Dallas Philanthropist and founder of EarthX, Trammell S. Crow, is putting his money where his mouth is and  helping to move the field forward in renewable energy production and deployment.  In an innovative public-private partnership with EarthX The Republic of Palau, an island country located in the western Pacific Ocean, has launched GridMarket and the Global Island Partnership (GLISPA) to bring renewable energy and resilient infrastructure to island and coastal communities. The United Nations high-level political forum helps island and coastal communities achieve their renewable energy and resilient infrastructure goals. This Island Resilience Partnership (IRP) is addressing the biggest challenge in the fight against climate change: time.

As the host of the Our Ocean Conference in 2020, Palau is making the IRP  a cornerstone of its efforts to combat the effects of climate change and improve island sustainability by providing tangible support to local, regional and national governments.

President Tommy Remengesau says, “The voyage to a resilient and sustainable future is not one that is taken alone, but by a movement of cities, states, islands, and countries working together to shape the future we want”. “Over the next two years, the Island Resilience Partnership with GridMarket, EarthX, and GLISPA will proactively engage communities across the globe in order to accelerate the world’s transition toward a sustainable and resilient future.” Remengesau and the IRP will be showcasing the progress of its partners with an exhibition and Island Resilience Pavilion at EarthX 2019 from April 26 through 28, in Dallas.

As a leader of GLISPA, Remengesau is committed to catalyzing sustainable solutions that support the resiliency of islands around the world. Their collaborative approach to strengthening island communities has cultivated a community of international leaders dedicated to a shared mission of the island resilience movement.

“Our partnership has been working across islands for the past 10 years to build island resilience,” says Kate Brown, executive director of GLISPA. “That’s why we’re excited to scale a proven public-private partnership that not only develops national resiliency roadmaps, but implements distributed energy solutions that achieve climate mitigation and adaptation goals. Too often, islands are dismissed as small and insignificant, but this unique partnership demonstrates why islands are becoming a model for the global transition towards resilient infrastructure.”

Palau’s public-private partnership is currently transitioning its energy economy away from dependency on imported diesel toward self-sustaining energy infrastructure; a national plan that was developed and is being implemented at no cost to the country’s government, due to the generosity of EarthX. GridMarket, which was spun out of a public-private partnership with the city of New York following Hurricane Sandy, used its predictive analytics and mapping technology to identify renewable energy and microgrid solutions for Palau’s government buildings, commercial properties and residential homes.

After witnessing the success of the partnership in Palau, Crow committed to scaling the public-private partnership in order to help those communities already being impacted by rising sea levels, ocean acidification and natural disasters.

“We now have a proven model for quickly transforming a diesel-dependent country with a fragile energy grid into a resilient, renewable energy-producing nation,” says Crow. “By underwriting GridMarket to not only develop energy roadmaps for governments, but also implement their distributed energy projects, we’re able to cut through bureaucratic red tape and quickly provide significant support to countries because it’s being provided to them for free. I’m committed to scaling our public-private partnership to coastal communities around the world because we simply don’t have time to waste.”