The arguments were recently advanced by Professor Mona Webber, Director of the Centre for Marine Sciences at the University of the West Indies and head of the Discovery Bay Marine Laboratory during a TEDxWorthington talk. “Although compromised, these coastal ecosystems are critical in the fight against climate change effects and they still offer the capacity to recover and the capacity to recover against the ravages of climate change,” she said in her opening salvo. “Mitigating their destruction and loss is very important because Jamaica and the Caribbean has as much as 75 per cent of the population living in the coastal zone and, in fact, if you consider coastal as far inland as the effects of the sea is felt, then the entire island is coastal,” she added.