Turks & Caicos.

How does Turks & Caicos compare in Caribbean?

Scored Caribbean destinations, Eco Index.

The global top 10 of the 77 destinations scored

What is Turks & Caicos particularly good at?

✓ Natural fibres, scored 5/5. Straw work here was never decorative. It was equipment, and that is what makes it a real swap rather than a souvenir. Weavers harvest fanner grass, silver top palm and buffalo top palm locally and dry the material for two to three weeks before working it. The tightly coiled fanner basket was a working tool, used to carry water and to winnow maize from chaff to make grits, and buffalo top palm thatched the roofs of the early island houses. A basket that once carried water will certainly carry your shopping. The Middle Caicos Co-op was founded in 1998 to preserve the artform and pay weavers fairly, and it sells only locally made handcrafts. Its store at Major Hill on North Caicos works as both shop and workspace, so you can watch the weaving and buy on the spot. On islands importing over ninety per cent of their food, this is one of the few things here that is genuinely of the place.

✓ Conservation, scored 4/5. This is where the Turks and Caicos are genuinely strong. National Parks were established in 1975 under the National Parks Ordinance. The estate now runs to 35 protected areas covering 71,714 hectares, five terrestrial and 28 marine, made up of 11 national parks, 11 nature reserves, four sanctuaries and nine areas of historic interest. The largest single reserve, the North, Middle and East Caicos Nature Reserve, is also a Ramsar wetland of international importance and covers about 58,600 hectares, roughly 145,000 acres. Enforcement is explicit. Fishing is prohibited in all protected areas with fines of US$50,000 per infraction, and camping, fires and littering carry fines too. The honest tension is what happens outside the boundaries. The UK Overseas Territories Conservation Forum names rapid and poorly regulated built development as a leading threat, alongside invasive lionfish and Australian pine, and declining fish stocks from habitat loss and overharvesting.

✓ Culture, scored 4/5. Two threads, both properly documented. The Lucayan archaeology is significant: MC-6 on Middle Caicos is a complex late Lucayan site in the Classic Taino tradition, around 1500 CE, with a stone lined court in its plaza used as a calendric device keyed to solstices and equinoxes, and a Lucayan built road. The oldest known pre Columbian site in the islands is Coralie on Grand Turk, dated to roughly 1,100 to 1,400 years old. The second is salt. Bermudians began raking salt on Grand Turk in the 1670s, later Salt Cay and then South Caicos, using natural shallow inland salinas. The industry collapsed in the 1960s after roughly 300 years, and the abandoned salinas, canals and ruined windmills are still there. See both at the Turks and Caicos National Museum in Guinep House on Grand Turk, a publicly funded non profit trust opened in 1991, created largely in response to the Molasses Reef Wreck, the oldest scientifically excavated European shipwreck in the Americas.

Where does Turks & Caicos score worst?

✕ Organic farming, scored 1/5. There is effectively no agriculture to certify. The islands are low, dry limestone, over 90 per cent of food is imported, and the national tourism guide's own advice on buying local produce points you to supermarkets rather than to any market. We found no certified organic producer and no organic growing project. The genuinely local food here is from the sea, not the soil, and we would rather tell you that than construct a farm to table story that does not exist.

✕ Plant-based eating, scored 1/5. We could not verify a named public produce market with days and location, and with more than 90 per cent of food imported we are not going to invent a farm to table story here. Eat well by all means. Just know that on these islands local means the sea and the kitchen rather than the soil.

✕ Recycling, scored 1/5. A documented crisis. Most waste goes to unlined landfills. Waste at Providenciales rose from 12 to 130 tonnes a day between 2005 and 2016, and the Wheeland landfill has suffered uncontrolled dumping, fires and hazardous waste exposure, with residents near the Provo and Grand Turk dumps enduring toxic fumes for years. Government spent US$500,000 extinguishing hotspot fires. Bottle Creek is planned as the country's first engineered landfill, with leachate collection, a civic amenity site and a composting plant. Until that exists, assume nothing you throw away here is recovered.

Energy, 2/5

The Turks and Caicos Islands generate almost all of their electricity from imported diesel, run by the national utility (formerly FortisTCI), with solar and battery microgrids still only a couple of megawatts, around 2% of supply as of 2022. Partly because of this fossil grid, tourism and heavy reliance on imports, territorial CO2 emissions are high for a small island at about 8.14 tonnes per person (2024).

Food and farming, 1/5

Over 90 per cent of the food consumed in the Turks and Caicos is imported. The islands are low lying, dry limestone with minimal domestic agriculture, and we found no verified national crop production figures at all.

Consequence: It is the lowest-scoring part of Turks & Caicos's record, so it is where the score moves first.

Heritage, 4/5

For a small territory the Turks and Caicos hold strong living African Caribbean heritage. Ripsaw, the local rake-and-scrape music thought to have originated here, is played on a carpenter's handsaw scraped with a metal object, backed by drums, concertina and shakers.