Whether it is the middle or working classes, or even the well-to-do, life can start to shrink in the face of extreme weather. Credit: Shutterstock

By Philippe Benoit
PARIS, Jul 3 2026 (IPS)

If you pay close attention to the rhetoric regarding climate change (at least in those forums still allowed to use the term), there has been a disturbing emerging trend among some climate-concerned thought leaders, as epitomized by Bill Gates’s letter to COP30 last fall.

In it, Mr. Gates argues that climate change is principally a problem facing poorer countries: “Although climate change will have serious consequences – particularly for the people in the poorest countries – it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

In many ways, Mr. Gates is correct: the people living in the poorest countries are particularly vulnerable to climate change, and the Earth will continue to be able to support humanity for decades and more. But what the recent record heat wave across Europe has served to remind those of us in more affluent countries is that there are different ways of living — and that living under a heat dome of near-40-degrees Celsius (over 100 degrees Fahrenheit) can stop us from thriving.

This recent European heat wave points to how climate change is also a menace to wealthier countries … today and more so tomorrow when rising CO2 emissions drive even more frequent and severe weather events

Whether it is the middle or working classes, or even the well-to-do, life can start to shrink in the face of extreme weather. It was ironic (perhaps the better word is sad) to see a number of events during London’s Climate Action Week cancelled because of soaring temperatures.

Staying home often becomes the best option, but it only really works as a refuge if you can afford air conditioning.

Those without need to hope to find the rare air-conditioned mall or other commercial space to escape to.

Probably the only ones who remain impervious to surging temperatures are the very rich who can jump on a plane at a moment’s notice to flee to another part of the globe that isn’t facing a heat wave. And all the while, the high temperatures and resulting surge in air-conditioning demand are putting a severe strain on Europe’s electricity grids, raising the possibility of even more disruptive blackouts.

Some analysts have argued that this record heat wave is being driven by the accumulation of high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere generated by the burning of fossil fuels. The analysis linking this particular heat wave to fossil fuel use is complex and beyond my competence (I am an energy expert, not an atmospheric specialist).

However, what is clear from scientists is that we can expect more of these types of extreme weather events as we continue to pour massive amounts of additional CO2 into our atmosphere from the combustion of fossil fuels (currently, over 35 gigatons each year).

Distressingly, climate change will mess with our lives in many ways beyond extreme heat. From wildfires that burn businesses and homes (including of the wealthy as last year’s fires in Hollywood showed), to higher winds that knock down electricity poles and trees, to reoccurring flooding that ravage towns (as Germany has experienced), to an uptick in heat-related deaths and other climate-related health risks, all the while simultaneously slowing economic activity as nature wreaks havoc on the normal ordering of our lives, jobs and economies. It may not add up to a climate apocalypse, but it is far from a minor inconvenience simply to be ignored.

And importantly, as the old Bachman-Turner Overdrive song says, when it comes to the destructive power of climate change, “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.” Indeed, we can expect worse in the future if we don’t curtail greenhouse gas emissions.

Yes, climate change will have a particularly severe impact on the world’s poorest countries. In that regard, Mr. Gates is totally correct. But this recent European heat wave points to how climate change is also a menace to wealthier countries … today and more so tomorrow when rising CO2 emissions drive even more frequent and severe weather events.

So, when politicians and pundits try to limit the impact of climate change to the world’s poorest, or worse, try to wipe it out of our political and policy discourse, let us remember these past weeks and that, aside from the uber rich, climate change is a threat to all.

Philippe Benoit is managing director for Global Infrastructure Advisory Services 2050, specializing in international energy and climate issues.

Residents of Mexico City take shelter from the heat in a covered area, on a central street in the capital, in the month of March, when spring has not even arrived yet in the country. Heat waves will become more frequent and will last longer, due to the climate emergency. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Mar 14 2023 (IPS)

On Mar. 9, more than half of Mexico reported maximum temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius, although spring has not even arrived yet in this Latin American country located in the northern hemisphere.

In fact, the Megalopolis Environmental Commission, which brings together the federal government, the Mexican capital city government and those of five states in the center of the country, forecasts four heat waves, a level similar to that of 2022 – one in March, one in April and two in May – before summer.

Despite constituting a public health problem, Mexico lacks a national heat warning system, like the ones that other Latin American nations, such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia, have in place.“The authorities must keep the public informed and get them to take the necessary measures. It is very important for the entire population to know what kind of weather lies ahead and to act appropriately. Unfortunately, misinformation is a social problem that we must eradicate all together, but it cannot be a pretext to say that we did not know what could happen." -- Ismael Marcelo

Ismael Marcelo of the National Meteorological Service recommended the creation of a warning system with a regional scope, based on temperature levels.

“Most of the population has a cell phone,” the meteorologist told IPS. “It’s important for the authorities to inform the public about meteorological events that affect us. In a culture of prevention, we have to adapt. At the National Meteorological Service we have all the tools to inform people, a website and through the social networks.”

A heat wave is an unusually hot, dry or humid period that begins and ends abruptly, lasting at least two to three days, with a discernible impact on humans and ecosystems, as defined by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), based in Washington DC.

These phenomena cause public health problems, especially for vulnerable groups – such as children and the elderly – food spoilage, increased air pollution, atmospheric environmental emergencies and forest fires.

The Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization warns that heat waves and other negative trends in the climate will become more frequent and will continue until at least 2060, due to the climate crisis.

In Mexico, a federal country, there are two governments that do have their own heat warning systems: Mexico City, which has a Meteorological Early Warning Network, and the southeastern state of Veracruz, which has a Grey Alert.

The scorching sun

Meanwhile, several Latin American countries do have heat warning systems.

In Colombia, a country of 52 million people, the government Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies monitors hot spots.

Lídice Álvarez, an academic in the nursing program at the Colombian University of Magdalena, told IPS about the relative usefulness of early warnings.

“In assessing how to prevent mortality from climatic events, we found that early warnings help, but it is difficult to predict certain events, because climatic variability further complicates things,” she told IPS from the city of Santa Marta, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast.

“What they do is to say that we are in a heat wave. But the public do not pay attention to the warnings. There is no discipline when it comes to checking climatological variables.”

In Colombia, heat waves have not yet occurred this quarter, but when the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon hits in July, a period of drought and lack of rain is expected, which will bring heat waves in the Caribbean zone in the second half of the year. ENSO cools the surface of the ocean and unleashes droughts in some parts of the planet and storms in others.

In Chile, a country of 19.2 million inhabitants, the government of Santiago introduced an “Extreme Heat and High Temperatures” system in December, which seeks to prevent deaths and protect people’s health during the southern hemisphere summer, through preventive alerts.

The number of heat waves in the Andean country increased from nine to 62 in the last 10 summers, according to figures from the Annual Environment Report from the government’s National Institute of Statistics.

In the metropolitan region there were 81 heat waves between 2011 and 2020 and forecasts point to a doubling of the percentage of days of extreme temperatures in the next 30 years. During a summer day in Chile, 100 people die from different causes, but when the temperature exceeds 34 degrees Celsius, the number goes up by 10 additional deaths, related to heat waves in Santiago.

Since 2018, Argentina’s National Meteorological Service (SMN) has operated a national warning system, which ranges from white to red according to the impact on human health, in the country of 46 million people.

Since 2009, the SMN has used a heat wave alert mechanism in the capital, Buenos Aires, which was later replicated in several other cities. In the current southern hemisphere summer that officially ends on Mar. 20, there have been nine heat waves so far, and in the metropolitan area of ​​Buenos Aires a red alert has been issued due to the high temperatures.

The places marked in red show spots where temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius were recorded in Mexico on Mar. 9, according to a map of the National Water Commission. In Latin America, extreme heat warnings can save lives. CREDIT: Conagua

A worsening problem

In Mexico, population 129 million, events due to high temperatures and victims of heat stroke are on the rise, with the exception of 2020, due to the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic led millions of people to stay at home.

In 2018, 631 health incidents linked to extreme temperatures and 30 deaths were documented, with the numbers growing to 838 and 44 the following year, according to figures from the General Directorate of Epidemiology, under the Ministry of Health.

Due to the pandemic, the numbers fell to 193 health events and 37 deaths in 2020, but the first figure jumped to 870 in 2021, although the latter dropped to 33. However, in 2022 both statistics climbed, to 1,100 and 42, respectively.

PAHO recommends strengthening the ability of the health sector, through the design of action plans against heat waves that include improvements in preparedness and response to this threat, to reduce the excess of diseases, deaths and social disruptions.

It also recommends improving the capacities of the meteorological services to generate accurate projections and forecasts, so that meteorological information can be used for decision-making before, during and after a heat wave.

Marcelo, the Mexican meteorologist, emphasized the importance of disseminating information.

“The authorities must keep the public informed and get them to take the necessary measures. It is very important for the entire population to know what kind of weather lies ahead and to act appropriately. Unfortunately, misinformation is a social problem that we must eradicate all together, but it cannot be a pretext to say that we did not know what could happen,” he said.

Álvarez from Colombia said mortality is preventable. “We have focused on how people are part of the problem and can take measures. They believe that they cannot make any changes, but they are realizing that simple steps taken at home can generate changes,” she said.

Local stakeholders engaged in participatory livelihoods planning in Champasack, Laos. Credit: A Barlis

By Marty Logan
KATHMANDU, Nepal, Sep 14 2021 (IPS)

As incidents of drought and extreme rainfall increase, farmers in Southeast Asia are partnering with experts to develop targeted weather forecasts to work around the threats and, when adaptation becomes too costly, buy specially designed insurance to protect their livelihoods.

Climate impacts are increasing. In 2016, for example, the impact of what is known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) resulted in severe drought and saline intrusion in 11 out of 13 provinces in the Mekong River Delta. This affected 400,000 hectares of cropland, resulting in 200 million dollars in economic losses and food insecurity among farmers. Household incomes dropped 75 percent, pushing vulnerable farmers who had little savings and no insurance deeper into poverty.

Integrated risk management and risk transfer approaches (e.g. innovative insurance solutions) will be critically required for smallholder growers to manage the physical and financial impacts of climate.

A key component of the project, DeRisk Southeast Asia, is to develop a number of adaptation strategies, says Professor Shahbaz Mushtaq, the project’s insurance segment lead at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) one of three project partners. The others are the World Meteorological Organisation and the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, part of the CGIAR.

“So the project is working on improved climate forecasts, new irrigation systems and practices, and improving production systems,” says Mushtaq in an online interview. “The underlying premise is that the smallholder growers need to mitigate their risk as much as they can while developing and adopting suitable adaptation practices.”

“Then, the project also acknowledges that there’s a limit to adaptation,” he adds. “Not all risk is manageable. [It is] when it is no longer economically viable then you need to transfer the risk elsewhere, this is where insurance will play a major role”.

ECOM facilitator leads the insurance literacy workshop with coffee farmers in Dak Lak. Credit: A Barlis

DeRisk, funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, operates in Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia. For example, in a pilot led by the Alliance in one of the provinces in the Mekong River delta, the department of crop production (across levels), extension officers and farmers now sit down with weather forecasters (or meet virtually because of COVID-19 restrictions) to mould a general weather forecast into seasonal and 10-day advisories that target rice producers.

“We really emphasize co-development by multiple stakeholders, integrating information from the hydro-meteorological (‘hydro-met’) experts and the crop experts with the local knowledge of farmers,” says Nguyen Duy Nhiem, DeRISK Country Coordinator in Vietnam.

For example, the representatives will take a seasonal forecast, broken down by month, and generate guidance for specific crops such as: “the best planting date, the best variety to plant and if drought happens, what drought-resistant variety to use,” Nguyen tells IPS in an online interview.

That advice is packaged as a bulletin and delivered using a variety of media, including stationary loudspeakers in villages, paper bulletins or posters and on a smartphone app called Zalo.

The 10-day advisories zero in on daily conditions. “For example, if it’s going to rain on a certain day, farmers are told not to apply fertilizers or pesticides because they would leach into the soil,” explains Nguyen.

He’s happy with the project’s progress. The stakeholders from the hydro-met sector and agriculture sector “understand better each other’s languages,” says Nguyen. “For example, prior to project’s engagement when talking about ‘rainy days’, the agriculture stakeholders and farmers think that rain should be an amount that can be measured in a gauge while for the hydro-met sector that can be any amount above 0.0 mm. The definition of rainy days has been explained during discussions and clearly noted in bulletins.”

In addition, Nguyen says the 20,000-plus farmers who have received the advisories in the past two cropping seasons have been very pleased because the information helped them avoid the impact of damaging weather and make more informed decisions better. If plans hold, other districts and provinces in the region will start developing the tailored forecasts in 2022.

Challenges, according to Nguyen, include the lack of capacity of staff in provincial weather offices to develop the tailored forecasts. Another is reaching more farmers. Although many farmers have access to smartphones, not all of them know how to use them to access the advisories in the Zalo group. Possible solutions, he says, include developing an app or partnering with a telecom company to send messages to all customers in project areas.

In neighbouring Laos, agro-climactic advisories are available for the whole country, in monthly and weekly forecasts, says DeRisk Country Coordinator Leo Kris Palao. The implementation of DeRISK in Laos was linked with existing efforts by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to further improve this system with national partners.

Seasonal agroclimatic bullet poster installed at District Agriculture Service Center in Mekong Delta. Credit: Dang Thanh Tai

The system is automated, he explains in an email interview. Called the Laos Climate Services for Agriculture (LaCSA), the system analyses meteorological and agricultural data from national databases and field-level data collection by local partners. Offices of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry review advisories before being disseminated.

LaCSA can be accessed online through an app (Android/iOS), but for those who don’t use IT tools, the information, as in Vietnam, is also shared via loudspeakers, radio and TV, and community and school posters.

More than 21 000 farmers in Laos have adapted their activities after receiving an advisory. “We are happy with the progress made by the De-RISK project in Laos,” says Palao. “Based on our baseline assessment, most of the responses from farmers receiving the agro-climatic advisories indicated that change in planting dates, use of suitable varieties tailored to the climate condition of the season, and water and fertilizer management were among their adaptation practices.”

Mushtaq says that to further mitigate the ‘residual risk’, which can’t be managed economically through adaptation strategies, his team developed various indexed-based insurance products that are now being tested through a pilot insurance scheme – Coffee Climate Protection Insurance.

“We went to the field and interviewed several hundreds of smallholder coffee growers and industry.” The assessment for the insurance scheme included asking about the biggest risks faced by farmers, whether it be drought, disease, or extreme rainfall, among other hazards. “We wanted to develop products for those risks that are most impactful,” Mushtaq says.

The researcher of USQ adds that if an extreme weather event occurs and a farmer can’t immediately recover from losses, “his production would suffer, it would impact the supply chain, it would impact the roaster, and it would impact coffee production regions. But if farmers could get back on their feet very quickly, it would help the industry, it would the whole supply chain. That’s the underpinning driver for the supply chain industry to co-contribute insurance premiums.”

Mushtaq says he was impressed when coffee growers told him that drought and extreme rainfall are major risks but didn’t want drought insurance because they are able to cope through access to irrigation. “But if there’s extreme rainfall, we don’t have an option to manage that risk, so we want products to cater to it,” the farmers said.

The initial assessment found that farmers have a range of attitudes about insurance — some were willing to pay more than the suggested premium, others would not even consider purchasing, and the majority were in the middle, unsure.

Finally, most agreed on the product. What swayed the doubters was the credibility that USQ and its partners had developed over the years working with the coffee industry represented by the private sector and associations, says Mushtaq. “To me, the most important success factor was the presence of the industry itself. You need to have really solid leadership to drive this agenda. And we were very lucky that we got some really good partners in the coffee industry.”

In stages 1 and 2 of the pilot, farmers and coffee traders will split the costs of the premiums, but in later years, other actors in the supply chain, such as roasters, will have to contribute a portion; the exact division of costs still needs to be negotiated.

Currently, the ‘extreme rainfall’ insurance product is in operation, explains Mushtaq, meaning that if total rainfall exceeds the threshold for the two-month season, payments would be triggered. As the insurance is indexed, the payouts would reflect the amount of protection that farmers chose to purchase.

To get to this point, “we had to run several workshops, and gather a lot of information on how index-based insurance products works,” he says, adding that more needs to be done to increase awareness. Moving forward, the team considers running a campaign to address this, “Awareness is still a problem, and we do need to run a massive campaign.”

DeRISK aims to develop its climate services and insurance products further and work with national partners on policies and strategies supporting smallholder farmers in the region in response to climate risks.

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The remains of abandoned shade houses that one farmer attempted to build to protect his crops from the effects of climate change in Trinidad. Credit: Jewel Fraser/IPS

By Zadie Neufville
KINGSTON, Jamaica, Aug 7 2017 (IPS)

Since 2013, Jamaica’s Met Office has been using its Climate Predictability Tool (CPT) to forecast ‘below average’ rainfall or drought across the island. The tool has allowed this northern Caribbean island to accurately predict several dry periods and droughts, including its most destructive episode in 2014 when an estimated one billion dollars in agricultural losses were incurred due to crop failures and wild fires caused by the exceptionally dry conditions.

In neighbouring Cuba, the reputation of the Centre for Atmospheric Physics at the Institute for Meteorology (INSMET) is built on the development of tools that “provide reliable and timely climate and weather information” that enables the nation to prepare for extreme rainfall and drought conditions as well as for hurricanes.“We saw the need to develop a drought tool that was not only easy to use, but free to the countries of the Caribbean so they would not have to spend large amounts of money for software." --INSMET’s Dr. Arnoldo Bezamilla Morlot

Regional scientists believe the extended dry periods are one of several signs of climate change, now being experienced across the region. Dr. Ulric Trotz, Deputy Director and Science Adviser at the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) – known regionally as the Five Cs – believes climate change is threatening the “Caribbean’s ways of life”.

Dr Trotz noted, “Some countries in the Caribbean like Barbados and Antigua are inherently water scarce. It is expected that climate change will exacerbate this already critical situation. We have seen in recent times the occurrence of extended droughts across the Caribbean, a phenomenon that is expected to occur more frequently in the future.

