Carolyn Trench-Sandiford - President

Planning, Environmental Law and Management and Poverty Reduction Policy and Practice Specialist

Carolyn Trench-Sandiford has graduate and undergraduate qualifications in Poverty Reduction Policy and Practice, Environmental Law and Management, Law and Physical Planning and Environmental Resource Development, Building and Civil Engineering and the Planning of Rural Services and Spatial Organization. She brings over 30 years of multi-disciplinary experience in being a team leader, lead author and lead consultant in preparing governance structures and tools, drafting legislative instruments, and formulating community, human settlement, regional, land use, integrated landscape and coastal zone development plans in urban and rural communities and the terrestrial and marine realms of Belize.

In addition, her work as a former public officer, and as a private consultant with national and local governments, non-state organizations and civil society and grassroots communities,

and with regional and global institutions and development partners-including but not limited to several UN agencies, the Inter-Development Bank, the Caribbean Development Bank, the Caribbean Community Climate Change Center and the World Wildlife Fund-positions her with unique lens of intersectionality and interdependency of issues concerning climate resilience at different levels and in different sectors.

Carolyn Trench-Sandiford is the President of the Caribbean Planners’ Association and is a former Vice-President of the Commonwealth Association of Planners. She is a member of Caribbean 2030 Leadership Network, a regional think-tank on development issues in the

Caribbean, is recognized as a UN Evaluation Expert and has served on the Physical Planning and Environmental Resource Committee of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Organization and on the Technical Advisory Board of the Built Environment Programme of the University of Technology.