The Precis Caribbean Story: Lessons and Legacies

By the beginning of the current century, there was heightened recognition that the Caribbean is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Yet, there was very little climate change science information for the region and at the scale of the small islands that make up most of the region. To fill the gap, a group of regional scientists representing three institutions and four territories (Barbados, Belize, Cuba, and Jamaica) initiated a project to provide dynamically downscaled climate change information for the Caribbean. The Providing Regional Climates for Impacts Studies (PRECIS)-Caribbean initiative was premised on a shared workload with goals to build regional capacity to provide climate change information for the region from within the region, to provide much needed climate information in the shortest possible time frame, and to create a platform for sharing the information as widely as possible. Ten years later offers the opportunity for retrospection and evaluation, particularly since a phase 2 initiative is being formulated. By both accident and design, the legacies of the PRECIS-Caribbean initiative include i) the positioning of the Caribbean to pose and answer for itself some of the emerging second-generation climate change questions; ii) the emergence of a regional template for capacity building in the sciences through cooperation; iii) an expanded regional capacity to undertake climate science; and iv) a significant body of climate change and climate science knowledge relevant to and at the scale of the Caribbean region.