“Droughts have serious implications across all sectors – the water, health, agriculture, tourism -and already we are seeing the disastrous effects of extended droughts throughout the Caribbean especially in the agriculture sector, on economies, livelihoods and the wellbeing of the Caribbean population,” he said.

With major industries like fisheries, tourism and agriculture already impacted, the region continues to look for options. Both the Cuban and Jamaican experiences with forecasting tools means their use should be replicated across the Caribbean, Central and South America as scientists look for ways to battle increasingly high temperatures and low rainfall which have ravaged the agricultural sector and killed corals across the region.

Charged with the Caribbean Community (CARICOM)’s mandate to coordinate the region’s response to climate change, the ‘Five Cs’ has been seeking financial support investigating and pooling regional resources to help countries cope with the expected impacts since its birth in 2004. These days, they are introducing and training regional planners in the application and use of a suite of tools that will help leaders make their countries climate-ready.

St Lucian government officers becoming familiar with tools at a recent workshop in St Lucia. As part of the training, they will use the tools to assess planned developments and weather conditions over six months to provide data and information which could be used for a variety of projects. Credit: Zadie Neufville/IPS

The experts believe that preparing the region to deal with climate change must include data collection and the widespread use of variability, predictability and planning tools that will guide development that mitigate the impacts of extreme climatic conditions.

The recent Caribbean Marine Climate Report card reflects the findings of the latest Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, pointing to the need for countries to ramp up their adaptation strategies. Both highlight the many significant risks climate change is expected to bring to regional economies that depend heavily on eco-systems based industries; where major infrastructure are located along the coasts and where populations are mainly poor.

The report points to the threats to biodiversity from coral bleaching; rising sea temperature and more intense storms which could destroy the region’s economy, and in some cases inundate entire communities.

The tools not only allow the users to generate country specific forecast information, they allow Met Officers, Disaster Managers and other critical personnel to assess likely impacts of climatic and extreme weather events on sectors such as health, agriculture and tourism; on critical infrastructure and installations as well as on vulnerable populations.

Training is being rolled out under the Climate Change Adaptation Program (CCAP) in countries of the Eastern and Southern Caribbean, with funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). CCAP was designed to build on both USAID’s Regional Development Cooperative Strategy which addresses development challenges in the countries in that part of the region, as well as the CCCCC’s Regional Framework for Achieving Development Resilient to a Changing Climate and its associated Implementation Plan, which have been endorsed by the Heads of Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries.

Regional experts and government officers working in agriculture, water resources, coastal zone management, health, physical planning and disaster risk reduction from Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago are being taught to use a variety of tools.

The program aims to build resilience in the development initiatives of the countries as they tackle climate change-induced challenges, which are already being experienced by countries of the region.

At a recent workshop in Rodney Bay, St. Lucia, trainees were confident that the tools could become critical to their developmental goals. St Lucian metrological forecaster Glen Antoinne, believes the tools could be “useful for St Lucia because they are directly related to our ability to forecast any changes in the climate”.

He looks forward to his government’s adoption of, in particular, the weather tools to  “support the climatology department in looking at trends, forecasting droughts and to help them to determine when to take action in policy planning and disaster management”.

The tools work by allowing researchers and other development specialists to use a range of climatic data to generate scientific information and carry out analysis on the likely impacts in the individual countries of the region. They are open source, to remove the need for similar expensive products being used in developed world, but effective, said INSMET’s Dr. Arnoldo Bezamilla Morlot.

“We saw the need to develop a drought tool that was not only easy to use, but free to the countries of the Caribbean so they would not have to spend large amounts of money for software,” he said.

“The more countries use the data, the more information that is available for countries and region to use,” Morlot continued, pointing out that the data is used to generate the information that then feeds into the decision making process.

CCAP also includes activities aimed at the expansion of the Coral Reef Early Warning System for the installation of data gathering buoys in five countries in the Eastern Caribbean providing data which, among other things will be used for ecological forecasts on coral bleaching and other marine events.

The project also provides for the strengthening of the hydro meteorological measurement systems in participating countries. This will allow for better monitoring of present day weather parameters and for generating data to feed into the climate models and other tools.

Among the tools being rolled out under the project are the Caribbean Assessment Regional DROught (CARiDRO) tool; the Caribbean Weather Generator, and the Tropical Storm Model which were designed to help experts to develop scenarios of future climate at any given location and to use these to more accurately forecast the impacts, and inform mitigating actions.

There are accompanying web portals and data sets that were developed and are being introduced to help countries to enhance their ability to reduce the risks of climate change to natural assets and populations in their development activities.

These online resources are designed to provide locally relevant and unbiased climate change information that is specific to the Caribbean and relevant to the region’s development. Their integration into national planning agendas across the region is being facilitated through regional and country workshops to ensure effective decision-making while improving climate knowledge and action.

“The resulting information will help leaders make informed decisions based on the projections and forecasting of likely levels of impact on their infrastructure and economies,” Lavina Alexander from St Lucia’s Department of Sustainable Development noted, pointing to that country’s recent experiences with hurricanes and extreme rainfall events.

As one of the tool designers, Morlot believes that by providing free access to the tools, the project is ensuring that “more countries will begin to collect and use the data, providing regional scientists with the ability to make more accurate forecasts of the region’s climate.”

Putting all the information and tools in one place where it is accessible by all will be good for the region, he said.

A poorly constructed house in Gelée, Les Cayes, Haiti is further damaged by trees that fell during the passage of Hurricane Matthew in October 2016. A senior Caribbean diplomat assigned to the European Union says climate change events are preventing many Caribbean countries from moving up the development ladder. Credit: Kenton X. Chance/IPS

By Kenton X. Chance
BRUSSELS, Belgium, Jul 14 2017 (IPS)

With Antigua and Barbuda joining St. Kitts and Nevis as the two eastern Caribbean nations to attain middle-income country status, a senior diplomat has identified climate change as a major factor preventing other nations in the grouping from taking the same step forward.

According to the World Bank, a middle-income economy is one with a gross national income per capita of between 1,026 and 12,475 dollars in 2016, calculated according to the Atlas method — a formula used by the World Bank to estimate the size of economies in terms of gross national income in U.S. dollars."Those who are indigent, they would enter...an avenue in Dante’s Hell which is indescribable. So that is the real story.” --Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines Ralph Gonsalves

“What I do want to say is that the other countries, the independent ones in the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) like Dominica, St. Lucia and St. Vincent, all of them are exposed to climate events annually and the climate events are devastating for us and you could have situations where 90 per cent of our GDP is wiped out in 22 hours, 23 hours, 15 hours, depending on how long a tropical storm sits on you,” says Sharlene Shillingford-McKlmon, chargé d’affaires at the Eastern Caribbean States Embassy to Belgium and Mission to the European Union

She was speaking to Caribbean journalists on a tour of the European Union Headquarters as part of activities to mark the 40th anniversary of the European Union Mission to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean.

Shillingford-McKlmon’s comments came as she spoke to some of the developmental challenges affecting OECS nations and the response options available to them.

Between Dec. 23 and 24, 2013, Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and St. Lucia began reporting heavy rain with accumulations over that 12- to 24-hour period recorded at 406 mm in St. Lucia, 156 mm in Dominica, and 109 mm in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

The heavy rains were associated with a low-level trough system, and with the traditional hurricane having ended almost a month earlier, many residents had dismissed the rains as just another tropical downpour.

However, by the time the hours-long downpour subsided in St. Vincent and the Grenadines around 7 p.m. on Christmas Eve, nine people were confirmed dead, three were missing and presumed dead, and 37 were injured.

Over 500 people were affected, of which 222 had to be provided with emergency shelter, while 278 took refuge with family, friends and neighbours.

The Caribbean Disaster Management Agency (CDEMA) said that sectoral damage assessment estimated that 495 houses were damaged/destroyed; over 98 acres of crops damaged; 28 bridges damaged/destroyed; and the Milton Cato Memorial Hospital suffered major losses.

The total damage/losses and cost of clean-up operations were estimated at 58.44 million dollars — some 17 per cent of the nation’s gross domestic product wiped out in a matter of hours.

In St. Lucia, there were six confirmed deaths related to the weather system and an estimated 1,050 persons were severely affected.

In Dominica, an estimated 106 households in approximately 12 communities were affected by the Christmas Eve weather system.

And, just over 18 months later, Dominica would be struck by yet another weather system, this time by Tropical Storm Erika on Aug. 24, 2015, which left at least 20 persons dead, and a number of other missing.

The storm also rendered 574 persons homeless and resulted in the evacuation of 1,034 others due to the unsafe conditions in their communities.

Damage and losses were estimated at EC$1.3 billion or 90 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product.

In noting the impact of these weather system on OECS nations, Shillingford-McKlmon pointed out that previously, it was only when a hurricane struck that the Caribbean saw such levels of destruction.

“Now, we have to be concerned about a tropical storm, because you really don’t know what is going to happen. And what has happened is that with respect to graduation from middle- to high-income status, if you do not retain your GDP per capita level for three years in a row, you can’t graduate — and it is really sad to say that some of our countries, the only reason they have not graduated to higher income status, where we receive less help, less official development assistance, less concessionary loans, is because of a storm or hurricane comes and devastates us.”

She said such a position puts Caribbean nations in a quagmire, because they want to be proud of the development they have achieved. However, at the same time, once they graduate to high-come countries status, one climate event can wipe out all those gains even as the countries would no longer qualify for official development assistance.

“You are going to lose financing and at the same time you don’t want to be hit by a hurricane, you don’t want to be in a situation where … if a hurricane comes and something happens, I may not graduate because I lose my GDP. Who wants to be in that position? What an awful place to be.”

Shillingford-McKlmon said that currently, OECS nations do not have an alternative with respect to the criteria for graduation but are having that conversation with the European Union and other development partners.

“A country will graduate when its GDP per capita remains at a certain level for a three-year period and then it will move from one category to another. And so what we are doing, we are arguing this at the European Commission level and they’ve begun to have discussion with us that give us the impression that they are willing to consider new criteria or alternate criteria for graduation,” she said.

The diplomat argued that with the severe impact of climate events on OECS economies, “GDP per capita is not a full and complete reflection of a country’s development.

“We have inherent vulnerabilities as small island developing states that make it very difficult for us to be graduated and not receive aid when we could be struck down by environmental and other exogenous shocks and be severely affected,” she said.

Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines Ralph Gonsalves has also spoken to the impact on climate change on national development – particularly the economic situation of individual families.

“Let us understand this. When we have a natural disaster, you go to bed at night middle class and after three hours of rainfall and landslides, torrential downpour, like we never used to have before the acceleration of man-made climate change, that person, in three hours, would move from middle class to poor,” he said in late June at Caribbean Climate Outlook Forum.

Gonsalves further said that after a few hours of intense rainfall, some persons who are poor become indigent.

“And those who are indigent, they would enter…an avenue in Dante’s Hell which is indescribable. So that is the real story.”

CTO Secretary-General Hugh Riley (left) and CDB President Dr. Warren Smith share a light moment during the signing of a partnership agreement at CDB headquarters. Credit: CDB

By Desmond Brown
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, Jun 30 2017 (IPS)

The tourism industry is the key economic driver and largest provider of jobs in the Caribbean after the public sector. Caribbean tourism broke new ground in 2016, surpassing 29 million arrivals for the first time and once again growing faster than the global average.

Visitor expenditures also hit a new high, growing by an estimated 3.5 per cent to reach 35.5 billion dollars. And the the outlook for 2017 remains rosy, with expected increases of 2.5 and 3.5 percent in long-stay arrivals and between 1.5 per cent and 2.5 percent in cruise passenger arrivals.A 460,000-euro grant from the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) will increase the tourism sector’s resilience to natural hazards and climate-related risks.

But tourism officials say Caribbean islands are significantly affected by drastic changes in weather conditions and they fear climate change could have a devastating impact on the industry.

They note that the Caribbean tourism sector faces significant future threats related to both competitiveness and climate change impacts. And for a region so heavily dependent on coastal- and marine-related tourism attractions, adaptation and resilience are critical issues facing Caribbean tourism.

“The impact of more severe hurricanes and the destruction of our most valued tourism assets, our beaches and coral reefs, and the damage to our infrastructure threaten to reverse the developmental gains that we have made,” Dominican Senator Francine Baron said.

“Our efforts to attain the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations cannot be achieved without dealing with the causes of climate change.”

Baron, who serves as Dominica’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, made the comments as she addressed a forum on the issue of climate change at the general assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) held in Mexico recently.

In the face of these threats, the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO), the Caribbean’s tourism development agency, has received a much-needed boost with a 460,000-euro grant from the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) to implement a project to increase the Caribbean tourism sector’s resilience to natural hazards and climate related risks.

“Global climate change and its impacts, including the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events, pose a significant risk to the Caribbean region and threaten the sustainability of Caribbean tourism,” the CTO’s Secretary General Hugh Riley said.

“The CTO is pleased to have the support of the CDB to implement this project which will contribute to enhancing the resiliency, sustainability and competitiveness of the region’s tourism sector. Mainstreaming climate change adaptation (CCA) and disaster risk management (DRM) strategies in tourism development and planning is our duty to our member countries.”

The CDB/CTO partnership was formalized at a signing ceremony held on June 22 at CDB’s headquarters in Barbados.

Speaking at the event, CDB President Dr. Warren Smith noted that the tourism sector makes an enormous contribution to the region’s socioeconomic development.

“Tourism generates high levels of employment, foreign direct investment and foreign exchange for our borrowing member countries and, given its multi-sectoral nature, it is a very effective tool for promoting sustainable development and poverty reduction,” Dr. Smith said.

“However, maintaining this critical role calls for adequate safeguards to be erected against the enormous threats that climate change and natural hazards pose to the sustainability of our region.”

Funding is being provided under the African Caribbean Pacific-European Union-Caribbean Development Bank-Natural Disaster Risk Management in CARIFORUM Countries programme, which aims to reduce vulnerability to long-term impacts of natural hazards, including the potential impacts of climate change, thereby achieving national and regional sustainable development and poverty reduction goals in those countries.

During the 19-month project implementation period, the CTO will support the region’s tourism entities with policy formulation, the promotion of best practices in disaster risk management and climate change adaptation, and the development of tools to enhance the tourism sector’s knowledge and awareness of disaster risk reduction strategies and the potential impacts of climate variability and climate change (CVC).

A training component will also be included to strengthen the ability of public and private sector tourism stakeholders to undertake adequate mitigation and adaptation actions to CVC. The CTO secretariat will also benefit from institutional strengthening to help provide technical assistance and ongoing support for tourism-related climate services.

The project is in keeping with 2017 as the International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development, which has been designated by the United Nations General Assembly.

At the CDB’s Annual Board of Directors meeting held in Turks and Caicos Islands last month, Governors noted the acute environmental vulnerability of the Region and urged CDB to continue to play an important role in helping its Borrowing Member Countries (BMCs) build resilience.

Smith said CDB’s commitment to this role was evidenced during the meeting, at which CDB signed an agreement with the European Investment Bank (EIB) for the second Climate Action Line of Credit (CALC).

“This will facilitate increased climate proofing of critical infrastructure in the Caribbean. The Line of Credit for Euro 100 million is the largest single loan made by EIB in our region. We are very encouraged by the strong statement of confidence in CDB that this line represents,” he said.

Eligible investments under the Climate Action Framework Loan II include climate change mitigation, adaptation and resilience projects in renewable energy, energy efficiency, road transport, water infrastructure and community-level physical and social infrastructure that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve resilience to the impacts of climate change.

“We are delighted to be signing this new climate action loan with CDB, which is the result of a fruitful partnership that lasts for almost four decades, to support new projects in the Caribbean,” said Pim Van Ballekom, EIB Vice President.

“This partnership is currently supporting CDB’s efforts to mainstream climate action to help its borrowing member countries (BMCs), which are all considered Small Island Developing States, to adequately tackle risks related to climate change. Caribbean countries face economic and social challenges which must be addressed whilst ensuring resilience to climate change,” he added.

To date, CDB has committed the total resources under the ongoing Climate Action Line of Credit (50 million euro), for nine projects. This co-financing is associated with total project financing of approximately 191 million dollars (from CDB loans/grants, EIB CALC, counterpart and other sources of financing).

Director of Richmond Vale Academy in St. Vincent Stina Herberg explains how compost is produced using vegetation, cardboard, and animal droppings. Credit: Kenton X. Chance/IPS

By Kenton X. Chance
KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent, Mar 30 2017 (IPS)

In the 1980s, an institution for troubled Danish youth and a vocational school for Vincentians was built in Richmond Vale, an agricultural district on the northwestern tip of St. Vincent.

It was hoped that spending time at Richmond Vale Academy would help the Danish youth to see the world from a different perspective. However, for a number of reasons, the concept didn’t pan out, the school closed and a farm was developed in its place.“It was both emotional and scary to hear these huge trees drop...That was a very big eye-opener for me.” --Stina Herberg, director of Richmond Vale Academy

In 2000, the first attempts were made to re-start the academy, which has been in full operation since 2007. Today, Richmond Vale Academy attracts young people from around the world who are troubled by poverty and what is going on with the Earth’s climate and want to do something about it.

The not-for-profit institution had previously focused mainly on poverty alleviation, with an emphasis on service in Africa. However, in 2010, Hurricane Tomas — the latest recorded tropical cyclone on a calendar year to strike the Windward Islands — passed to the north of St. Vincent, where the academy is located, and St. Lucia.

“That was a very big eye-opener for me,” Stina Herberg, director of Richmond Vale Academy, told IPS. “We were, of course, very worried but that was my very first meeting with climate change, I would say.”

The storm, which impacted St. Vincent on Oct. 30, left hundreds of homes without roofs, and, in addition to significant damage to homes and public infrastructure, destroyed about 90 per cent of banana cultivation, then an important crop for the local economy.

At Richmond Vale Academy, Herberg, her staff and their students listened as the tropical cyclone destroyed huge, decades-old trees. “It was both emotional and scary to hear these huge trees drop: you would hear it, like you put matches up and they just came down.”

The academy’s banana cultivation, which had taken three years to get to the point where it met the standards necessary for exportation to England, was also ruined.

“Three years of work was destroyed in seven hours,” Herberg said of the impact on the academy, adding, “but for other farmers, it was their lifetime’s work.

