The equipment was sourced as part of the Mainstreaming Biodiversity in the Mining Sector Programme, which was started in the latter part of 2015. It includes: turbidity test kits, soil sieve sets, measuring cylinders, pipets, ion meters, conical flasks and chemical flocculants.
United Nations Resident Coordinator, Ms. Khadija Musa said that this initiative is part of the wider Global Environment Facility (GEF) programme through which the UN is working with Guyana to help keep the country’s biodiversity intact.
“The important thing… in all areas of the environment is to ensure that skills capacity is developed so that the country can have [the] manpower it needs to monitor, verify and ensure that the right practices are being used,” Ms. Musa said.
Minister of Natural Resources and Environment, Mr. Raphael Trotman said that the project has three components; the first looks at illegal mining and non-compliance environmental regulations, the second addresses insufficient personnel and institutional capacity to enforce the regulatory framework and the third addresses the issue of insufficient capacity to implement the environmental regulations and codes of practices among miners.
“As we pursue our goal of developing the resources of Guyana; extracting and exploiting them, we will do so in a respectful and sustainable manner, respecting the environment and ensuring that after we would have finished… we would, to the best of our abilities, restore the environment to its original state so that future generations could benefit from it,” Minister Trotman said.
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