PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad
Officially, the Caribbean's rainy season begins in June, coinciding with the start of the hurricane season. But recently, heavy rains have signalled an early start to the rainy season, flooding streets, swelling rivers and causing widespread damage to crops.
In Haiti, a simple spring shower that would barely be noticed in most countries can cause devastating floods, due to the severe deforestation and erosion that impedes the absorption of rain.
The postcards portray sand, sea and sun. But key players in the Caribbean tourism industry are warning that it's time to shift gears away from the region's threatened coastlines and instead promote inland attractions like biodiversity.
After more than a century of fighting sea erosion by massively dumping granite boulders along the beaches of southern Kerala state, environmentalists and administrators are beginning to see that this has been a costly and ineffective solution.
Ordinarily they live for at least half a century. But at least 20,000 leatherback sea turtle hatchlings never made it past their nesting ground at Grand Riviere, a stretch of shoreline along Trinidad's north coast, in what's been described as "an engineering disaster" last weekend.
As scientists increasingly label desertification as one of the most burning challenges facing the world today, a small village in China’s semi-arid Northeastern region of Inner Mongolia is fighting back.
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