Jost van Dyke Environment Information Centre
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Island Resources Foundation - Our Partner for Research and Analysis
Island Resources Foundation (IRF), a partner to the JVD Preservation Society for
implementation of this project, will be responsible for selecting and assembling an
interdisciplinary team of environmental specialists with Caribbean and BVI experience to
research, analyze, synthesize, write, and edit the Environmental Profile.
The Foundation was established in the Caribbean in the early 1970s as a regional non-
governmental organisation dedicated to assisting small island states to protect and enhance
their environments and to pursue development options that preserve the special qualities of
island life. IRF is a not-for-profit, non-endowed, operating foundation, initially incorporated
in 1971 in the U.S. Virgin Islands and since registered as a non-profit company in the British
Virgin Islands. A full list of the Foundation’s funded programmes, published reports and
other programme products can be found at the IRF website, www.irf.org.
The Foundation’s relationship with the BVI dates back to its earliest years when, in 1974, it
prepared for the BVI Government what may have been the Eastern Caribbean’s first island-
specific “Environmental Guidelines for Development Planning”. More recently, for the last
five years the Foundation has, in partnership with the BVI National Parks Trust, carried out
a major programme designed to strengthen the institutional, legal, and policy framework
for protected area management in the BVI, including the enactment of a modern National
Parks Act (2006), with Regulations to the Act drafted but pending review by Government.
From 1987 to 1993, Island Resources Foundation, working with the Caribbean
Conservation Association (the region’s leading, membership-based environmental NGO),
developed and published eight Country Environmental Profiles with funding provided by
the U.S. Agency for International Development and the United Nations Development
Programme. These documents—prepared for Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica,
Grenada, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines—
represent the most comprehensive environmental overviews prepared to date for each of
the target islands and continue to be widely consulted by resource managers, researchers,
students, policy makers, and development planners throughout the Caribbean. No
Environmental Profile has been produced for the Territory of the British Virgin Islands,
although UNDP had indicated a willingness to support a BVI Profile at the time it undertook
funding of the Anguilla and Montserrat Profiles.
To carry out its responsibilities under this project, IRF will draw upon the technical expertise
of its staff and affiliated programme associates, each of whom is familiar with both the
physical and institutional environments of the British Virgin Islands.
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