Holopelagic species of Sargassum pose a challenge to Caribbean countries. It disrupts fishing operations through entanglement in nets; deters beach going tourists due to its odour during decomposition, and harms coral reefs and mangroves through smothering. The removal of Sargassum is costly and is considered a regional disaster. The SarGASsum project, funded by the European Union grant-funded project Harnessing Innovative Technologies to Support Resilient Settlements on the Coastal Zones of the Caribbean (HIT RESET Caribbean), addresses these issues by developing an app to estimate the mass of Sargassum mats in the ocean and tracks their shoreline movements. This technology will help fishermen avoid the Sargassum mats and also enables local government officials to plan for beach clean-up operations to protect the tourism industry. It also helps to make ocean harvesting of Sargassum an economically viable option by selective targeting. By September 2024, with previously developed technology, SarGASsum aims to convert ocean harvested Sargassum into biofuel for automotive use. Collaboration with a local oil company for commercialization, scaling up of operations is underway. SarGASsum serves as a case study for scaling research and this project will produce a SarGASsum plan that will guide the Technical Lead (Rum & Sargassum Inc.) by identifying constraints to horizontal and vertical scaling and recommending mitigation strategies. Lessons learnt will allow the other eight coastal climate resilience projects under HIT RESET Caribbean to evaluate potential pathways for scaling up. These and other inputs culminate in a User Guide on Best Practices for the scaling of innovative, blue economy and coastal climate resilience projects which build capacity to expand impacts, facilitate sustainability and commercialization of innovations which address climate resilience, particularly those that contribute to the blue economy. This project complements HIT RESET Caribbean and allow an extension of the work by creating frameworks for scaling innovations.