“So that caused us to ask a lot of questions. Yes, there were always hurricanes, but why are they more frequent? So it set us off to do a lot more research about climate change, about pollution, and we got a lot of eye-opening experiences.”

The research led to the St. Vincent Climate Compliance Conference 2012-2021, which aims to make St. Vincent and the Grenadines one of the first nations to become “climate compliant”.

The programme brings together local students as well as students from Europe, North America, South America, other parts of the Caribbean and Asia for programmes of one, three or six months duration, in which they learn about global warming, its causes and consequences.

The programme offers firsthand knowledge, as students can go directly into the nearby communities such as the village of Fitz Hughes or the town of Chateaubelair to see the impact on housing, public infrastructure, and the physical environment of severe weather events resulting from climate change.

However, the major focus of the programme is on “climate compliance”, which might be more frequently referred to as adaptation measures.

“Because if you going to talk about getting ready for climate change, if you are not doing it yourself, if you are going to tell people ‘I think it is a good idea to go organic. It is good for the soil, to plant trees’ — if you are not doing it for yourself, when you are speaking to other people it will be less effective,” Herberg said.

The academy has developed models and used its own farm to demonstrate ways in which the population can move away from carbon-based fossil fuels, which contribute to global warming.

For example, the academy set up a bio-gas facility that shows that mixing 1.5 kilogrammes of kitchen waste with 50 litres of water can produce fuel for five hours a day in a country where liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) is the main fuel used for cooking.

“It is suitable as a model that can be used by families in villages,” Herberg said of the academy’s biogas facility.

“We cannot make hydropower plants, we cannot build geothermal power plants. Governments have a variety of plans for that, so we have to see what can we do. We are promoting solar, and also the biogas,” she said, adding that Richmond Vale Academy has secured funding to set up five biogas facilities in western St. Vincent.

“So, it mitigates because it is a renewable gas and you can produce it yourself. You don’t need transport from China or Venezuela or from the United States or wherever.”

The biogas production process results in slurry that can be used as fertilizer. “The important thing is that people know there are alternatives. I don’t think we can get everybody on biogas. I doubt that. But what is important is that we open up and say these are the options,” Herberg explains.

While potable water is almost always available on St. Vincent Island, St. Vincent and the Grenadines is a water-stressed country as there are no rivers and no municipal supply of water in the Grenadines, an archipelago.

However, even on St. Vincent Island, with its rivers, streams, and springs, the dry season, which runs from December to May, can be especially punishing for farmers, only 7 per cent of whom have irrigation.

Richmond Vale Academy has developed a system for collecting rainwater for washing, showers, and toilets. The excess water from this system collects in a reservoir and is used for irrigation. Small fish are placed in the catchment to prevent mosquitos from breeding in it.

Further, the academy has, over the years, phased out chemical fertilizers from its farm. In explaining the link between organic farming and mitigating against climate change, Herberg tells IPS that as the climate changes, St. Vincent and the Grenadines is expected to have more periods without rain, and when the rains come, they are expected to be heavier over shorter periods.

Most of the nation’s farmers are still engaged in mono-cropping and use chemical fertilizer in their production. “The chemicals break down the soil structure, so it gets sandy, it gets dry, so then when you get some rain and the rain is heavier, it just washes away the soil,” Herberg said, adding that this leads to flooding and landslides.

“So, the way that we are farming, it is very dangerous for the future. If you look at the big picture of biodiversity, the planet’s biodiversity is what’s keeping the temperature [stable]. If you take away the biodiversity by making cities, chopping down the rainforest, whatever we decide to do to change the balance of nature, we cannot maintain a stable temperature,” she said.

She also spoke about deforestation to convert lands to agricultural and houses use. “We need to have trees that will give us shade, we need to have trees to shelter us from the heavy rains, so the farming has to change for us to get ready to live with climate change. We have to change the way we farm. Monocropping has no future.”

An important part of any discussion about adapting to climate change is the extent to which actions that have proven successful can be multiplied and scaled up.

“I’m quite optimistic and I think that St. Vincent, as it is a small country, it is easy to get around. There is consensus that we need to be more sustainable and go organic and focus on renewable energy. And I actually think that it is going to happen: that we are going to get geothermal energy, improve our hydro stations and then more people will get on to solar. So we will be one of the first countries in the Caribbean that will be nearly everything on renewable energy within a very reasonable time – maybe 10 years,” Herberg predicted.

She added that while Costa Rica is ahead of the region, St. Vincent and the Grenadines is a good example in the 15-member Caribbean Community of what can be done to adapt to and mitigate against climate change. “We are not ahead in organic agriculture yet,” she said, but added that there are “some outstanding examples”.

A man rides his bicycle through a dusty village in the Mahavellithanne area, about 350 km northeast of Sri Lanka's capital Colombo, where daytime temperatures were hitting 38C this week. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
POLONNARUWA, Sri Lanka, Oct 13 2016 (IPS)

Sri Lanka is literally baking these days.

During the first week of October, the Metrological Department reported that maximum daytime temperatures in some parts of the country were between 5 to 2C above average. They hit 38.3C in some parts of the North Central Province, a region vital for the staple rice harvest.South Asia needs around 73 billion dollars annually from now until 2100 to adapt to the negative impacts of climate change if current temperature trends continue.

The prolonged dry spell has already impacted over 500,000 people, with government agencies and the military providing them with safe drinking water brought in from other areas. When those supplies are not sufficient or delayed, the affected communities can buy water from private dealers who sell safe drinking water in one-litre bottles at a price between Rs four to 10 (three to seven cents).

“It has been like this for over three months now,” said Ranjith Jayarathne, a farmer from the region.

Ironically, a little over three months back, the area was fearing floods. In early May, heavy rains brought in by Cyclone Roanu left large parts of the country inundated, caused massive landslides, and left over half million destitute and over 150 dead or missing.

It is not only Sri Lanka that is facing the acute impacts of changing weather. A study by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) found the entire South Asia region stands to lose around 1.3 percent of its collective annual GDP by 2050 even if global temperature increases are kept to 2 degrees Celsius.

After 2050, the losses are predicted to rise sharply to around 2.5 percent of GDP. If temperature increases go above 2 degrees Celsius, losses will mount to 1.8 percent of GDP by 2050 and a staggering 8.8 percent by 2100, according to the analysis.

Coping is not going to be cheap. South Asia needs around 73 billion dollars annually from now until 2100 to adapt to the negative impacts of climate change if current temperature trends continue.

In its regional update, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said that this year, above-average monsoon rains, coupled with a succession of typhoons and tropical storms from June to early August, have caused severe localized floods in several countries in the subregion, resulting in the loss of hundreds of lives, displacement of millions of people and much damage to agriculture and infrastructure.

Losses of livestock, stored food and other belongings have also been reported. Affected countries include Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

If current climate patterns continue, like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh will face severe fallout. The ADB study said Bangladesh is likely to suffer an annual economic loss from climate risks of about 2 percent of GDP by 2050. That is expected to balloon to 8.8 percent by 2100.

Annual rice production could fall by 23 percent by 2080 in a country where agriculture employs half of the labour force of around 60 million. Dhaka could see 14 percent of its territory underwater in case of a one-metre sea level rise, while the South Eastern Khulna region and the delicate eco-system of the coastal Sundarbans could fare far worse, the report said.

Women wait for water in the village of Chenchuri, in Eastern Bangladesh, about 300 km from Dhaka. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Bangladesh’s other South Asian neighbours also face mounting risks, according to ADB assessments.

Nepal could lose as much as 10 percent of GDP by 2100 due to melting glaciers and other climate extremes, while in neighbouring India, crop yields could decline 14.5 percent by 2050, the bank said.

India’s 8,000 kilometre-long coastline also faces serious economic risk due to rising sea level, it said. Currently 85 percent of total water demand for agriculture is met through irrigation, and that need is likely to rise with temperature increases, even as India’s groundwater threatens to run short.

Sri Lanka has already seen its rice and other harvests fluctuate in recent years due to changing monsoon patterns. ADB data warns that yields in the vital tea sector could halve by 2080.

Death and mayhem could be the most visible impact of changing climates, but according to experts, extreme weather events have also caused major disruptions in the island’s agriculture and food sectors.

According to the World Food Programme (WFP) Sri Lanka’s rapid development has been scuttled by fickle weather events. Though the country has been classified as a lower middle income country since 2010, “improvements in human development, and the nutritional status of children, women and adolescents have remained stagnant. The increased frequency of natural disasters such as drought and flash floods further compounds food and nutrition insecurity.”

Nearly 4.7 million (23 percent of the population) people are undernourished, according to the State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015, and underweight and anaemia affect nearly a quarter of children and women. According to WFP’s most recent Cost of Diet Analysis, 6.8 million people (33 percent) cannot afford the minimum cost of a nutritious diet.

Experts say that despite cyclic harvest losses due to erratic weather patterns in the past decade, Sri Lanka is yet to learn from them. “People are yet to fathom the extent of extreme weather events,” Kusum Athukorala, Co-chair of the UNESCO Gender Panel on the World Water Development Report, told IPS.

Athukorala, who is an expert in community water management, said that Sri Lanka needs a national water management plan that links all relevant national stake-holders and a robust community awareness building programme.

In a classic example of lack of such national coordination, the Irrigation Department is currently reluctant to release waters kept in storage for the upcoming paddy season for domestic use in the drought-hit areas. Department officials say that they can not risk forcing a water shortage for cultivation.

Experts like Athukorala contend that if there was active coordination between national agencies dealing with water, such situations would not arise. She also stresses the need for community level water management. “The solutions have to come across the board.”

Officials in South Asia do understand the gravity of the impact but say that their governments are faced with a delicate balancing act between development and climate resilience.

“Right now, the priority is to provide food for 160 million (in Bangladesh),” said Kamal Uddin Ahmed, secretary of the Bangladesh Ministry of Forest and Environment. “We have to make sure we get our climate policies right while not slowing down growth.”

Excerpt:

Coastal communities in the Solomon Islands in the southwest Pacific Islands are already threatened by climate change with rising seas and stronger storm surges. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
CANBERRA, Australia, Jan 1 2016 (IPS)

Women leaders in the Pacific Islands have acclaimed the agreement on reducing global warming achieved at the United Nations (COP21) Climate Change conference in Paris as an unprecedented moment of world solidarity on an issue which has been marked to date by division between the developing and industrialized world. But for Pacific small island developing states, which name climate change as the single greatest threat to their survival, it will only be a success if inspirational words are followed by real action.

“It’s a huge step forward and I don’t think it would have been possible without the voices of indigenous Pacific Islanders banding together and demanding action and justice…. I am very optimistic about the future,” Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, climate activist and poet from the Republic of the Marshall Islands, who attended the historic meeting, told IPS.

Intense negotiations and compromise between the interests of 195 countries, plus the European Union, which make up the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the climate change convention, marked its 21st meeting in Paris last month.

Dame Meg Taylor, Secretary General of the regional Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat (PIFS), said that “while not all the issues identified by Pacific Island countries were included in the final outcome and agreement, there were substantive advances with recognition of the importance of pursuing efforts to limit temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the inclusion of loss and damage as a separate element in the agreement and simplified and scaled up access to climate change finance.”

Claire Anterea of the Kiribati Climate Action Network in the small Central Pacific atoll nation of around 110,000 people added that the outcome was “good, but not perfect,” highlighting that the new temperature goal and call to boost climate finance were particularly important.

The World Meteorological Organisation predicted this year will be the hottest on record with average global temperatures expected to reach 1 degree Celsius above the pre-industrial age. Meanwhile Pacific Island countries are bracing for further rising temperatures, sea levels, ocean acidification and coral bleaching this century. Maximum sea level rise in many island states could reach more than 0.6 metres, reports the Pacific Climate Change Science Program.

Due to rising seas in the Marshall Islands “a simple high tide results in waves flooding and crashing through sea walls built of cement and rocks and completely destroying homes. The salt from the flooding also destroys our crops and food,” Jetnil-Kijiner said..

In the best case scenario, Kiribati and Papua New Guinea could experience a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius, but under high emissions this might soar to 2.9 degrees Celsius by 2090.

Global warming could result in yields of sweet potato, a common staple crop, declining by more than 50 per cent in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands by 2050, estimates the Asian Development Bank. The burden of crop losses will fall on the shoulders of Pacific Islands’ women who are primarily responsible in communities for growing fresh produce, producing food and fetching water.

Pacific Islanders led a campaign in Paris this year to recognize a new temperature rise threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius. This is critical, they argued, to stem future climate shocks and mitigate forced displacement as islands become increasingly uninhabitable due to loss of food, water and land.

And in a sign of shifting views in the industrialized world, Pacific Islanders were joined in their campaigning on this issue by numerous developed and developing nations in a ‘Coalition of High Ambition’ which emerged during the second week of COP21. Solidarity was demonstrated by, amongst others, Mexico, Brazil, Norway, Germany, the European Union and United States.

The final Paris agreement which seeks to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius and ‘pursue efforts’ to further reduce it by another 0.5 degree was a win for the coalition.

“1.5 degrees Celsius wasn’t even on the table before the conference began, so hearing it first announced that it even made it into the text made me cry with relief. That being said, the vague wording definitely has me worried and I know it’ll take a continued push from all of us to actually reach 1.5,” Jetnil-Kijiner said.

This will not decrease the immense challenges the region already faces in adapting to extreme weather, which cannot be met by small island economies without access to international climate finance. This year island leaders called for the international community to honour its pledge to raise 100 billion dollars per year by 2020 to fund adaptation in developing countries, an objective first conceived in Copenhagen in 2009. Assessments since then of how much has been raised vary, but the World Bank claimed in April there was a serious shortfall of 70 billion dollars.

Taylor believes “there is a positive outlook for climate financing post-2020 with Article 9 of the Paris Agreement identifying that, for Small Island Developing States, financing needs to be public and grant-based resources for adaptation.” There has been debate about whether finance mechanisms, such as the Green Climate Fund (GCF), should issue free grants or concessional loans.

Anterea emphasised that, to be effective, funding “needs to reach grassroots people through a simple processing method.”

Recognition of loss and damage caused by extreme weather and natural disasters in the final pact was also a milestone, the PIFS Secretary General added, even though it does not provide for vulnerable nations to claim liability or compensation from big polluters.

“The legal right of countries to test the liabilities of other Parties using other avenues has not been diminished by this decision,” she said.

But the greatest hope is being invested in the binding commitment by nations to set emission reduction targets and be subject to a process of long term monitoring and review, a move which would accelerate the global transition toward renewable energy and make the burning of fossil fuels, the greatest driver of greenhouse gas emissions, increasingly unviable.

“We need the five-year review as a crucial step to keeping countries’ governments accountable to our targets and goals,” Jetnil-Kijiner emphasised. If nations are not emboldened to better their goals every time, the planet may continue toward a devastating temperature increase of 2.7 degrees Celsius or more, experts conclude.

The most pressing question, after the euphoria of the global accord demonstrated in Paris has died down, is how will these lofty promises be implemented? Pacific Islanders are depending on it.

(End)

A man walks through agricultural land in the village of Mirusuvil, in Sri Lanka’s northern Jaffna District. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
KILINOCHCHI, Sri Lanka, Oct 3 2014 (IPS)

Gazing out over the parched earth of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, one might think these farmlands have not seen water in years. In fact, this is not too far from the truth.

The World Food Programme (WFP) last month allocated 2.5 million dollars to assist hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans in the throes of an 11-month drought that has shown no signs of abating.

A woman stands in front of her parched paddy land in the eastern Batticaloa District, one of Sri Lanka’s largest paddy-producing regions, that has been hit by the 11-month-long drought. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

A man stands in the middle of parched paddy land in the northern Kilinochchi District. Sri Lanka’s staple rice harvest is expected to record a loss of 17 percent from around four million metric tonnes in 2013. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

The WFP said on Sep. 1 that 2.3 million dollars worth of supplies, including rice rations, would be provided to the drought victims. The assistance scheme will also provide 277,000 dollars in cash grants to needy families.

A woman covers her head with a cloth to escape the extreme heat in Sri Lanka’s northern Jaffna District where daytime temperatures can reach 40 degrees Celsius. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

A woman carries firewood in the drought-impacted Pillumalai area of the eastern Batticaloa District. Residents of this region are staring a water crisis in the face, as the main reservoir, the Vakaneri Tank, is almost completely dried up. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

The drought has so far impacted over 1.6 million people, of whom at least 190,000 are in need of urgent food assistance, while there are concerns about the food security of an additional 700,000.

A parched tank bed in the southeastern Moneragala District, where farmers say the absence of rain since late 2013 has completely destroyed their agricultural lands. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

A young girl drinks water out of a bottle in Sri Lanka’s eastern Batticaloa District, where over 220,000 persons have been affected by the drought. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Over half of those impacted by the drought are from the northern and eastern provinces of the country, two of the poorest in the nation.

A tractor moves along the side of the dried-out Elephant Pass causeway in the northern Kilinochchi District. Officials told IPS the district was in need of at least nine million rupees (69,000 dollars) per week for drought relief. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

A man uses water from an industrial-grade pump in the Karadiyanaru area of the eastern Batticaloa District. Experts warn that the rampant use of powerful water-pumps in this arid region is putting undue stress on the water table. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

While the situation calls for immediate assistance, the WFP also warned that the affected would need long-term help to adapt to the impacts of changing climate patterns.

A woman tries to salvage whatever is left of her green gram crop before the lack of water destroys the entire plot in the eastern Pillumalai area of the Batticaloa District. According to government estimates, Sri Lanka’s agricultural output is likely to fall by at least 10 percent this year due to the drought. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

The World Bank estimates that the annual risk to Sri Lanka posed by climate-related disasters stands at some 380 million dollars. The worst disaster to date, a severe flood in 2010 and 2011, caused damages to the tune of 50 billion dollars.

A villager prepare to dig a deep well by hand in the drought-stricken village of Tunukkai in Sri Lanka's northern Mullaithivu District. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Sep 29 2014 (IPS)

The last time there was mud on his village roads was about a year ago, says Murugesu Mohanabavan, a farmer from the village of Karachchi, situated about 300 km north of Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo.

