While the Cayman Islands struggles to find money to protect its indigenous iguanas and parrots, nearly $40 million sits in a specially established Environmental Protection Fund.
The fund was set up in 1997 to acquire land for conservation purposes and other environmental projects. But in the intervening 15 years, it has mostly been used to help shore up the government’s reserve cash coffers, as well as for some infrastructure projects and post-Hurricane Ivan clean-up.
Director of the Department of Environment Gina Ebanks-Petrie said the fund had not been meant to be used by government, but rather to buy land and support conservation efforts.
“The only way we will ever get conservation land is to buy it at sale market value. We realised some time ago that we would need to get some money in order to do that and for other conservation projects, not just government conservation, but for other conservation organisations, like the National Trust.
“The idea was that you would apply for grant money from the fund if your project met certain criteria. It was also envisaged to be out of the hands of government as a separate trust to be managed by a board of trustees comprising government and private sector. That is not how it has transpired,” she said.
According to the 2011/2012 Annual Plan and Estimates, the Environment Protection Fund contained $39.8 million and receives between $4 million and $5 million a year, gathered through departure taxes charged to travellers leaving Cayman via the airport or the cruise ship terminal.
Instead of being used for environmental projects, the Environmental Protection Fund is mostly used to bolster the reserve funds the government is legally required to have under the Public Management and Finance Law to run Cayman for 90 days.
Fewer grants
Because the Department of Environment and conservation organisations such as the Cayman Islands National Trust have little access to the Environmental Protection Fund, they seek external grants from abroad.
“The Department of Environment over the years has had to rely more and more on grants, particularly as our own operating budget has been cut quite a lot over the last few years,” Ms Ebanks-Petrie said.
However, as conservation efforts worldwide increase, the demand for such grants is growing, meaning Cayman has more competition when bidding for funds. Cayman also finds itself at a disadvantage when asking for these funds because it lacks a national conservation law, Ms Ebanks-Petrie said.
That lack of a comprehensive conservation law, which would protect locally threatened species and land, led the UK’s Overseas Territories Environment Programme to turn down a request for funds from the Cayman Islands Department of Environment to help protect the endangered Cayman Parrot.
In notifying the Department of Environment that it would not be providing funds for the project, the Overseas Territories Environment Programme stated: “The panel liked this strong proposal, but felt that without a conservation law being in place, it would not be worthwhile to fund the work.”
Ms Ebanks-Petrie said the project had entailed finding a solution to the “intractable problem” of dealing with local endangered parrots that face threats from local farmers whose produce they destroy.
“The project got good reviews and we probably would have gotten the funding except that one of the things that the OTEP does is evaluate risks when they give money and they felt that because we did not have a proper conservation legislation framework, it probably did not make sense for them to give us the money,” she said.
More reactions like that from grant-giving bodies, as well as the possibility that some external grants might not be made available if those bodies determined that Cayman’s own Environmental Protection Fund could be used for the projects it is requesting funding for, concerns Ms Ebanks-Petrie.
Some of the money in the Environmental Protection has gone toward local conservation – enabling the purchase of some land at Barkers and to pay for a portion of land for the Cayman Brac Parrot Reserve.
“The problem is that there’s no surety, we cannot with confidence plan acquisition of land, for example, because we don’t know to what extent the fund is going to be tied up in this other role it plays. It was never intended to be part of the government’s reserve. It was always meant to be used for conservation projects,” the environment director said.
Under the proposed National Conservation Bill, which has undergone several drafts over many years, but has not been finalised and has not been yet been brought before the Legislative Assembly to be passed into law, a conservation fund would be set up into which fines and other environment-related fees would paid into. It could also accept transfers of funds from the Environmental Protection Fund, said Ms Ebanks-Petrie.
Travellers departing by air are charged $3.28 and cruise ship visitors about $1.60 each for the Environmental Protection Fund as part of their departure tax.
Since it was established 15 years ago, the money in the Environmental Protection Fund has rarely been spent on the projects for which it was established. It has been spent on roads and infrastructure development and after Hurricane Ivan in 2004, some $10 million of it was spent on clean-up operations.
Over the years, money has been transferred from the Environmental Protection Fund into other funds, such as the Capital Development Fund and into the government’s General Reserve Fund. For example, at the end of 2000, when about $3.3 million was collected in the fund, there was a transfer of $5.2 million the General Reserve, leaving the Environment Protection Fund in deficit.
Transfers from the fund date back to its first year of operation, with an auditor general’s report in 1998 showing 18 capital projects were funded by $1.7 million from the environmental fund, but only three related to environmental protection.