opening the doors of innovation and opportunities for positive development in the island.  
 
“What I really, really want in this world is for us to be able to have a sense of responsibility towards our environment, but also to the future generations”. Mia Amor Mottley, Barbados Prime Minister, 2021

The pioneering work of transforming the Walkers Quarry sand mine into the vibrant and complex ecosystem that Walkers Reserve is now. The project started in 2011, and since then, they have planted hundreds of thousands of trees of 134 different plant species, including a variety of fruit trees planted in the orchard and being propagated at the nursery. These trees include Bajan cherry, soursop, river tamarind, pineapple, seagrape, cashew, almond, avocado, Jamaican ackee, Bajan ackee and pomegranate, just to name a few. The Reserve is also home to a wide range of animals, including Moore hens, lizards, butterflies, frogs, bees, and monkeys.

Through the One Tree For Every Bajan initiative WIRRED plans to put 285,000 trees in the ground. The NGO’s mission is to inspire and teach other extraction-oriented businesses around the world how to develop regenerative post-extraction models that benefit local communities and the environment by restoring such areas back to ecological health.  

The success of the Walker’s Reserve is consolidating WIRRED as a pioneer and project leader whose knowledge is expanding into low-cost mangrove regeneration with projects such as ‘The Wetland Restoration Project’ that aims to restore the mangrove ecosystem in the Long Pond Estuary, functioning as a proof-of-concept for the successful marriage of regeneration by extractive industries, ecotourism, conservation and habitat restoration in Barbados. This is a perfect example of best practices for fighting the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.   

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Text by: Marta Quintana Ponce (UNEP)