“Since last October we have had nothing but sun, all day,” the 40-year-old father of two school-aged children told IPS. If his layman’s assessment of the rain patterns is off, it is by a mere matter of weeks.

At the disaster management unit of the Kilinochchi District Secretariat under which Mohanabavan’s village falls, reports show inadequate rainfall since November 2013 – less than 30 percent of expected precipitation for this time of year.

“We don’t have any savings left; I still need to complete a half-built house and send two children to school. The nightmare continues." -- Murugesu Mohanabavan, a farmer from the village of Karachchi, 300 km north of Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo
Sri Lanka is currently facing a severe drought that has impacted over 1.6 million people and cut its crop yields by 42 percent, according to government analyses. But a closer look at the areas where the drought is at its worst shows that the poorest have been hit hardest.

Of the drought-affected population, over half or roughly 900,000 people, are from the Northern and Eastern Provinces of the country, regions that have been traditionally poor, dependent on agriculture and lacking strong coping mechanisms or infrastructure to withstand the impact of natural disasters.

Take the northern Kilinochchi district, where out of a population of some 120,000, over 74,000 are affected by the drought; or the adjoining district of Mullaithivu where over 56,000 from a population of just above 100,000 are suffering the impacts of inadequate rainfall.

The vast majority of residents in these districts are war returnees, who bore the brunt of Sri Lanka’s protracted civil war that ended in May 2009. Displaced and dodging the crossfire of fierce fighting between government forces and the now-defunct Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) during the last stages of the conflict, these civilians began trickling back into devastated villages in late 2010.

Despite a massive three-billion-dollar mega infrastructure development plan for the Northern Province, poverty remains rampant in the region. According to poverty data that was released by the government in April, four of the five districts in the north fared poorly.

While the national poverty headcount was 6.7 percent, major districts in the north and east recorded much higher figures: 28.8 percent in Mullaithivu, 12.7 percent in Kilinochchi, 8.3 percent in Jaffnna and 20.1 percent in Mannar.

The figures are worlds apart from the mere 1.4 percent and 2.1 percent recorded in the Colombo and Gampaha Districts in the Western Province.

“The districts in the North were already reeling under very high levels of poverty, which would have certainly accentuated since then due to the prolonged drought to date,” said Muttukrishna Saravananthan, who heads the Point Pedro Institute of Development based in northern Jaffna.

Mohanabavan told IPS that even though he has about two acres of agriculture land that had hitherto provided some 200,000 rupees (1,500 dollars) in income annually, the dry weather has pushed him into debt.

“We don’t have any savings left; I still need to complete a half-built house and send two children to school,” he explained, adding that there is no sign of respite. “The nightmare continues,” he said simply.

Agriculture accounts for 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s national annual gross domestic product (GDP) of some 60 billion rupees (about 460 million dollars). In primarily rural provinces in the north and east, at least 30 percent of the population depends on an agriculture-based income.

Kugadasan Sumanadas, the additional secretary for disaster management at the Kilinochchi District Secretariat, said that limited programmes to assist the drought-impacted population have been launched since the middle of the year.

Around 37,000 persons get daily water transported by tankers and there are a set number of cash-for-work programmes in the district that pay around 800 rupees (about six dollars) per person per day, for projects aimed at renovating water and irrigtation networks.

But to carry out even the limited work underway now, a weekly allocation of over nine million rupees is needed, money that is slow in coming.

“But the bigger problem is if it does not rain soon, then we will have to travel out of the province to get water, more people will need assistance for a longer period, that means more money [will be required],” Sumanadas said.

In April this year, a joint assessment by the World Food Programme and the government warned that half the population in the Mullaithivu district and one in three people in the Kilinochchi district were food insecure.

Sumanadas is certain that in the ensuing four months, the figure has gone up.

Overall, crop production has decreased by 42 percent compared to 2013 levels, while rice yields fell to 17 percent below last year’s output of four million metric tons.

In fact, the government decided to lift import bans on the staple rice stocks in April and is expected to make up for at least five percent of harvest losses through imports.

The main water source in the district, the sprawling Iranamadu Reservoir – 50 square km in size, with the capacity to irrigate 106,000 acres – is a gigantic dust bowl these days, the official said. That scenario, however, is not limited to the north and east.

“All reservoir levels are down to around 30 percent in the island,” Ivan de Silva, the secretary to the minister of irrigation and water management, told IPS.

He attributes the debilitating impact of the drought to two factors working in tandem: the increasing frequency of extreme weather events and the lack of proper water management.

“In the past we excepted a severe drought every 10 to 15 years, now it is happening almost every other year,” de Silva said.

A similar drought in late 2012 also impacted close to two million people on this island of just over 20 million people, and forced agricultural output down to 20 percent of previous yields.

That drought however was broken by the onset of floods brought on by hurricane Nilam in late 2012.

“We should have policies that allow us to manage our water resources better, so that we can better meet these changing weather patterns,” he said.

The country is slowly waking up to the grim reality that a changing climate requires better management. This week the government launched a 100-million-dollar climate resilience programme that will spend the bulk of its funds, around 90 million dollars, on infrastructure upgrades.

Of this, 47 million dollars will go towards improving drainage networks and water systems, while 36 million will go towards fortifying roads and seven million will be poured into projects to improve school safety in disaster-prone areas.

Part of the money will also be allocated to studying the nine main river basins around the country for better flood and drought management policies.

S M Mohammed, the secretary to the ministry of disaster management, admitted that national coping levels were not up to par when she said at the launch of the programme on Sep. 26, “Our country must change from a tradition of responding [to natural disasters] to a culture of resilience.”

Such a policy, if implemented, could bring a world of change to the lives of millions who are slowly cooking in the blistering sun.

Edited by Kanya D’Almieda

Women sleep on a crowded train in Myanmar. Globally, some 1.2 billion people live on less than 1.25 dollars a day. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Jul 24 2014 (IPS)

Millions still live in poverty and even those who have gained the security of the middle-income bracket could relapse into poverty due to sudden changes to their economic fortunes in South Asia, the latest annual Human Development Report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) revealed.

“In South Asia 44.4 percent of the population, around 730 million people, live on 1.25−2.50 dollars a day,” said the report, released in Tokyo Thursday.

It went on to warn that despite the region’s gains, the threat of more of its citizens being pushed back into poverty was very real and that there were large disparities in income and living standards within nations.

“Many who recently joined the middle class could easily fall back into poverty with a sudden change in circumstances,” the report’s authors stressed.

“The most successful anti-poverty and human development initiatives to date have taken a multidimensional approach, combining income support and job creation with expanded healthcare and education opportunities." -- UNDP Human Development Report 2014
Here in Sri Lanka, categorised as a lower middle-income country by the World Bank in 2011, overall poverty levels have come down in the last half-decade.

The Department of Statistics said that poverty levels had dropped from 8.9 percent in 2009 to 6.7 percent by this April. In some of the richest districts, the fall was sharper. The capital Colombo saw levels drop from 3.6 percent to 1.4 percent. Similar drops were recorded in the adjoining two districts of Gampaha and Kalutara.

However the poorest seemed to getting poorer. Poverty headcount in the poorest area of the nation, the southeastern district of Moneralaga, increased from 14.5 percent to 20.8 percent in the same time period.

The disparity could be larger if stricter measurements aren’t used, argued economist Muttukrishna Sarvananthan.

“There is a very low threshold for the status of employment,” he told IPS, referring to the ‘10 years and above’ age threshold used by the government to assess employment rates.

“Such a low threshold gives an artificially higher employment rate, which is deceptive,” he stressed.

The UNDP report said that in the absence of robust safeguards, millions ran the risk of being dragged back into poverty. “With limited social protection, financial crises can quickly lead to profound social crises,” the report forecast.

In Indonesia, for instance, the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s saw poverty levels balloon from 11 percent to 37 percent. Even years later, the world’s poor are finding it hard to climb up the earnings ladder.

“The International Labour Organisation estimates that there were 50 million more working poor in 2011. Only 24 million of them climbed above the 1.25-dollars-a-day income poverty line over 2007–2011, compared with 134 million between 2000 and 2007.”

Globally some 1.2 billion people live on less than 1.25 dollars a day, and 2.7 billion live on even less, the report noted, adding that while those numbers have been declining, many people only increased their income to a point barely above the poverty line so that “idiosyncratic or generalised shocks could easily push them back into poverty.”

This has huge implications, since roughly 12 percent of the world population lives in chronic hunger, while 1.2 billion of the world’s workers are still employed in the informal sector.

Sri Lanka, reflecting global trends, is also home to large numbers of poor people despite the island showing impressive growth rates.

Punchi Banda Jayasundera, the secretary to the treasury and the point man for the national economy, predicts a growth rate of 7.8 percent for this year.

“This year should not be an uncomfortable one for us,” he told IPS, but while this is true for the well off, it could not be further away from reality for hundreds of thousands who cannot make ends meet or afford a square meal every day.

While the report identified the poor as being most vulnerable in the face of sudden upheavals, other groups – like women, indigenous communities, minorities, the old, the displaced and the disabled – are also considered “high risk”, and often face overlapping issues of marginalisation and poverty.

The report also identified climate change as a major contributor to inequality and instability, warning that extreme heat and extreme precipitation events would likely increase in frequency.

By the end of this century, heavy rainfall and rising sea levels are likely to pose risks to some of the low-lying areas in South Asia, and also wreak havoc on its fast-expanding urban centres.

“Smallholder farmers in South Asia are particularly vulnerable – India alone has 93 million small farmers. These groups already face water scarcity. Some studies predict crop yields up to 30 percent lower over the next decades, even as population pressures continue to rise,” the report continued, urging policy-makers to seriously consider adaptation measures.

Sri Lanka is already talking about a 15-percent loss in its vital paddy harvest, while simultaneously experiencing galloping price hikes in vegetables due to lack of rainfall and extreme heat.

It has already had to invest over 400 million dollars to safeguard its economic and administrative nerve centre, Colombo, from flash floods.

“We are getting running lessons on how to adapt to fluctuating weather, and we better take note,” J D M K Chandarasiri, additional director at the Hector Kobbekaduwa Agrarian Research Institute in Colombo, told IPS.

Smart investments in childhood education and youth employment could act as a bulwark against shocks, the report suggested, since these long-term measures are crucial in interrupting the cycle of poverty.

The report also urged policy makers to look at development and economic growth through a holistic prism rather than continuing with piecemeal interventions, noting that many developed countries invested in education, health and public services before reaching a high income status.

“The most successful anti-poverty and human development initiatives to date have taken a multidimensional approach, combining income support and job creation with expanded health care and education opportunities and other interventions for community development,” the reported noted.

(END)

Residents stand on a bridge destroyed by massive flooding in St. Vincent. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
CASTRIES, St. Lucia, Jan 7 2014 (IPS)

Guyanese President Donald Ramotar says the death and destruction caused by intense rainfall in three Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries over the Christmas holidays is a sign that the region has no time to lose in fortifying its resiliance to climate change.

A slow-moving, low-level trough on Dec. 24 dumped hundreds of millimetres of rain on St. Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Lucia and Dominica, killing at least 13 people. Following the deadly floods and landslides, the Guyanese government approved financial support of 100,000 dollars each for St. Lucia and St. Vincent and 75,000 to Dominica.“The damage unleashed by the trough [on]…that dreadful night has been extensive and severe." -- Prime Minister Dr. Kenny Anthony

“The scientific evidence is showing that for our region, which is one of the most vulnerable, these weather events will become more frequent as the impacts of global climate change intensify,” Ramotar told IPS.

Guyana’s coastal plains are approximately six feet below sea level.

“Recognising our own vulnerabilities here in Guyana, efforts will intensify in 2014 to improve and expand infrastructure, in particular our sea and river defence and drainage and irrigation systems; enhance our forecasting capabilities and response mechanisms, and build climate resilience in the social and productive sectors of our economy,” he said.

The Guyanese president said these steps will be taken within the framework of the country’s Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS).

The LCDS, a brainchild of former president Bharrat Jagdeo, sets out a vision to forge a new low-carbon economy in Guyana over the coming decade. It has received acclaim globally, and is now in the implementation stage.

Ramotar said the time for urgent action is now, citing “millions of dollars in damage and loss of life” resulting from extreme weather events.

In St. Lucia – one of three Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) countries that felt the most severe impact of the Dec. 24 floods – Prime Minister Dr. Kenny Anthony said that while the full economic cost of the storm has not yet been determined, it is clear that reconstruction will run into several hundred million dollars.

“The damage unleashed by the trough [on]…that dreadful night has been extensive and severe,” he told IPS.

“We now know that some 10 homes were completely destroyed by the raging floods. Agriculture has suffered badly. According to initial estimates there was 30-40 percent damage to banana fields, 90 percent damage to vegetables and five percent damage to tree crops.”

Anthony told IPS that 90 percent of all ponds have suffered “varying degrees of siltation” and shrimp, fish and livestock have been lost.

“Our infrastructure, some of which was already compromised by Hurricane Thomas [in 2010] has taken a further battering,” he said.

St. Lucia’s minister of sustainable development, Dr. James Fletcher, told IPS that the catastrophic events brought about by climate change caused severe infrastructural and psychological damage.

“These extreme weather events are quite traumatic for us, both on our psyche and on our national purse…but this is what climate change is bringing to us and this is what we have to unfortunately look forward to,” he told IPS.

At the same time, Fletcher said citizens and commercial enterprises must do a better job of solid waste management, since the indiscriminate disposal of garbage clogs waterways and causes serious problems.

“Some people treat the rivers as garbage disposal sites. This is something that we have to pay close attention to,” he told IPS.

The Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) said it continues to be in contact with the affected countries and is coordinating the response and recovery support. CDEMA is assisting the three impacted states in developing proposals to access the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) Emergency Response Grant facility and the Emergency Recovery Loan facility.

The government of Barbados is making available a coast guard vessel to assist in transporting emergency supplies to St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The “Trident” is capable of transporting more than four tonnes of cargo at one time.

In Dominica, where 65 households were affected by flooding, disaster officials estimate that 1.13 million dollars is required for immediate clean-up.

Prime Minister Anthony said the government of St. Kitts and Nevis has dispatched via the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank 1.36 million dollars as a donation to assist St. Lucia with its recovery efforts.

Britain is also providing 1.36 million dollars for vital emergency humanitarian support to St. Vincent and the Grenadines and St. Lucia.

British Minister of State for International Development Alan Duncan is visiting the region, and is meeting with the prime ministers of the two affected countries to discuss the humanitarian situation and reconstruction needs.

The newest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the ability of tourism-dependent Caribbean destinations like Barbados, Belize, Jamaica and the Bahamas, among others, to provide not only for their residents, but for the many thousands of visitors demanding water, energy, and other natural resources, is in jeopardy.

“As severe storms, drought, hurricanes, and other climate challenges rise to the forefront of issues being addressed by CARICOM countries, emerging data sheds new light on the future challenges in store for the islands and coastal nations throughout the region,” the report noted.

Ramgopaul Roop explains how sustainable farming, including conservation farming and a water harvesting system, has allowed him to run a successful business despite unpredictable climate conditions. Credit: Jewel Fraser/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Nov 25 2013 (IPS)

Even as weather extremes bedevil Caribbean farmers, Ramgopaul Roop has turned his three-acre fruit farm into a showcase for how to beat climate change.

His conservation farming methods include water harvesting and growing lemon grass as mulch. Since the grass is also a weed, it discourages the growth of other harmful weeds without the use of herbicides.“Farmers always asked, ‘When do we plant? When is the rain going to start?’” -- Dr. Leslie Simpson

“Because of the system using lemon grass and pommecythere trees growing lower than the lime trees, my land is covered with vegetation, so that we can adapt to climate changes,” Roop told IPS.

“If it is hot, we have this natural mulch under the crop. If it is raining, it helps to reduce the soil erosion,” he explained.

Roop is now the regional administrator for the Caribbean Agribusiness Association (CABA), an organisation mandated by the 15-member regional grouping Caricom to work with regional farmers’ groups to find agroprocessing opportunities.

CABA serves as a collective voice for farmers in the region through advocacy and assistance with trade negotiations.

Roop, who has farmed in Trinidad for 25 years, said that compliance with a country’s environmental regulations is key to success. This has proven true in the case of his own property, Rocrops Agrotech, which is used as a model farm by Trinidad and Tobago’s Environmental Management Authority.

His strategies have enabled Rocrops to supply agroprocessors with 10,000–12,000 limes weekly, 52 weeks a year, over the past five years.

“If farmers adopted the methods that I have implemented, they would be able to develop small holder farms to produce year-round to increase their level of production so that they could fulfil commitments to processing facilities,” he said.

“Small-holding farms can be developed into a sustainable unit that can be passed on to the next generation,” Roop added.

Across the region, Caribbean farmers are seeking reliable climate data to help them make better decisions when planning their crops. To meet this demand, the European Union and African, Caribbean and Pacific group (ACP) are training meteorologists to interact directly with farmers to provide accurate, timely information on weather patterns.

Monthly or trimonthly agricultural bulletins also discuss the possible effects on agriculture of the weather forecasted by the agro-metereologists.

Jamaica has also launched a website dedicated to providing twice-daily weather forecasts for farmers. Farmers can plug in the name of their location for detailed information on temperature, humidity, windspeed and other relevant data.

The training of the agrometereologists and the publishing of the bulletins are part of a larger EU-ACP project known as the Caribbean Agrometereological Initiative (CAMI), whose aim is to improve agricultural productivity in the region through the “improved dissemination and application of weather and climate information using an integrated and coordinated approach.”

CAMI’s partners include the Caribbean Institute for Metereology and Hydrology and the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI), among others.

Dr. Leslie Simpson said that Caribbean farmers have been in dire need of “access to information about what is happening and what is expected to happen with regard to climate change, and then information on how they can deal with these changes and risks.”

Farmers at workshops co-sponsored by CARDI “always asked, ‘When do we plant? When is the rain going to start?’” said Dr. Simpson, who is the natural resources management specialist with responsibility for climate change at CARDI.

The region’s increasing climate variability and the effects of climate change are making it difficult for farmers to determine when best to plant their crops, since the type of crop planted at a given time of year depends on the amount of rain expected then.

