 The Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, ICA, and the Canaries Community Improvement Foundation, CCIF, have been collaborating since 2020 to build capacity in the use of vertebrate grass as a tool for geo-engineering and a product for economic growth. To this end, the Ministry of Agriculture has partnered with ICA to provide drone safety training to members of the Canaries Community Improvement Foundation in preparation for the drones recently procured by ICA through the Caribbean Biodiversity Fund to monitor the use of vertebrate as a rehabilitation tool. Coordinator of the drone team and agricultural engineer Joel Ramin says this initiative is in keeping with the Agriculture Ministry's ultimate goal of knowledge sharing and capacity development among agricultural stakeholders. So what we're planning to do is just show them the basics of being of safety, drone safety, how to calibrate the drones, how to update the drones, also geo-zones, geo-fencing, because based on the project there might be areas that you will come across that you will not be able to fly the drone. So we want to teach them how to deal with these things and also show them the importance of having a pilot, a co-pilot and different team members, the importance of filling the forms, because the agricultural MOA, for short, MOA drone team, we always keep all our forms so that we can be aware of the flights we have. So we want to show the CCIF group the importance of keeping documents and records. National Specialist of the Eco-delegation in St. Lucia, Brent Theofill, explains that the plan moving forward is to use drones provided under this initiative to continuously monitor the specifically designated sites to determine whether the installation of the vetive grass was effective. This is a really good example of looking at how technology can be used to support key interventions in agriculture. We know that ecosystem-based adaptation practices are very effective in supporting livelihoods and supporting the rehabilitation of everyday needs of vulnerable ecosystems. In these drones, in the process of evaluating these, conducting the assessments and being able to progressively look at improvements to those targeted areas, it's very valuable to confirm the effectiveness of initiatives such as this and to encourage them as suitable tools for other communities and other territories in the Caribbean. According to the technical coordinator of the Canaries Community Improvement Foundation, Elijah Shalmine, the training will enable the validation of the interventions that have already been carried out, as well as future work utilizing vetive grass for slope stabilization and for the rehabilitation of degraded areas. The benefit of this training is to assist in mapping out all our different farms and locations so that we could have proper guidance in terms of how the implementation is successful over the coming years. So we'll be doing monthly records at every site so that we could actually track the data and then we could compile it to actually prove that, yes, this is successful and could be continued throughout the island, so that we are suffering a lot of sedimentation loss on the island and it's affecting our entire coastline. So definitely it is something that is worthwhile and would be a great benefit for internal love information for our future benefit of our coastlines and marine life. Upon completion of the theoretical and practical drone training session, the CCIF members will receive certification in basic training for maintaining, managing and operating of drones. From the communications unit of the Ministry of Agriculture, I am Anisia Antoine reporting.