Antigua and Barbuda.

How does Antigua and Barbuda compare in Caribbean?

Scored Caribbean destinations, Eco Index.

The global top 10 of the 77 destinations scored

What is Antigua and Barbuda particularly good at?

✓ Wildlife, scored 5/5. The Antiguan racer was long called the world's rarest snake, a title Fauna & Flora now gives to the Saint Lucia racer, and its recovery is peer reviewed. Confined to Great Bird Island, a 24.5 acre islet off the north east coast, surveys in the mid 1990s found only around 50 individuals. After the Antiguan Racer Conservation Project began in 1995 and rats were eradicated, the population grew tenfold to around 500 across a habitat expanded to 63 hectares. It is still constrained: Great Bird Island alone cannot support more than about 100 snakes, and threats include inbreeding, hurricanes, invasive predators and deliberate killing by tourists. The Redonda ground dragon is critically endangered and endemic, up thirteenfold since 2017. The Barbuda warbler is endemic to Barbuda and is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, assessed on 29 July 2020, with 600 to 1,700 mature individuals and a decreasing population.

✓ Conservation, scored 4/5. Redonda is one of the best island restoration stories anywhere, and it is properly documented. Miners left behind rats and goats that stripped the island bare. In 2017 Fauna and Flora and their partners eradicated the rats and moved the feral goats to Antigua. Native trees and grasses returned, brown boobies and red billed tropicbirds recolonised, and the critically endangered endemic Redonda ground dragon increased thirteenfold. In September 2023 the Redonda Ecosystem Reserve was established over nearly 30,000 hectares of land and sea, delivered by the government with the Environmental Awareness Group, Fauna and Flora and Re:wild. We have to flag a discrepancy rather than paper over it. The World Database on Protected Areas records Antigua and Barbuda at 16.5 per cent terrestrial and 0.7 per cent marine for 2024, with the terrestrial figure having fallen from 19.9 per cent, which does not reflect a 30,000 hectare marine inclusive reserve declared in 2023. Either the reserve is not yet registered or it is counted differently. Until that resolves we will not repeat the claim that Antigua has met a 30 by 30 target. Codrington Lagoon National Park on Barbuda is the country's only Ramsar site, running the entire west coast, and holds the largest magnificent frigatebird colony in the Caribbean at around 2,500 pairs.

✓ Culture, scored 4/5. Antigua and Barbuda has done something no other Caribbean state had done. In 2023 the Medicinal Cannabis Authority granted Rastafari sacramental authorisation to cultivate and use cannabis for religious purposes, reported as the first in the Caribbean, with cultivation by authorised Rastafari groups exempt from licensing fees. Named recipients included the Nyabinghi Theocracy Church at Creekside, the Ras Freeman Foundation for the Unification of Rastafari at Liberta and the Wan Love Chant at Bendals Village. This built on the 2018 framework, which recognised the government's responsibility to uphold the religious rights of persons of the Rastafari and Hindu faiths through a special religious licence. To be precise about it: this is legal accommodation and recognition, not a state apology. We looked for an apology and did not find one. Barbuda's communal land is the other story, and it is going the wrong way. Under section 3 of the Barbuda Land Act 2007 all land in Barbuda is owned in common by the people of Barbuda, and under section 7 their consent is required for any major development. In MacKenzie Frank v Attorney General, judgment given on 13 June 2022, the Privy Council held that the Act established collective rights of Barbudans as a class rather than personal property interests, so the appellants lacked standing, and the Paradise Found Act 2015, which exempted leased tourism development land from the Land Act, was not struck down. Communal tenure of this kind is rare and valuable, and in 2022 the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the country's final court of appeal, held that it is not a property right protected by the Constitution. Boat trips into Codrington Lagoon through the Environmental Awareness Group and named local guides are the clearest way we found for visitor money to reach Barbudans directly. That recognition has a working shape you can see. GROW (Antigua and Barbuda) Limited, the country's first licensed medical cannabis company, is a joint venture between private business, the state asset company NAMCO, and Rastafari Food For Life Ltd, which was formed by the Nyabinghi Theocracy Church Haile Selassie I Big Creek together with the Ras Freeman Foundation for the Unification of Rastafari. Those are the same bodies granted sacramental cultivation rights in 2023. Its first dispensary opened at Redcliffe Quay in St John's on 15 August 2022, opened by the Prime Minister, and it runs a lounge at Bay Gardens on Hodges Bay Main Road. We note it here as evidence of how the recognition works in practice, not as a recommendation.

Where does Antigua and Barbuda score worst?

✕ Recycling, scored 2/5. The front end is genuinely strong and the back end is unverified. Antigua and Barbuda folded a shopping bag prohibition into existing law rather than drafting new legislation, added tax incentives for importing reusable non plastic bags, and promoted bagasse from sugarcane as the alternative. Plastic fell from 20 per cent of what reached the country's landfill in 2006 to 4 per cent in 2017, though a 2025 review by the Caribbean Policy Research Institute found most of that fall came before the ban and that no monitoring system was built into the policy to measure its effect. What we could not verify is what happens to the rest: no recycling rate, no landfill detail and no waste strategy we could read. This sits at two on the strength of the plastic result alone.

✕ Water, scored 2/5. Antigua is formally water scarce, not merely dry. FAO AQUASTAT puts renewable internal freshwater at about 560 cubic metres per person a year in 2022, below the 1,000 cubic metre mark used to define water scarcity and among the lowest in the Caribbean alongside Barbados on 283 and St Kitts and Nevis on 514. Its one large freshwater store keeps failing. Potworks Dam, a 500 acre earth filled dam built to hold a billion gallons, has repeatedly emptied through drought and spillway failures. In April 2025 the utility reported the reservoir holding six feet eleven inches of water, with extraction averaging 900,000 gallons a day and roughly three weeks of supply left. So the drinking water is now substantially manufactured from the sea. Reverse osmosis was supplying 300,000 imperial gallons a day with new units projected to add a million more, and work has begun at Barnacle Point on a further two million gallon a day plant. Treat water as made, because increasingly it is.

✕ Organic farming, scored 1/5. Antigua has a heritage crop worth seeking out and almost no organic infrastructure behind it. The Antigua Black pineapple is the national fruit, measured at 13.3 to 15.3 degrees Brix with low acidity, and grown mainly on the southwest coast around the Cades Bay Pineapple Station founded by the Ministry of Agriculture in the 1960s. Even at its peak only about 20 acres were in production. Food was 27.67 per cent of merchandise imports in 2024, the highest of the larger islands we compare, and agriculture, forestry and fishing was 1.49 per cent of GDP in 2025. We found no certified organic producer. Wallings Nature Reserve sells locally made lemongrass punch, tea, soaps and candles on site, which is the closest thing to a chemical free local product chain we could verify.

Energy, 2/5

Antigua and Barbuda runs an almost entirely oil-fired grid, with renewables supplying only about 5.6 per cent of electricity generation in 2023. Per-person emissions sit at roughly 6.9 tonnes of CO2, high for a small island economy and driven by imported diesel, tourism demand and air conditioning.

Food and farming, 2/5

Food was 27.67 per cent of merchandise imports in 2024, the highest of the four larger islands we compare, and rising from 24.53 per cent in 2021. Agriculture is 1.61 per cent of GDP.

Heritage, 4/5

Antigua and Barbuda holds a strong living Afro-Caribbean heritage rooted in the experience of emancipation. Benna, a call-and-response folk song tradition that once carried news and pointed social commentary, sits alongside calypso, soca and the steelpan.