Region-wide discussions with farmers revealed that the foremost needs were for seasonal and inter-annual climate forecasts, forecasting for crop disease and pest incidence, and user-friendly weather and climate information.

Dr. Simpson said that “dealing with the variability of the present weather situation is the first step [for farmers] in dealing with any future climate change.”

CAMI notes that, “Short-range forecasts are normally available one day in advance, but modern agricultural practices …require weather forecasts with higher lead time which enable the farmers to take ameliorative measures.

“Thus, for the agricultural sector, location-specific weather forecast in the medium range (three to 10 days in advance) is very important. These forecasts and advisories should be made available in a language that farmers can understand.”

A second CARDI project now underway to help Caribbean farmers deal with climate change is being sponsored by the European Development Fund and administered by the ACP. This project is to help identify strains of crops that would be resilient to climate variability and climate change.

Dr. Arlington Chesney, CARDI’s executive director, told IPS that the project would focus firstly on starches and vegetable protein since “those are critical components of the diet of the majority of people in the region.”

Among the crops identified for research are sweet potato, cassava, corn, peas and beans. Dr. Chesney said the project has done a review of the soil types and changes in temperatures and rainfall patterns in various islands over the past 20 years, preparatory to selecting the crop varieties for investigation.

“We would try to characterise these varieties morphologically and genomically. We are looking at their DNA to determine if there are some inherent characteristics that are more resilient to climate change so that we could, with time, have a group of these varieties that we could say have a better than average chance of doing well under these new [climate] conditions,” Dr. Chesney said.

Much of the DNA work will be done by CARDI’s European partner in the project, the Wageningen University in Holland, which is considered one of the foremost agricultural universities in that country.

The university “will also do matching between the DNA crop performance and ecological measurements, temperatures, and rainfall,” said Dr. Chesney. CARDI will be providing mainly logistical and technical support on the project.

Dr. Chesney, like CAMI, stresses that his organisation’s work on equipping farmers to cope with climate change seeks to ensure the region’s food supply by improving farmers’ standard of living.

Rich benthic fauna and associated reef fish, Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia, which is expected to be one of the first places in the world to see prolonged, record-breaking heatwaves. Credit: Courtesy of Keoki Stender, Marinelifephotography.com

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Oct 10 2013 (IPS)

A climate plague affecting every living thing will likely start in 2020 in southern Indonesia, scientists warned Wednesday in the journal Nature. A few years later the plague will have spread throughout the world’s tropical regions.

By mid-century no place on the planet will be unaffected, said the authors of the landmark study."Within my generation, whatever climate we were used to will be a thing of the past." -- Nature study lead author Camilo Mora

“We don’t know what the impacts will be. If someone is about to fall off a three-storey building you can’t predict their exact injuries but you know there will be injuries,” said Camilo Mora, an ecologist at University of Hawai‘i in Honolulu and lead author.

“The results shocked us. Regardless of the scenario, changes will be coming soon,” said Mora.

The “climate plague” is a shift to an entirely new climate where the lowest monthly temperatures will be hotter than those in the past 150 years. The shift is already underway due to massive emissions of heat-trapping carbon from burning oil, gas and coal.

Extreme weather will soon be beyond anything ever experienced, and old record high temperatures will be the new low temperatures, Mora told IPS. This will affect billions of people and there is no going back to way things were.

“Within my generation, whatever climate we were used to will be a thing of the past,” he said.

In less than 10 years, a country like Jamaica will look much like it always has but it will not be the same country. Jamaicans and every living thing on the island and in its coastal waters will be experiencing a new, hotter climate – hotter on average than the previous 150 years.

The story will be same around 2030 in southern Nigeria, much of West Africa, Mexico and Central America without major reductions in the use of fossil fuels, the study reports.

“Some species will adapt, some will move, some will die,” said co-author Ryan Longman also at the University of Hawai‘i.

Tropical regions will shift first because their historical temperature ranges are narrow. Climate change may only shift temperatures by 1.0 degree C but that will be too much for some plants, amphibians, animals and birds that have evolved in a very stable climate, Longman said.

Tropical corals are already in sharp decline due to a combination of warmer ocean temperatures and  higher levels of ocean acidity as oceans absorb most the carbon from burning oil, gas and coal.

The Nature study examined 150 years of historical temperature data, more than a million maps, and the combined projections of 39 climate models to create a global index of when and where a region shifts into novel climate. That is to say a local climate that is continuously outside the most extreme records the region has experienced in the past 150 years.

Canada’s climate won’t shift until 2050 under the business as usual emissions scenario the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calls RCP8.5. The further a region is from the equator, the later the shift occurs. If the world sharply reduces its use of fossil fuels (RCP4.5), then these climate shifts are delayed 10 to 30 years depending on the location, the study shows. (City by city projection here)

Tropical regions are also those with greatest numbers of unique species. Costa Rica is home to nearly 800 species, while Canada, which is nearly 200 times larger in area, has only about 70 unique or endemic species.

Species matter because the abundance and variety of plants, animals, fish, insects and other living things are humanity’s life support system, providing our air, water, food and more.

“It’s an elegant study that shows timing of when climate shifts beyond anything in the recent past,” said Simon Donner, a climate scientist at Canada’s University of British Columbia.

Donner, who wasn’t involved in the study, agrees that the new regional climates in the tropics will have big impacts on many species.

“A number of other studies show corals, birds, and amphibians in the tropics are very sensitive to temperature changes,” Donner told IPS.

The impacts on ecosystems, food production, water availability or cites and towns are not known. However, the results of the study confirm the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions to reduce those future impacts, he said.

Developed countries not only need to make larger reductions in their emissions, they need to increase their “funding of social and conservation programmes in developing countries to minimize the impacts of climate change”, the study concludes.

Amongst the biggest impacts the coming ‘climate plague’ will have is on food production, said Mora.

“In a globalised world, what happens in tropics won’t stay in the tropics,” he said.

A vendor selling produce at a market in Dominica, which has been alternately hit by flooding and severe drought. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
CASTRIES, St. Lucia, Oct 7 2013 (IPS)

Malcolm Wallace always knew on which side his bread would be buttered.

At the age of 19, he built and operated his own greenhouse on his father’s farm in Dominica, planting lettuce, sweet peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers."Every step that we make forward we are probably making two backward." -- Samuel Carrette

“It was very lucrative and I actually made money,” said Wallace, now a graduate researcher at the Trinidad-based Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI).

“The push was financial. You do stuff and you see it’s actually making money, you are actually able to take care of your family and lime [party] a little bit. Which young person does not want that?” he told IPS.

Caribbean governments have long sought to attract more young people to their agriculture sectors, and the nine-member Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) has declared agriculture and tourism the “key pillars for development in the region”.

Samuel Carrette, permanent secretary for ministry of environment, physical planning, natural resources and fisheries for Dominica, says the OECS is focusing on these two sectors in order to build a sound economic base, improve the quality of life of residents, provide employment and to reduce poverty.

But he laments that both sectors are seriously challenged by climate variability and climate change.

“For agriculture we have many situations of greenhouses being affected, being blown away by hurricanes or strong winds. We have flooding of fields, we have the issue of access roads being blocked or carried away,” he told IPS.

“The weather variability provides a very serious challenge for us in terms of scheduling activities,” he said, referring to the challenges for the tourism industry.

In 2011, Dominica experienced its worst flooding on record. That followed almost a year of drought from 2009-2010 that severely affected the agriculture sector. In 2008, the island’s fishing industry was destroyed by hurricane Omar.

“Government had to find monies to rebuild the fisheries industry by providing the fisher folk with all the required fishing gear to rebuild,” Carrette said.

The OECS is a nine-member grouping comprising Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Anguilla and the British Virgin Islands are associate members.

OECS countries have very limited resources – natural, physical and financial – as well as small markets and economies.

Ignatius Jean, the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) representative in Jamaica and a former minister of agriculture for St. Lucia, told IPS that “food security is national security.”

Jean said that part of the IICA’s mandate is to support the member states in the management of natural resources, and coping with climate change in particular. They also work to show the linkages between the agriculture and tourism sectors.

He pointed to “the need for a multi-disciplinary approach towards managing the situation”, noting that this entails assessing the impacts of climate change and creating mitigation and adaptation strategies.

“We cannot run away from our territory. We have to learn to live with it. That is what adaptation is,” he said.

IICA has ongoing programmes to climate-proof the agricultural development strategies in Jamaica, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica and the Dominican Republic.

Keith Nicholls, climate change expert with the Belize-based Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC), believes the impacts of climate change will cripple tourism niche markets in the region.

He told IPS that increased storm surges brought on by climate change is impacting the dive sector, in particular coral reefs.

“Ultimately, if corals are going to suffer, then the loss of the biodiversity will represent a loss of a competitive advantage in tourism,” he said.

The increase in the severity of storms and hurricanes will also drive visitors away, Nicholls said. He argued that visitors will not come to a region deemed unsafe, especially given the vulnerability of beach resorts to storm surges.

“Tourists come here for sun and sea. Properties are losing their appeal because of beach erosion,” Nicholls said.

“Extreme drought conditions mean we have no water and the tourism industry is highly based on water resources. If tourists cannot get water in your country, they will go elsewhere to get water,” he said.

However, it is not just the absence of water that concerns Nicholls but the abundance of it.

“If it rains in the dry season and it rains all the time we are not going to want to come to such a place,” he said.

Carrette said his country, Dominica, has “been exposed to very erratic weather conditions and for us it is a bit too frequent. This is so because Dominica is exactly directly in the path of the hurricanes given its location so that predisposes us to the unfavourable conditions of the tropical winds systems.”

He noted that most of the countries in the Windward Islands are moving away from a reliance on the banana industry and trying to diversify their economies, so severe weather conditions are major setbacks.

“As small developing island states, basically every step that we make forward we are probably making two backward because we have to keep rebuilding major roads, seawalls and rehabilitating feeder roads in the context of agriculture and rescheduling of tourism activities,” he told IPS.

“We have to understand that the monies required for rehabilitation and restoration of human livelihoods are not available locally within your own budget and you do not have adequate reserves to mobilise resources to do restoration work and so you have to borrow. So for us it’s a major challenge as it increases our debt burden.”

Senior director of economic affairs at the OECS Secretariat, Randolph Cato, said recently that the total cost of climate change to the OECS tourism industry could be as high as 12 billion dollars over the next 40 years.

“We must do something about it,” he said. “Adapting to climate change will cost less than the potential damage.”

Many farmers will be forced to adapt to a changing climate. Geoffrey Ndung’u, from Kanyonga village in semi-arid Eastern Kenya, earns a living growing watermelons on his dry land. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Lester R. Brown
WASHINGTON, Aug 21 2013 (IPS)

Agriculture as it exists today developed over 11,000 years of rather remarkable climate stability. It has evolved to maximize production within that climate system. Now, suddenly, the climate is changing. With each passing year, the agricultural system is becoming more out of sync with the climate system.

In generations past, when there was an extreme weather event, such as a monsoon failure in India, a severe drought in Russia, or an intense heat wave in the U.S. Corn Belt, we knew that things would shortly return to normal. But today there is no ‘normal’ to return to. The earth’s climate is now in a constant state of flux, making it both unreliable and unpredictable.

Since 1970, the earth’s average temperature has risen more than one degree Fahrenheit. If we continue with business as usual, burning ever more oil, coal, and natural gas, it is projected to rise some 11 degrees Fahrenheit (six degrees Celsius) by the end of this century. The rise will be uneven. It will be much greater in the higher latitudes than in the equatorial regions, greater over land than over oceans, and greater in continental interiors than in coastal regions.

As the earth’s temperature rises, it affects agriculture in many ways. High temperatures interfere with pollination and reduce photosynthesis of basic food crops. High temperatures can also dehydrate plants. When a corn plant curls its leaves to reduce exposure to the sun, photosynthesis is reduced.

The earth’s rising temperature also affects crop yields indirectly via the melting of mountain glaciers. As the larger glaciers shrink and the smaller ones disappear, the ice melt that sustains rivers, and the irrigation systems dependent on them, will diminish. The continuing loss of mountain glaciers and the resulting reduced meltwater runoff could create unprecedented water shortages and political instability in some of the world’s more densely populated countries.

Scientists also expect higher temperatures to bring more drought – witness the dramatic increase in the land area affected by drought in recent decades. A team of scientists at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in the United States reported that the earth’s land area experiencing very dry conditions expanded from well below 20 percent from the 1950s to the 1970s to closer to 25 percent in recent years.

As the earth’s temperature rises, scientists expect heat waves to be both more frequent and more intense. Stated otherwise, crop-shrinking heat waves will now become part of the agricultural landscape. Among other things, this means that the world should increase its carryover stocks of grain to provide adequate food security.

From “Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity” by Lester R. Brown (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.) Supporting data, video, and slideshows are available for free download at www.earth-policy.org/books/fpep.

Disaster Risk Management Project (DRM). An elderly person with a disability goes down the stairs of the Cyclone shelter in Mohanagar, Sitakunda, Bangladesh. Credit: Brice Blondel/Handicap International

By Lucy Westcott
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 20 2013 (IPS)

Upon first glance, the emergency checklist distributed in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake looks like any other. Organised into key categories like water, sanitation and hygiene, and psychosocial support, the information is typical of the kind circulated for emergency response.

But after a closer read, with recommendations for latrines to be built with a 90cm diameter so a wheelchair can turn around, and 80-cm-wide doors for wheelchair or crutch-users to pass through comfortably, it is clear that the checklist, distributed by Handicap International, was intended for persons with disabilities living in the disaster-ravaged country.“When we don’t include people with disabilities, that’s when the most deaths and casualties happen.” -- Fred Doulton of UN Enable

Natural disasters are common in many developing countries across the globe, and organisations like Handicap International are helping communities plan better for their disabled populations. There are between 2.9 and 4.2 million persons with disabilities among the world’s 42 million forcibly displaced population, according to data from the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

For many people living with disabilities in developing countries, social stigma and cultural barriers prevent community cohesion, which is essential for emergency planning and preparedness, Annie Lafrenière, social inclusion and technical adviser at Handicap International, told IPS.

“People won’t speak about social barriers… they’ll talk about ramps [instead],” Lafrenière said. “[People with disabilities] are not considered the same as everyone else.”

Developing countries are vulnerable and at a higher risk of disasters because they are less prepared and equipped to deal with them, and not necessarily because they are more exposed to hazards, Lafrenière says. Persons with disabilities are often invisible to relief activities and unable to reach food or water checkpoints due to destroyed roads or non-accessible transportation.

“Meeting basic needs… remains a priority and often a challenge for communities affected by disasters, whether they are persons with or without disabilities,” Lafrenière says. “What our experiences have shown us… is that the presence of disability amplifies the impact of the disaster on a person’s life… and reduce[s] the range of strategies to cope with them.”

Inclusive planning is one improvement that can be made by communities in developing countries, and one that Handicap International stresses. It’s vital that disabled people are part of planning meetings and committees, as they help to spread awareness while offering their expertise.

“When we don’t include people with disabilities, that’s when the most deaths and casualties happen,” Fred Doulton, social affairs officer at UN Enable, which focuses on the rights of disabled people and is part of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), told IPS. “By asking [people with disabilities] directly about what they think, you get to the core issues.”

The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) recently released a survey asking persons with disabilities around the world about their experience living with and preparing for disasters.

In the Indonesian province of East Nusa Tenggara (NTT province), Handicap International is working with schools and children with disabilities and their families to improve awareness and response to disasters. The region is prone to flooding, landslides and whirlwinds; in 2012 there were 258 whirlwinds, 28 times the number recorded in 2002, according to Indonesia’s National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB).

“We are implementing activities within the community to increase resilience to natural disasters, but we are also implementing activities within schools to be sure that children with disabilities will be taken into consideration,” Catherine Gillet, programme director for Handicap International in Indonesia/Timor-Leste, told IPS from the ground.

The NTT province consists of rural communities living in hilly areas and on dry and rocky land. The terrain can be treacherous, with communities staying either in valleys near the rivers, where there is a high risk of floods during the rainy season, or on the slopes of hills near areas suitable for crop cultivation, but where landslides pose a huge risk.

The children, mainly in grades three to five, raise awareness among their peers about disaster risk and are involved in risk assessment and identification. Disabled and non-disabled schoolchildren also demonstrate good practices for evacuation in disasters and work together in mock drills.

“For children with disabilities [the main challenge] is the problem of access, the problem of moving around,” Mathieu Dewerse, regional operational coordinator for Handicap International in Indonesia/Timor-Leste, told IPS.

“This is compounded in the case of disasters. If we think about a landslide, the road may be cut, there could be rocks on the road. If this is a child that uses crutches, it’s very hard to move around,” Dewerse says.

During past disasters, children with mobility disabilities have been supported by tricycles or motorbikes, Dewerse says.

For children with sensory impairments in the region, access to information is one of the main concerns. Communities have set up flag systems to compensate for the sound of an evacuation signal, which can’t be heard by children with hearing impairments, and have recruited friends and family to make sure they get away safely.

“Take the example of a child who doesn’t see. It’s a very big problem, especially if they have to evacuate quickly,” Dewerse says.

The provision of more mobility devices adapted to the needs of children with disabilities is an important step in helping communities the next time there is a flood or landslide, Dewerse says.

In the neighbouring Philippines, Handicap International replaced the cumbersome wheelchair of Joshua Degas, a 10-year-old boy with cerebral palsy, after Tropical Storm Washi in 2011, with one his own size, improving his future mobility in the face of potential disasters.

(See Part One and Part Two)

Excerpt:

Boats washed up along the riverfront in Croton-on-Hudson, about thirty miles north of Manhattan, after Hurricane Sandy. Credit: Katherine Stapp/IPS

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Aug 20 2013 (IPS)

The United States government is recommending new preparations aimed at protecting vulnerable communities from climate change-related disasters, a year after a major hurricane devastated swaths of the country’s East Coast.

On Monday, a presidential task force released a report that details a strategy it says will both rebuild the region devastated in October by Hurricane Sandy and guard the nation from future climate change-related extreme weather."When we look at the costs of national disasters... it starts to become clear that those costs outweigh the costs of cutting down on the use of fossil fuels." -- Janet Larsen of the Earth Policy Institute

The Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force Strategy Report includes 69 policy recommendations, some of which are already in practice. The authors says they are designed to “help homeowners stay in and repair their homes, strengthen small businesses and revitalize local economies and ensure entire communities are better able to withstand and recover from future storms.”

The government’s signal that it will directly confront challenges related to climate change is viewed positively by some environmental experts.

“It is absolutely critical that the U.S. takes climate change into consideration as it decides how to invest money into repairing and rebuilding infrastructure,” Janet Larsen, research director at the Earth Policy Institute (EPI), a Washington think tank, told IPS.

Larsen believes the United States learned the hard way that its communities are vulnerable to climate change.

“Ten or 15 years ago, if you asked where there were likely to be ‘climate refugees’, it was commonly thought they would just be from small island nations,” she notes. “But after Hurricane Katrina” – which hit the U.S. in 2005 – “there were a quarter of a million people who had to leave their homes, and many have yet to return.”

Twenty-three federal agencies participated in drafting the Strategy Report, headed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

The report says its recommendations are aimed at “cutting red tape”, but advocates of more localised solutions note the continuing multitude of agencies involved. Such bureaucracy, they say, undermines claims that a massive federal effort would make responses to disaster more efficient.

“They talk about better coordination,” Ted DeHaven, a budget analyst for the Cato Institute, a think tank here that promotes small government, told IPS. “But the reality is that there are too many federal cooks in the kitchen.”

Nonetheless, the report presents guidelines for using the 50 billion dollars authorised by Congress and approved by U.S. President Barack Obama in January to rebuild the northeastern region.

According to HUD, the strategy outlined in the report is also intended “to serve as a model for communities across the nation facing greater risks from extreme weather and to continue helping the Sandy-affected region rebuild.”

The agency emphasises two of its recommendations as being of particular consequence, and both revolve around the potential for increased extreme weather in the future. One is to initiate “a process to prioritize all large-scale infrastructure projects and map the connections and interdependencies between them, as well as guidelines to ensure all of those projects are built to withstand the impacts of climate change.”

Another is to “harden energy infrastructure to minimize power outages and fuel shortages – and ensure continuation of cellular service – in the event of future storms.”

The report also urges the creation of a publicly available “Sea Rise Projection Tool” in order to keep vulnerable communities aware of how water levels may change.

Such measures, the authors suggest, “will improve our ability to withstand and recover effectively from future flood-related disasters across the country.”

Resilience and hard truths

In line with a growing trend across the globe, the stated goal of these new official recommendations is to achieve “resilient” communities – those with the ability “to respond effectively to a major storm, recover quickly from it, and adapt to changing conditions, while also taking measures to reduce the risk of significant damage in a future storm.”

Yet EPI’s Larsen suggests that some of this emphasis may be misplaced. She notes that while the concept of “resilience” is mentioned in the report over 300 times, root causes of climate change, such as fossil fuel emissions, are hardly addressed.

While she applauds the report for acknowledging the challenge of climate change, she regrets the lack of attention to these causes.

Larsen suggests that positive concepts such as rebuilding are politically popular and therefore easier to propose to the public, while “hard truths” that put the country on the defensive don’t resonate well with the United States’ “dominant” self-image.

Cato’s DeHaven agrees that politics are at play in the federally focused strategy. He says that state and local politicians, without considering long-term costs, are often all too quick to accept federal dollars.

Yet the long-term costs, according to DeHaven, are state and local governments that are dependent on federal cheques and therefore less in control of their own destinies.

“Once the federal government intervenes and accrues power, even after the original problem subsides, it tends not to relinquish that power,” he says.

DeHaven also notes that the federal policies have increased vulnerability by subsidising below-market insurance rates that encourage building in risky areas.

For EPI’s Larsen, a better national plan would include a more rapid timetable for cutting emissions and acceptance of the fact that “there may have to be some areas where we don’t build at all.”

“The main idea,” she says “should be that when we look at the costs of national disasters and understand that climate change contributes to them, it starts to become clear that those costs outweigh the costs of cutting down on the use of fossil fuels.” 

Flooding in Trinidad's capital of Port of Spain in May 2013 left residents little choice but to wade through the deluge. Credit: Peter Richards/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Aug 19 2013 (IPS)

The Caribbean is in danger of becoming “a region of serial defaulters” with respect to international debt obligations, according to one expert, and this may partly be due to its economies suffering frequent shocks from natural disasters.

Caribbean nations are among the world’s most vulnerable to natural disasters, with the region being struck by 187 such disasters in the past 60 years.

According to an International Monetary Fund study entitled “Caribbean Small States: Challenges of High Debt and Low Growth” and published in February, “The effects of natural disasters on [the region’s] growth and debt are also significant,” and “many Caribbean economies face high and rising debt to GDP ratios that jeopardize prospects for medium-term debt sustainability and growth.”

Commenting on the region’s restructuring of loans after some countries had defaulted on bond payments, a Bloomberg news report quoted an expert in international finance from American University who claimed Caribbean governments find it easier to default on bond payments than to reduce their spending.

Over the past three years, a number of Caribbean countries have restructured bond payments, making this period one of the highest for defaults on loan agreements by Caribbean governments. The Bloomberg report cited Grenada, Jamaica and Belize as three of the Caribbean countries restructuring debt obligations.

However, Michael Hendrickson, an economic affairs officer with the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), emphasised the pressures brought by natural disasters on these countries’ economies over the past decade.

“In Grenada, GDP contracted largely due to the fallout from Hurricane Ivan, the growth rate declined from 9.5 percent in 2003 (before Ivan) to -0.7 percent in 2004 (year of Ivan) then recovered strongly in 2005, with growth of 13.3 percent, no doubt related to strong reconstruction, i.e. investment, but declined again in 2006, after the investment had run its course.

“Jamaica also felt the impact of Ivan and its growth rate slowed from 3.7 percent in 2003 to 1.3 percent in 2004 [the year Ivan struck the island]. This reflected the impact on productive sectors such as agriculture, mining and tourism.

“Moreover, the impacts lingered into 2005, when the economy grew by only 0.9 percent. In Belize, growth slowed to 1.1 percent in 2007 from 5.1 percent in 2006, partly as a result of the impact of Hurricane Dean, owing to damage to agriculture and productive infrastructure,” he told IPS.

Regional governments’ tendency to fund social and economic development through borrowing rather than through establishing an appropriate framework for sustainable economic development has also contributed to the high debt to GDP ratio.

Some Caribbean countries “have debt levels that can be considered unsustainable”, Hendrickson said. “Moreover, debt service payments, namely, interest and principal repayments, absorbed a full 29 percent of government revenue in 2011.

“We are still collating numbers for 2012. This reduces the ability of governments to finance public investment and social protection programmes.”

The 2013 IMF study noted that “part of the build-up can be traced to the cost of natural disasters, successive years of fiscal deficit, public enterprise borrowing and off-balance-sheet spending, including for financial sector bailouts.”

An IMF working paper entitled “Macroeconomic Implications of Natural Disasters in the Caribbean” observes that following natural disasters in the Eastern Caribbean region, “the tendency appears to have been a marked increase in expenditure and a small reduction in total revenue (including grants) despite an increase in inflows of official assistance and aid.”

The working paper said this “is not surprising, as governments and households would be expected to borrow in response to temporary shocks.”

Since natural disasters affect two of the largest economic sectors in the region, tourism and agriculture, the impact on countries’ economic growth is considerable.

According to ECLAC’s “The Economics of Climate Change in the Caribbean Summary Report,” it is estimated that natural disasters due to climate change will likely cost countries in the subregion up to five percent of annual GDP between 2011 and 2050.

It is also estimated that GDP in the region has declined by about one percent annually over the past several years because of natural disasters.

However, because of their middle income status, the majority of the region is unable to benefit from international debt relief, says the 2013 IMF study on Caribbean debt. The study also noted that “only a few Caribbean countries still qualify for concessional borrowing at the World Bank.”

“Given the exceptionally high costs of natural disasters, small states in the Caribbean should be seen as frontline candidates for support from climate-change funding,” the IMF report stated.

The president of the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), Dr. Warren Smith, also stated a case for increased insurance coverage to help offset the impact of natural disasters due to climate change, at a recent meeting of the CDB’s governors.

He made specific reference to the region’s need to make greater use of the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF), an organisation set up to insure Caribbean countries against natural disasters.

Dr. Simon Young, who heads Caribbean Risk Managers Ltd., which supervises most of the technical aspects of CCRIF, said 16 countries in the region have policies with CCRIF.

“Those policies cover hurricane and earthquake and the total amount of risk that is covered amounts to just over 600 million” for all 16 countries, he told IPS.

Dr. Young conceded, “It is not adequate, but the adequacy of the coverage is a function of the countries’ ability to pay premiums that would be needed to buy adequate coverage. CCRIF provides premiums at less than half of what the commercial market would require.”

Yet, many countries find it difficult to pay for coverage even at those preferential rates. As a result, the insurance coverage has provided only “a very small amount” of compensation to islands hit by natural disasters in recent years.

Dr. Young added that insurance coverage should not be seen as a “silver bullet” for disaster risk reduction.

“Caribbean countries need to look for cost efficient ways to manage disaster risk reduction,” he said, and CCRIF provides just one tool for doing so.

Regional temperature increases predicted by 2100. Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Synthesis Report 2004

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Aug 15 2013 (IPS)

Two reports released Wednesday reveal the dangerous gap between science and politics. New climate research shows that extreme events such as the severe heat wave in the U.S. last year will double in 2020, increase 400 percent by 2040, and then get far worse without significant carbon reductions.

Meanwhile, an analysis shows Canada cannot meet its weak 2020 carbon emissions reduction target even as it plans to triple the size of its massive tar sands operations in coming decades.

Canada’s has no credible carbon reduction plan and has done virtually nothing on climate since Stephen Harper’s government came to power in 2006, said activists.

“It will be very difficult for the Canadian government to achieve its own emissions reduction target for 2020 even without tar sands expansion,” Danny Harvey, a climate scientist at the University of Toronto, said at a press conference Wednesday.

Canada, the United States and other countries pledged to reduce their total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 17 percent compared to 2005 levels by the year 2020 under what is known as the Copenhagen Accord. Scientists say that target is too weak and will result in global temperatures rising by at least 3.5C, a very dangerous level of climate change.

Those high temperatures will likely produce heat extremes that kill people, animals and crops, and blanket 85 percent of the planet’s land area in summer by 2100, German and Spanish scientists reported late Wednesday.

“That’s what our calculations show for a scenario of unabated climate change,” said co-author Dim Coumou of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

Shockingly, it is already too late to prevent a doubling of heat waves by 2020 and four-fold increase by 2040, concludes the study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The reason for this is that burning enormous amounts of fossil fuels over the past 50 years has added 40 percent more heat-trapping CO2 gas to the atmosphere. Even if all human sources of CO2 emissions ended today, temperatures will continue to rise from the present 0.8C of additional warming to as much as 1.1. to 1.5C due to a time lag in the climate system, scientists say.

And those temperatures would not decline for a very long time.

That is why all countries agreed to cut CO2 emissions at the 2009 U.N. climate treaty negotiations in Copenhagen.

Canada matched the U.S. pledge to reduce emissions 17 percent but then did little to reduce its emissions and instead dramatically expanded the world’s biggest energy project, the Alberta tar sands.

Each year, the tar sands burn nearly 40 billion cubic metres of natural gas, roughly two-thirds of what India uses annually. This gas is mainly used to heat water so the tarry bitumen can be boiled out of the ground and converted into heavy crude oil.

In 2011, 370 million cubic metres of freshwater was used. This is more than the city of Toronto’s 2.8 million people use. Oil companies pay nothing for the water even though the water becomes too toxic to be returned to rivers or to aquifers.

Most analyses show that oil from the tar sands is the most polluting and has the highest CO2 footprint compared to other sources of oil. Those CO2 emissions are increasing as bitumen becomes harder to extract and are expected to double by 2020.

“Canadian politicians are simply not telling the truth. You can’t keep expanding the tar sands and meet the reduction target,” said Mark Jaccard, an energy economist at Simon Frasier University and a Harper government appointee to the now-shuttered National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy.

There are no federal regulations on oil and gas emissions in Canada. Instead of acting, the Harper government launched a 16-million-dollar public relations campaign in the U.S. and Canada promoting the economic benefits of “responsible resource development” of the tar sands – a move mocked by activists as “greenwashing”.

Deep cuts in emissions after 2020 will be needed to avoid most of the world suffering under devastating heat waves before the end of the century, the Potsdam Institute’s research shows. Those reductions “will be impossible to achieve if we lock in 40 years of increased tar sands emissions by building more pipelines” like the Keystone XL, said the University of Toronto’s Danny Harvey in a press conference here in Toronto Wednesday.

The U.S. is on target to make its meet its Copenhagen reduction pledge. However, Canada’s abysmal environmental record has come to the attention of the Barack Obama administration. President Obama recently said that he would only approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline if it “does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution”. The long-delayed Keystone XL would bring 800,000 barrels of tar sands bitumen (heavy oil) to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Keystone XL will increase Canada’s emissions by allowing the tar sands to expand in size, said Gillian McEachern of Environmental Defence Canada. And there is no technology nor any policies that will allow Canada to reduce those emissions before 2020, McEachern said.

Other proposed pipelines that are needed to support tar sands expansion have met strong opposition in Canada and it is far from certain if they will be completed, said Jaccard.

“We are now at a point where the only acceptable alternative is for the U.S. government to reject Keystone XL,” he said.

Extreme heat, flooding and water and food shortages will rock South Asia and Africa by 2030 and render large sections of cities inhabitable, if the world continues to burn huge amounts of coal, oil and gas, the World Bank is warning.

“Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts and the Case for Resilience“, a new report commissioned by the World Bank and released Wednesday, analysed the expected effects on South Asia and Africa if global temperatures increase by two and four degrees Celsius.

The report showed that a global temperature rise of two degrees Celsius will have a wide range of dangerous effects, including a loss of 40 to 80 percent of cropland in Africa and rising sea levels that will destroy significant parts of many coastal cities in South Asia.

“If the world warms by two degrees Celsius – warming which may be reached in 20 to 30 years – that will cause widespread food shortages, unprecedented heat waves, and more intense cyclones,” said World Bank President Jim Yong Kim.

He pointed out that such change could “greatly harm the lives and the hopes of individuals and families who have had little hand in raising the earth’s temperature”.

The burning of carbon-based fuels has increased the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere by 40 percent. CO2 and water vapour in the atmosphere are crucial in retaining some of the sun’s heat energy; without them, the earth’s atmosphere would be more like the moon’s: 100 degrees Celsius in the daytime and -150 degrees at night.

Adding 40 percent more CO2, however, has increased the amount of heat energy the Earth absorbs, with more than 93 percent of it warming the oceans.

Bleak findings

One of the shocking findings in the new study is the enormous impact a two-degree rise will have on the urban poor, said Rachel Kyte, the vice president for sustainable development at the World Bank.

Urbanisation is increasing rapidly, especially in the developing world, with many more people living in slums and informal settlements, Kyte told IPS from London.

The report painted a bleak picture for many cities.

As climate change disrupts rainfall patterns and generates more extreme weather in the coming decades, leading to poor crop yields, rural populations will flood cities. Escalating numbers of urban poor will suffer, with temperatures magnified by the “heat island effect” of the constructed urban environments.

Safe drinking water will also be harder to find, especially after floods, contributing to greater water-borne diseases such as cholera and diarrhoea.

Coastal regions like Bangladesh and India’s two largest coastal cities, Kolkata and Mumbai, will face extreme river floods, more intense tropical cyclones, rising sea levels and very high temperatures.

“Huge numbers of urban poor will be exposed in many coastal cities,” Kyte said.

Meanwhile, a sea level rise of 30 centimetres, possible by 2040, will result in massive flooding in cities and inundate low-lying cropland with saltwater, which is corrosive to crops. Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, a global rice producer, is particularly vulnerable to sea level rise, and a 30-centimetre rise there could result in the loss of about 11 percent of crop production, the report found.

“We face a huge challenge over the next 20 years to…redesign our cities to protect them from climate change,” Kyte predicted, even as cities already face a huge infrastructure investment gap.

One trillion dollars a year needed to be invested every year by 2020 by some estimates, Kyte said, adding that “to build climate resilience into cities will take another 300 to 500 million dollars a year”.

A lack of water will be a problem in other regions. The projected loss of snowmelt from the Himalayas will reduce the flow of water into the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra river basins, which altogether threaten to leave hundreds of millions of people without enough water, food or access to reliable energy, the report said.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, by the decades of 2030 or 2040, drought mixed with destructive flooding will contribute to farmers’ losing 40 to 80 percent of cropland used for growing maize, millet and sorghum.

And while carbon emissions have already increased oceans’ acidity by 30 percent, by 2040, oceans will be too acidic for many coral reefs to survive. The death of coral reefs results in major loss of fish habitats as well as protection against storms.

“That will have significant consequences for ocean fish catches, which are already in decline today,” said Bill Hare of Climate Analytics and who was the lead author of the study.

Policy recommendations

The report is a science-based guide for the World Bank and governments for what these regions will face over the next 20 to 30 years, said Hare.

“Much of this can be avoided, and it will cost far less with urgent action to reduce carbon emissions,” Hare told IPS.

In a speech at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate Wednesday, U.S. President Barack Obama called climate change the “global threat of our time” and promised the United States would do far more to reduce emissions. A detailed announcement is expected next week.

Last week, the United States and China agreed to reduce phase out HFCs, a greenhouse gas used in air conditioners. China has also created a series of carbon trading regions to cut emissions.

“These are small positive signs that need to pickup momentum,” Hare said.

People at Labor Square in Gulshan-e-Maymar, Karachi, Pakistan wait for food aid after the 2010 floods. Forced migration and the displacement of vulnerable communities are issues of concern to U.S. national security experts. Credit: M Fahim Siddiqi/IPS

By Walter García and Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Feb 27 2013 (IPS)

More than three dozen national security officials, members of Congress and military leaders are warning of the threat climate change poses to U.S. national security, the latest in an indicator that U.S. intelligence and national security circles are increasingly worried about a warming planet.

In a new bipartisan open letter, they stress the need for urgent action and call on both public and private support to address issues that included forced migration and the displacement of vulnerable communities, as well as the dangers related to food production during extreme weather events.

“We tried to accomplish two things: First, to make a call to action on the whole issue of climate change,” Lee Hamilton, a former member of Congress and a founder of the Partnership for a Secure America (PSA), a bipartisan Washington group that organised the letter, told IPS.It’s very weird we’re getting ‘100-year floods' every five years.

“Many people are frustrated that the political system doesn’t seem to be able to deal with question of climate change. It’s not on the agenda – the president has mentioned it, politicians have mentioned it, but we really have no action taking place.”

Hamilton continued, “The second thing we did was put it in a national security context, which I think was a unique way to frame it, and hopefully it will provide an additional stimulus for action.”

Signatories to the letter include former secretaries of state (George Schultz and Madeleine Albright), secretaries of defence and homeland security (William Cohen and Tom Ridge), a former director of central intelligence (R. James Woolsey), several generals (Gen. Anthony Zinni, Gen. Wesley Clark) and others.

They join the State Department, Defence Department, National Intelligence Council and a growing number of other security voices here in emphasising the national security implications of climate change.

“Even if you’re sceptical about any single part of climate change, it’s hard to get away from the … combination of feedback loops together with population growth and increasing consumption, which lead to a number of national security concerns,” Woolsey said here Tuesday, referring to “millions upon millions of hungry, thirsty neighbours to the south [of the United States], looking for somewhere to go.”

Unless precautionary steps are taken, the letter warns that “climate change impacts abroad could spur mass migrations, influence civil conflict and ultimately lead to a more unpredictable world.” And “protecting U.S. interests under these conditions would progressively exhaust American military, diplomatic and development resources as we struggle to meet growing demands for emergency international engagement.”

The new letter also comes against the backdrop of unfulfilled promises of action from the White House and a highly polarised Congress on the issue.

The national security aspect of climate change for the United States was given high prominence in December, when a major report from the National Intelligence Council (NIC), a high-level body coordinating all of the country’s intelligence agencies, listed climate change as one of four “megatrends” that will shape the world over the next two decades.

Other megatrends included factors relating to greater empowerment and prosperity of the individual, the growing political and economic power of developing countries, and dramatic changes in demographic patterns like rapid urbanisation.

The “Global Trends” report emphasised that climate change will severely impair the ability of food producers to meet a growing global demand for food, water and energy, each of which is forecast to increase by between 35 and 50 percent. Adding to this strain are the expanding consumer demands of a swelling worldwide middle class.

Most exposed

All of these issues will be exacerbated by the disrupted weather patterns associated with global climate change.

Scientists predict that the severity of existing weather patterns will intensify, with wet areas getting wetter, and arid areas becoming drier. Much of the decline in precipitation is expected to occur in the Middle East and North Africa as well as western Central Asia, southern Europe, southern Africa and the U.S. southwest.

“We are going to be see evidence of climate change beyond rising temperatures,” Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, said during an analysis of the Global Trends 2030 report Tuesday here in Washington.

“But as more thermal energy is put into the climate as a system, we will see more extreme events like the snowfalls across the country over the past couple of weeks, the floods in Thailand, floods in Pakistan, fires around Moscow … It’s very weird we’re getting ‘100-year floods’ every five years.”

Even as members of the U.S. Congress fail to arrive at any consensus on how or whether to overhaul the country’s energy sector, the Global Trends report notes that the United States is indeed moving towards “energy independence” – albeit not on the backs of renewable sources as pushed by environmentalists and others.

In fact, the U.S. recently regained its position as the world’s largest gas producer, largely due to its introduction of new “hydraulic fracturing” (or “fracking”) technologies. Experts now say U.S. reserves will be able to continue producing for the next century.

“It seems we are going to be stuck in an oil and gas world for quite some time, and we will see the impacts accumulate along with the temperature,” Goldstone said. “The poorer countries are precisely the ones left most exposed and vulnerable to climate change, and we need saleable, efficient, cost-effective solutions – and we need to keep vulnerable cities viable.”

Despite the expanding middle class and swelling urban populations and the resulting pressures on critical resources like food and water, the scientists point out that shortages are not inevitable, particularly through the effective management of natural resources.

Here in Washington, the close timing of the new letter and the report indicate a clear and growing recognition of the climate change threat as a national security issue. Yet whether this growing consensus can influence members of Congress has yet to be seen.

“It is quite clear that our national security establishment, especially over the past couple of years, has been keenly aware of the threat of climate change – but now its time to act,” Hamilton said.

Downpours flood the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Credit: Farid Ahmed/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Feb 27 2013 (IPS)

Killer heat waves, floods and storms are increasingly caused by climate change, new research reveals.

Scientists in Germany say they have found how greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels are helping to trap the jet stream, resulting in extraordinary weather such as the 2010 Pakistan flood and the 2011 heat wave in the United States.

Human-driven climate change repeatedly disturbs the flow of atmospheric waves around the globe’s Northern hemisphere, said lead author Vladimir Petoukhov of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany.

Giant atmospheric waves called Rossby waves are meanders in the strong, high-altitude winds known as jet streams and have a major influence on weather. These wave movements are caused by the difference in temperatures between the cold air from the Arctic and hot air from the tropics.

When the waves shift north, they suck warm air from the tropics to Europe, Russia, or the U.S., and when they swing down, they do the same thing with cold air from the Arctic, said Petoukhov.

“During several recent extreme weather events, these planetary waves almost freeze in their tracks for weeks,” he said. “So instead of bringing in cool air after having brought warm air in before, the heat just stays.”

This unnatural pattern is due to human heating of the climate through emissions of greenhouse gases that result from burning fossil fuels, according to the study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

However, this heating of the atmosphere is wildly uneven. The Arctic is warming two to three times faster than the global temperature rise of 0.8C and that affects the Rossby waves and is slowing the jet stream.

“(Our research) complements previous research that already linked such phenomena to climate change,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a co-author of the study.

IPS previously reported research showing the dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice and rapid warming of the region was affecting weather patterns in the northern hemisphere.

The unprecedented expanse of ice-free Arctic Ocean has been absorbing the 24-hour sun over the short polar summer. The heat in the water must be released into the atmosphere if the ice is to re-form in the autumn.

“This is like a new energy source for the atmosphere,” Jennifer Francis, a researcher at Rutgers University, told the Guardian.

Major declines of Arctic summer sea ice as in 2011 and 2007 have been linked to colder winters in the UK and northern Europe, Francis said. The record ice loss in 2012 has been followed by a cold and stormy winter over much of Europe.

“The jet stream is clearly weaker,” said Francis. That means weather systems, be it rain or dry conditions, are slow to move on and last longer. Ultimately, this can result in “blocking” events, such as the conditions that produced the terrible heatwave in western Russia during the summer of 2010 and floods in Pakistan, she said.

Last summer, Greenland experienced a similar blocking anti-cyclone, resulting in a record surface melting of its ice sheet. “Blocks act like a traffic jam, slowing down weather patterns elsewhere,” Francis said.

Scientists are surprised by how extreme these changes have been with a relatively small amount of warming. That has prompted some to speak out politically to urge emission reductions. On Monday, a group of Canadian and U.S. scientists pleaded with the Canadian government to stop the expansion of the Alberta tar sands oil projects and take real steps to reduce carbon emissions.

Canada ranks 58th out of 61 countries according the 2013 Climate Change Performance Index.

“The Canadian government has no credible plan for stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions, much less reducing them,” Danny Harvey, a University of Toronto climate scientist, said in a statement.

Canada needs “across-the-board deep reductions”, Harvey said. “Continued expansion of the oil sands operations runs counter to this imperative.”

The tar sands, also called oil sands, are responsible for about 300 million tonnes of CO2 a year (production and consumption) — more than most countries. The industry, supported by the Canadian and Alberta governments, hopes to triple this amount.

In recent weeks, they have been heavily lobbying the new Obama administration to get approval for the Keystone XL pipeline. If President Obama approves it, Keystone XL will bring 800,000 barrels of tar sands oil south from Alberta to the U.S. gulf coast every day for many years.

That decision is expected in a few weeks.

Last December, at the U.N. climate conference in Doha, Qatar, Schellnhuber declared: “The first law of humanity is not to kill your children.”

Hoping to prevent the tragedies that have become an annual event every rainy season, authorities in the southeastern Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro plan to require that municipal governments include environmental risk mapping in their infrastructure projects, in order to prohibit construction in vulnerable areas.

The initiative was put forward by the Rio de Janeiro State Secretariat of Environment, and must still be approved by the Legislative Assembly of the State of Rio de Janeiro. It was announced in the midst of yet another weather-related disaster in the state, earlier this month.

Since the beginning of the year, the southern hemisphere summer rainy season has already resulted in at least three deaths, while thousands of people have been left homeless due to collapsed buildings and flooding.

“We decided to submit this bill to the legislative assembly to bring an end to the suicidal ‘populism’ of some mayors, who ignore the maps of disaster risk areas,” Rio de Janeiro Environment Secretary Carlos Minc told IPS.

“I have seen mayors building streets and installing public services in places that have been identified by studies as vulnerable to natural disasters, which imminently endangers the lives of these populations,” said Minc.

If the bill is passed into law, disaster risk maps will become official public documents and “municipal governments will be obliged to incorporate their findings and restrictions in master plans and regulations on land use,” he added.

A study by the Rio de Janeiro State Geological Service, reported by the newspaper O Globo this month, revealed that there are disaster risk areas in 67 of the state’s 92 municipalities, and there are some 36,000 people living in these highly vulnerable areas.

In an interview with IPS, geotechnical engineer Willy Lacerda noted that most of these municipalities are in mountainous areas, which makes them susceptible to landslides during heavy rainfall.

Lacerda, an engineering professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, explained that different rainfall patterns can lead to different types of disasters.

In the case of steady, continuous rainfall, the ground slowly becomes saturated with water. “If the depth of this saturation is great enough, there may be scattered landslides,” he noted.

When there is heavy rainfall following a period of continuous precipitation, rivers can become swollen and overflow. The riverbanks are more susceptible to being washed out because the soil has become saturated and therefore less resistant to the water pressure.

“In this case, landslides are widespread,” he said.

This is what happened in 2011 in Teresópolis and Nova Friburgo, in the mountainous region of Rio de Janeiro. Flooded rivers and collapsed buildings resulted in 900 deaths and left some 25,000 people homeless, according to figures from the Rio de Janeiro state government.

A third variant is that of torrential rains of more than 60 millimetres an hour, which can set off widespread landslides on steep slopes, as was the case in Jacarepaguá in 1996.

Disaster risk mapping contributes to preventing or at least minimising climate-related tragedies, stressed Lacerda. In some cases, it could lead to the timely evacuation of the population from vulnerable areas. In others, it might bring about engineering works, such as containment walls to reinforce hillsides.

Lacerda, who participates in the development of these maps, explained that they take numerous factors into account, such as geology, the shape of the terrain (slope and concavity), the thickness and resistance of the topsoil, and the type of vegetation.

“This is how we define areas where there is a greater or lesser probability of landslides, and based on this, we determine which homes are more susceptible to landslides,” on a scale of high, medium and low risk, he said.

The risk of flooding, meanwhile, can be gauged on the basis of local hydrologic conditions and data like maximum and average rainfall.

None of these efforts, however, could prevent the catastrophic effects of a torrential downpour like the one that hit Vale de Cuibá, in the district of Itaipava, en 2011, and Xerém, in Duque de Caxias, earlier this month, washing away houses, bridges and cars “like a tsunami”, said Lacerda. Nevertheless, the impact of these disasters could be mitigated, he added.

Disaster risk maps also make it possible to identify areas where housing can be constructed to shelter people evacuated from high-risk areas.

The government of the city of Rio de Janeiro, the state capital, has installed sirens in neighbourhoods located in high-risk areas, including a number of its favelas or shantytowns. The sirens are activated six hours before the expected arrival of heavy rains.

For its part, the national government announced that it will allocate some 175 million dollars for construction projects to reinforce slopes in order to prevent landslides.

The state of Rio de Janeiro has already allocated resources for these types of public works, but in some municipalities the funds were reportedly misappropriated by corrupt mayors.

In Xerém, for example, trash collection had been interrupted before the devastating downpour due to a change of municipal government and reported irregularities in the contracting of the company responsible for urban sanitation.

While the accumulation of trash obviously did not cause the downpour, said Lacerda, it did aggravate its impact, because it obstructed the drainage of the rainwater and contributed to the spread of diseases.

Brazilian theologian and environmental activist Leonardo Boff, in a column published after the disaster in Xerém, classified the “tsunami” that devastated the municipality as a “crime against humanity”, like the other socio-environmental disasters that have become ever more frequent.

Boff proposed “a national law on socio-environmental responsibility… with heavy penalties for those who do not respect it.

“We are irresponsible towards nature when we deforest, when we dump billions of litres of toxic agrochemicals into the soil, when we release around 30 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases into atmosphere annually, when we pollute the water, when we destroy the forests along riverbanks,” declared Boff.

Moreover, “we do not respect the slope of mountains that can crumble and kill people, nor do we consider the banks needed by rivers so that floods do not wash everything away with them,” he added.

*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

A thunderstorm over Zurich, Switzerland. Credit: Kuster & Wildhaber Photography/cc by 2.0

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jan 29 2013 (IPS)

Weird is the only way to describe January temperatures whipsawing between record warm and arctic cold over a span of a few days. Experts say that is what climate change looks like: weird, record-shattering weather.

Here’s a fact that goes beyond weird to astonishing. Anyone who is 27 years old or younger has never lived through a month that was colder than the global 20th century average. In other words, we’ve had 334 consecutive months with above average temperatures, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Last summer, the Arctic sea ice shrunk to half of what it used to be during summers only three decades ago. Our planet’s weather is driven largely by the two cold polar regions and the warm tropics. With the Arctic defrosting, it should be no surprise our weather is getting weird. And that it’s not going to get better.

Our planet is heating up because we each year put thousands of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere by burning coal, oil, and natural gas. CO2 acts as heating blanket keeping the planet warm by trapping some of the sun’s heat.

The amount of extra heat-energy being trapped is like exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day 365 days per year, calculates James Hansen, a climate scientist who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Cautious scientists like Hansen are terrified of what’s coming. Conservative institutions like the World Bank and accounting giant Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) have warned we’re on a path to heating the entire surface of the planet by an average of four or five degrees C before 2100. That translates into eight to 12 degrees C hotter in places like Canada.

In the U.S., the just released National Climate Assessment projects that average temperatures could rise by five to 10 degrees Fahrenheit after 2050. This increase is akin to our body temperatures soaring to fatal feverish levels.

We all should be terrified for ourselves and especially for our children and grandchildren. As U.S. President Barack Obama put it during his Jan. 21 inauguration speech, failure to respond to the threat of climate change “would betray our children and future generations”.

What scientists, and now President Obama, are saying is that we know the fossil fuel energy that powers our societies is destroying them. Our challenge is to re-engineer our societies and lifestyles to prosper on green alternatives. Time is not on our side. The sobering climate math says CO2 emissions must start to decline in the next three to five years and continue to fall to give our kids hope for a decent future.

Because climate change affects everything from food to water, nothing is more important than this.

Here’s what we can do right now. As individuals we can reduce our CO2 emissions five percent this year, and each year after. There are a thousand ways to do this: we can walk and bike more and drive less, adjust our thermostats, add insulation to our homes, eat less meat, etc.

The typical family could reduce their energy use 60 to 75 percent, saving thousands of dollars, according to Godo Stoyke, an Alberta energy expert and author of “The CarbonBuster’s Home Energy Handbook”.

Our communities could join the Transition Town movement. This is a volunteer, non-profit movement focused on reducing community-wide dependence on fossil fuels while increasing local resilience and self-sufficiency in food, water, energy, culture and wellness.

There are over one thousand transition communities around the world. It took just one person to put the idea to friends one night at a pub in the village of Ashton Hayes in Cheshire, England. Two years later, residents had cut their energy costs by 20 percent.

“It’s been great fun and an amazing boost in community spirit,” said resident Garry Charnock.

Peterborough, Ontario has a Transition Town community where they’re creating their own currency – the Kawartha Loon – to support local business and strengthen their community. Find out what they are doing here.

There are over 130 transition communities in 34 U.S. states. Transition Salt Lake is focused on building resilience and having more fun with less stuff. Transition Houston has taken root in at least eight neighbourhoods. Transition Los Angles has dozens of activities and events each month. Find out more about Transition USA

Denial or waiting for someone else to tackle this guarantees a future we don’t want. Before you go, please consider this question: What is the legacy you want to leave your family and the next generation?

In 2012, top TV news stories included elections, violence and extreme weather events in the United States, with little attention paid to most international events. Credit: scott*eric/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jan 17 2013 (IPS)

The presidential election topped news coverage in 2012 from the three major U.S. television networks, closely followed by violence in the United States and Middle East, and extreme weather events in the United States, according to the latest annual review by the authoritative Tyndall Report.

Britain also received a significant amount of airtime on the three most-watched evening news programmes, with the London Olympics and British royal family garnering more attention than any other foreign country or news story except Syria’s civil war, according to the Report.

Syria, the top foreign news story of the year, claimed 461 minutes of network evening news time, or roughly three percent of the total amount of “news” presented by the networks’ weekday evening news programmes, which for most of the public are the most important source of news information.

The Olympics and the British royals together received almost as much attention as Syria – a total of 377 minutes, which was more than the two next biggest foreign stories combined: the December killing in Benghazi of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three of his staff (163 minutes); and the fighting in Afghanistan (158 minutes).

Apart from those stories, the outside world received minimal or no attention, according to the Report, which for over 20 years has tallied the number of minutes that each weekday evening network news programme allocates to news events.

Despite the controversy surrounding immigration and drug-related issues, Mexico received a total of only 44 minutes of coverage by all three network news programmes in 2012, according to Tyndall’s tally. But that was far more than the rest of Latin America.

“Haiti, [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chavez’s illness and election hardly got anything. Nothing on Colombia, except the Secret Service prostitution scandal there,” noted Andrew Tyndall, the Report’s founder and publisher.

The scandal, in which a team of U.S. Secret Service officers was discovered cavorting with prostitutes, claimed 54 minutes of the networks’ time, or ten minutes more than all Mexico-related coverage.

Similarly, sub-Saharan Africa, led by stories about newly independent South Sudan and the “Kony 2012” viral video against the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), received less than 30 minutes’ coverage during 2012, he said.

The vaunted U.S. “pivot” to Asia and rising tensions in the region also received minimal attention.

The Eurozone crisis, which has had a serious impact on and poses still greater risks to the U.S. economy, received a total of 87 minutes of coverage – or about 40 percent less than the British royals.

“Here we are in this globalising economy and culture,” noted Robert Entman, a communications and international affairs professor at George Washington University. “This shows how the ability of Americans to understand this global interdependence is really hindered by the superficial and glancing coverage to what’s going on in the world.”

While Fox News, CNN and MSNBC are widely recognised as important sources of news, the evening news programmes of ABC, NBC, and CBS enjoy roughly seven times the viewership of the cable channels. Together, they have an average nightly news audience of more than 20 million people.

The Report reviews the three evening news programmes, which present an average of about 22 minutes of news each and together nearly 15,000 minutes throughout the year.

As in previous election years, the 2012 presidential race led 2012 coverage with 2,016 minutes – or about 15 percent of total news coverage. The increase in domestic political news during election years has normally come at the expense of international or foreign policy news, and 2012 was no exception, according to Tyndall.

At 461 minutes, the violence in Syria ranked second as a discrete news story, followed by Hurricane Sandy (352 mins); the Summer Olympics (246 mins), and partisan wrangling over the federal deficit (206 mins). The Libya crisis ranked eighth; Afghanistan, tenth; and the British Royals, sixteenth out of the top 20 stories, both foreign and domestic.

In addition to Hurricane Sandy, the top 20 included four other major weather stories: the slew of tornados that hit various parts of the country; the summer’s western wildfires; extreme winter weather early in the year; and Hurricane Isaac, which caused severe damage in the Caribbean and the U.S. Gulf Coast last August.

These five weather events claimed nearly 1,000 minutes of coverage on the three networks, or about seven percent of the year’s total. Yet until Sandy none of the programmes explored the question of their possible relationship to climate change.

“Only one story in the first week of Sandy addressed rising sea levels being possibly related to global warming,” Tyndall told IPS. “That was an angle of the weather stories that was woefully undercovered.”

Extreme weather events in other parts of the world, such as Europe’s harshly cold winter, major flooding in Australia, Brazil, China and the Philippines, and drought in the Sahel, received at most only peripheral coverage on the three networks.

News of ice melting more quickly than anticipated in the Arctic Ocean and Greenland received a total of nine minutes on the three programmes, according to Tyndall.

“It’s been the same for many years now,” said Dan Hallin, a communications professor at the University of California at San Diego about the lack of coverage of climate change. “Sandy produced the beginnings of some discussion of that, but in general, the issue has been glaringly absent.”

On stories with a purely international focus – that is, those that did not include an explicit U.S. foreign-policy angle – Syria ranked at the top, followed by the two British stories, and the political upheaval in Egypt (93 min), which in 2011 received over five times as much coverage.

The sixth-ranked international story last year was the foundering of an Italian cruise liner, followed by the Israel-Palestinian conflict (76 minutes focused mostly on Israel’s Gaza offensive); the aftermath of Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami (45 mins), Greek anti-austerity protests (38 mins); Iran’s nuclear programme (37 mins); and the schools-for-girls campaign in Pakistan (34 mins).

“Outside our borders, it looks either like the froth of the Olympic Games and the royals or violence,” noted Entman. “I think it’s legitimate to take note of both, but there are a lot more important substantive things.”

“The world that is presented on U.S. newscasts is an extraordinarily narrow one,” noted Peter Hart, an analyst at Fairness in Accuracy and Reporting (FAIR), a progressive press watchdog group. “The substantial attention given the British royal family last year is a pretty clear demonstration of what U.S. corporate media think of as important news from abroad.”

An Aedes aegypti mosquito, which transmits the dengue virus, feeding. Credit: jentavery/CC-BY-2.0

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 10 2013 (IPS)

Mosquitoes that transmit dengue fever need clean, still water and warm night temperatures to reproduce and thrive. That is common knowledge, but now scientists in Brazil have managed to measure the relation between increased rainfall and temperatures and the risk of dengue epidemics in this city.

A study at the National School of Public Health in Rio, titled “Temporal analysis of the relationship between dengue and meteorological variables in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2001-2009” and published in the journal Cadernos de Saúde Pública, evaluated the relationship between climate variables and dengue risk.

The results showed that for the period 2001 to 2009, an increase of one degree in the minimum temperature in a given month led to an increase of 45 percent in reported dengue cases in the following month in Rio de Janeiro.

An increase of 10 millimetres in rainfall was associated with a lower rise of six percent in dengue virus infections in the following month.

“The relationship between rainfall, heat and tropical diseases is partly common sense. In our study we tried to provide a scientific explanation and a theoretical model to quantify this relationship,” Adriana Fagundes Gomes, one of the authors of the study at the School of Public Health, part of the private Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ), told IPS.

“The hypothesis was proven by mathematical methods,” said Gomes, who is currently a researcher in the epidemiology department of the Paulo de Góes Institute of Microbiology at the state Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

Analysis of the data led to the conclusion that the risk of dengue increases when temperatures are above 26 degrees Celsius, as higher temperatures favour the development of the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits the dengue virus.

Average annual precipitation in Rio de Janeiro is about 1,000 millimetres, with the heaviest rainfall from December to March – the southern hemisphere summer – contributing to the proliferation of the mosquito vectors.

“It’s important to point out that the findings of this research paper have been known for a  long time: the mosquito needs clean water and high temperatures to reproduce, which is why summertime is the period of highest incidence of dengue fever,” Dr. Alberto Chebabo, a specialist in infectious diseases, told IPS.

“The only new result in this study was the measurement of how many new dengue cases per degree Celsius or per millimetre of rainfall there were during the epidemic years,” said Chebabo, head of the department of infectious and parasitic diseases at the Clementino Fraga Filho Hospital at UFRJ.

The study cross-compared data for: notifications of dengue cases from the Rio de Janeiro Secretaria Municipal de Saúde (SMS, Health Department); temperature from the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE, National Space Research Institute); and rainfall from the Secretaria Nacional de Obras Públicas (Municipal Department of Public Works).

Given the lack of a vaccine against dengue fever, the study authors say that increasing knowledge about how the virus develops will boost prevention.

“Establishing an early intervention system based on variables that can indicate the onset of an epidemic would reduce the risk of disease,” said Gomes.

“Studies of climatic variables can improve knowledge and prediction of epidemic seasonality, because the vector-climate relationship is just as important as vector-human interaction,” the study says.

In Gomes’ view, the main discovery is that, in Rio de Janeiro, temperature (especially minimum temperature) “has a more significant correlation with the number of dengue cases than rainfall.”

The Aedes aegypti mosquito needs clean water, from rainwater or irrigation, to lay its eggs. But high temperatures “facilitate hatching of the eggs and reduce the time needed by larvae to develop into adults,” said Chebabo.

“In the hot, rainy season of the Rio de Janeiro summer, mosquito numbers increase, enabling transmission of the disease,” he said.

Analysis of the last decade shows that in southeastern Brazil, where Rio de Janeiro is located, dengue is prevalent between the months of December and April, precisely the hottest and wettest period. All the epidemics of dengue fever have occurred within this period of the year.

The Aedes aegypti mosquito transmits dengue fever by picking up the virus when it feeds on the blood of an infected person, and infecting other people when it bites them. The symptoms are fever, headache and muscle pain. But haemorrhagic dengue causes intense abdominal pain, nausea and bleeding under the skin and into mucous linings, which can be fatal.

In Chebabo’s view, traditional methods of prevention carried out by “the human vector” – the agency of humans – are still essential for combating dengue.

“Eliminating mosquito breeding sites is the most effective means of reducing incidence of the disease,” he said.

The government and the population must work together to get rid of water accumulated in flowerpots and disposable containers like plastic bottles, to cover water tanks and to collect and dispose properly of waste, he said.

The Brazilian health ministry included similar measures in its campaign for 2013 with the slogan “Dengue é fácil combater, só não pode esquecer” (Dengue is easy to fight, but must not be forgotten), launched at the start of the year.

The aim of the campaign is to reinforce educational messages underlining the need for mass mobilisation for prevention and early treatment of dengue. Every region of the country will undertake specific measures according to the needs of each municipality.

In a bulletin issued Jan. 4, the health ministry reported that in 2012, confirmed dengue cases fell by 64 percent compared with 2011.

Mortality from dengue also declined by 49 percent between these two years. From January to the first week of November 2012, the number of deaths from the disease was 247, while in the same period in 2011 the number was 481.

Estimates from the World Health Organisation indicate that some 2.5 billion people living in tropical and sub-tropical areas are at risk of contracting dengue, and that there are between 60 and 100 million actual cases a year, leading to between 12,000 and 15,000 fatalities annually.

Water, too much and too little of it, will be the biggest climate-induced factor determining Sri Lanka’s future in an era of extreme weather. Credit: Amantha Perera

By Amantha Perera
UDAWALAWE, Sri Lanka, Dec 30 2012 (IPS)

Wild elephants are usually the primary attraction in the remote shrub jungles of Udawalawe, about 180 kilometres southeast of Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo. But this Christmas season, the massive Udawalawe dam stole the limelight from the lumbering beasts.

By the end of December, heavy rains had brought water levels in the Udawalawe reservoir close to spilling point, forcing irrigation engineers to open the sluice gates.

Despite these efforts, the massive tank continued to spill over, creating a gigantic flood downstream.

People drove in cars, vans, motorcycles, lorries and even bullock carts to witness the spectacle, which was but a minor footnote compared to the impact of the rains elsewhere in this South Asian island nation.

Between Dec. 17 and 26, cyclone-level rains left 34 dead, nine unaccounted for and 328,000 stranded. Over 8,000 homes were damaged and roughly 4,000 were completely destroyed.

“No one expected this much rain,” Lal Kumara, deputy director at the government’s Disaster Management Centre (DMC), the main public body tasked with early warnings and post-disaster relief efforts in Sri Lanka, told IPS.

But someone should have expected the rains, based on the extreme weather events that ripped through the country in 2012, forcing Sri Lankans to come face to face with the disastrous impact of changing climate patterns. The end-of-year torrential rains were not the first time the country experienced unexpected floods, nor will it be the last, experts say.

In the first week of November, sudden rains brought on by Cyclone Nisha left over 200,000 people stranded, 15,000 displaced and nine dead. Over 5,000 homes were also destroyed.

Just prior to the November rains, much of the country had been hit by a 10-month-long drought. Close to a million people were affected, according to the International Federation of Red Cross Societies (IFRC), which recently launched a million-dollar international appeal to assist over 125,000 drought-affected people in Sri Lanka.

The drought destroyed 23 percent of the secondary rice harvest, the Ministry of Agriculture said, putting thousands of farmers at risk of starvation.

“More and more people are being forced to think about climate change and evaluate the impact,” Bob McKerrow, head of the IFRC delegation in Sri Lanka, told IPS.

The Northwestern Puttalam District provides a salient example of the extent of weather fluctuations within a matter of months.

During the December floods, parts of the district were submerged under eight feet of water, forcing 36,000 displaced persons to take shelter in over 60 government camps.

Yet just three months prior to the floods, people in the district were walking miles to dig holes in dried-out tank beds and wait overnight to collect the water.

“Water, the lack of it and too much of it, will be the biggest climate induced (factor) determining the way Sri Lankans live in the future,” W L Sumathipala, former head of the climate change unit of the ministry of environment, told IPS.

And though the signs are evident for all to see, hardly any action is being taken to mitigate the likelihood of future intense weather events.

The Meteorological Department still lacks the capacity to provide detailed forecasts, leaving the public to decipher cryptic notices, like the one that appeared on Dec. 20 stating, “There will be showers or thundershowers at times in the Northern, Eastern, North Central and Uva provinces and in the eastern slopes of the central hills and in the Hambantota district. Fairly heavy falls are also expected in some places.

“Showers or thundershowers will develop (in) several places elsewhere, particularly during the afternoon or evening,” the bulletin concluded.

Even officials at the DMC bemoaned the fact that they were not given detailed accounts of how much rain to expect, which would have enabled them to issue more precise warnings.

S H Kariyawasam, director general of the Meteorological Department, told IPS that the department lacked the technical and personnel capacity to give out such forecasts.

Erratic weather also continues to plague the vital paddy sector. In 2011, the country lost close to 17 percent of the total harvest to floods, followed by a bumper harvest the year after. The 2012 drought ignited fears of another lost crop, but heavy rains this month are forcing experts to rethink their forecasts yet again.

Initial reports said the rains had caused substantial damages to paddy storage facilities.

Farmers have yet to change their practices to accommodate the volatile weather, and paddy cultivation continues to follow the traditional cycle of planting and harvesting according to the two monsoons.

“Maybe if this trend continues we will have to think of adjusting the crop cycles,” said L Rupasena, additional secretary at the government-run Hector Kobbekaduwa Agrarian Training Research Institute.

According to McKerrow, the nature of incremental climate change over decades, and sometimes generations, means people pay less attention to the patterns that they should. “Slow moving disasters are the hardest for people to understand,” he said.

But for those who gathered in close proximity to the gushing torrents under the Udawalawe dam, there was no doubt about the need for urgent action.

Havana also got wet. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Aug 30 2012 (IPS)

The impact of Hurricane Isaac as it made its way through the Caribbean region highlighted both the fragility of some countries in the face of extreme meteorological events, which are expected to become more and more intense, and the different strategies adopted to mitigate the risk of disasters.

Isaac made landfall twice in the southeast U.S. state of Louisiana as a category 1 storm, almost 600 km wide, with top sustained winds up to 130 km an hour. Its slow motion over land – it was travelling at 13 km per hour – raised concerns that it could take a while to blow over.

Authorities in the U.S. reported that the strong winds and torrential rains had overtopped a levee outside New Orleans, and led to power outages affecting some 450,000 homes. But the hurricane was downgraded Wednesday to a tropical storm.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said the storm could dump more than 400 mm of rain because of how slow it was moving. “It is quite ironic that we have a hurricane threatening us on the seventh anniversary of Katrina,” he added.

Isaac was the first test of the improved levees, rebuilt since the tragedy caused by Katrina, a category 3 hurricane that left 1,800 people dead and 3,000 missing and caused billions of dollars in damages. Most of the deaths occurred after the dikes around the city failed, flooding the city.

Landrieu said the city’s flood defences, a system of walls, floodgates, levees and pumps upgraded since 2005 at a cost of 14.5 billion dollars, had withstood the onslaught.

In Cuba, Isaac, the ninth named storm of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season (June to November), provided abundant water for the country’s thirsty reservoirs, did not claim any lives, and cause little material damage.

But in impoverished Haiti, 19 people were killed and six are missing.

Haiti has not yet recovered from the devastating earthquake of 2010, and around 400,000 people are still living in tent cities and camps. The country’s civil protection office reported that 5,000 people were evacuated and taken to shelters.

About 3,000 of those evacuated were in Port-au-Prince. The authorities are particularly concerned that the flooding could cause a resurgence of the cholera epidemic, which since October 2010 has cost the lives of more than 7,500 people in Haiti.

The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, reported that five people had drowned as rivers overflowed their banks, and nearly 26,000 people were evacuated, 5,000 dwellings were damaged, and 116 villages and communities were isolated.

The Ozama River, which tends to flood at times of heavy rainfall, flooded some 2,500 makeshift shacks built along the river.

One of the big challenges faced in the Dominican Republic is the proliferation of slums along rivers, which puts thousands of families at risk during extreme events like torrential rains, tropical storms or hurricanes.

The areas with the largest number of families affected are the slums in Santo Domingo and the border region, says a report sent to IPS by World Vision, a U.S.-based Christian relief, development and advocacy organisation, which has an office in Jimaní, in the southwest of the Dominican Republic.

Cuba prepared for the storm

Isaac, which began forming on Aug. 21 in the Atlantic Ocean, caused heavy rain, winds,
coastal storm surges, flooding and blackouts in the eastern Caribbean. After bashing Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, it touched land in Cuba on Aug. 25 in Maisí, a town in the province of Guantánamo at the eastern tip of Cuba.

Five hours later, Isaac headed back out to sea near Guardalavaca beach in the northern part of the eastern province of Holguín, 743 km from Havana.

The brunt of the storm was felt in Baracoa, a city in Guantánamo province 929 km southeast of Havana, where it affected electricity and phone services, caused flooding, and damaged 89 homes, 19 of which were completely destroyed.

But there was a silver living: official reports indicate that the torrential rains helped fill reservoirs in the eastern part of the country, some of which were far below normal level.

In Santiago de Cuba, 847 km southeast of Havana, the 11 reservoirs now have 71 million cubic metres of water. They are 66 percent full, compared to 57 percent prior to the storm.

Provinces of central and western Cuba also received heavy rainfall, to the point that some reservoirs had to open their gates to release excess water. The reservoirs are indispensable for storing water reserves during periods of drought in this Caribbean island nation, which does not have significant sources of water.

With its internationally renowned disaster management system, which involves the entire population, from the highest levels of government to every rural and urban community, Cuba has managed to reduce the loss of human lives to a minimum, even during storms of the intensity of Hurricanes Gustav, Ike and Paloma, which caused 10 billion dollars in economic losses in a single season, in 2008.

Cuba’s disaster risk prevention system includes an early warning service, evacuation of all at-risk people, the protection of economic resources with an emphasis on food, and the immediate start of the recovery phase in the wake of a disaster.

José Rubiera, head of the Meteorology Institute’s Forecast Centre, said Cuba is the safest country in the region during hurricanes.

“That is the result of years of work focused on adapting disaster prevention, preparedness and response to the new conditions emerging as a result of the increase in hurricane activity in this area, which could be a forerunner of what could happen as a result of climate change, which to a certain extent is already being felt,” Rubiera told IPS.