The eye of Hurricane Sandy made landfall on Oct. 25, 2012, near the Mar Verde beach west of the city of Santiago de Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
NEW YORK/HAVANA, Oct 30 2013 (IPS)

One year ago, Hurricane Sandy ravaged the Northeast United States, causing an estimated 68 billion dollars in damage and paralysing the world’s financial nerve centre.

But days before, in the Caribbean, the same storm ran roughshod over Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba and other countries, causing widespread loss of life and destruction that the region is only beginning to recover from."If you don’t start investing, for every dollar not spent on adapting, you will spend six or seven within a few years." -- UNDP's Guido Corno

The hurricane was one of several in the past decades that meteorologists had previously considered “once in a century” events.

Those predictions now appear outdated.

“The power of these storms is off the chart,” Guido Corno, chief technical advisor at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), told IPS. “Sandy was a massive storm, larger than any in the past 100 years.”

Scientists believe that by the end of the century, climate change will increase the severity of extreme weather events, making storms like Sandy more common.

For Caribbean nations with fewer resources, that spectre is daunting.

A path of destruction

On Oct. 24, Sandy strengthened into a Category One hurricane and made landfall in Jamaica, causing widespread damage in the east of the island.

Seventy percent of residents were left without power and in Portland Parish, on the northeast coast, the Red Cross reported 80 percent of houses had lost their roofs.

In Haiti, though the storm only skirted the coastline, it dropped nearly 20 inches of rain in the south of the country and came as a severe blow to hundreds of thousands still left homeless after the 2011 earthquake.

Already in 2012, Tropical Storm Isaac, which damaged parts of the north, had been followed by a drought that led up to Sandy. The combined effect of the three devastated Haiti’s farmers and left some 1.5 million Haitians at risk of malnutrition.

Residents in Santiago de Cuba, accustomed to storms that usually pass over west of Cuba, were caught unaware when the storm made landfall in the city as a Category 3 storms with winds up to 110 mph. Eleven died and half the houses in the city were either destroyed or severely damaged.

“Now I know what a hurricane is; when another comes, we won’t delay,” Rey Antonio Acosta, 12, who escaped the storm with his older brother, told IPS.

Though the hurricane was the deadliest to strike Cuba in seven years, the toll was relatively low considering its severity.

Cuba’s longstanding system of civil defence, which calls on all citizens in the event of disasters, has been able to plan well in advance of approaching hurricanes – recently with the help of climate change models – and spring into action quickly after storms pass.

The U.N. has highlighted the country’s disaster prevention initiatives that include “two-day training session in risk reduction for hurricanes, complete with simulation exercises and concrete preparation actions” as a model for the Caribbean.

Still, a year after Sandy, the government’s recovery efforts, hampered by the local economy and a U.S. embargo, have struggled to keep pace with a nationwide housing deficit that already existed well before the storm.

Vulnerability

In Haiti, like much of the region, “water is the main issue,” said Johan Peleman, head of the U.N.’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Haiti.

Port-au-Prince, a city of nearly 2.5 million, has no sewage system.

The hurricane worsened a cholera outbreak – alleged to have been brought by U.N. peacekeepers – that began in 2010 and has since infected more than 650,000 and led to the deaths of over 8,000 Haitians.

“Waterborne diseases were already one of the mass killers in Haiti,” Peleman told IPS.

The solution, an institutionally funded effort to build a water and sewage system from scratch, may take decades to fully complete.

What Haiti lacks in human-made infrastructure is only matched by what has been destroyed by human activity.

After years of often illegal logging, only two percent of the country is forested, leaving many areas vulnerable to mudslides that can wipe away neighbourhoods in heavy rains that pale in comparison to those seen during Sandy.

But mangroves, which serve as a natural barrier from the force of hurricanes and were lately on the verge of an ecological catastrophe in Haiti, have in recent years been included in preparedness plans and are making a slow but marked comeback.

After the earthquake and continuing in the wake of Sandy, the Haitian government, with significant outside funding began a process of disaster risk mitigation, mapping neighbourhoods by their risk assessments and marking houses with red, orange and green to indicate their habitability.

Still, as of July of this year, 279,000 internally displaced people were living in tent camps originally built after the earthquake, though it is difficult to delineate which catastrophe made them homeless.

An unpredictable future

For a region jarred by last year’s hurricane season, the third most active on record, 2013 has been eerily quiet.

Climate change could affect the already imprecise science of predicting weather, said Kathy Ann Caesar, acting chief meteorologist at the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology in Barbados.

“This hurricane season, the forecasts were for normal to above normal activity,” Caesar told IPS. “But that hasn’t manifested itself – there have been no named hurricanes.”

In September, the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted temperatures could rise by as much as 4.8C by the end of the century, increasing food insecurity and harming many developing countries.

Years like 2013 are to be expected and shouldn’t be taken as indicative of trends, the panel said.

Even in a country as small as Haiti, where the northwest is predicted to experience temperature gains that outpace the rest of the country, the effects of climate change are expected to vary greatly.

Similarly, in Jamaica, climate studies “project we will have more rainfall in the next 20 years, then less after that,” said Albert Daily, principal at the climate change division of Jamaica’s Ministry of Water, Land, Environment and Climate Change.

“There will be fewer hurricanes, but they will be stronger,” he said.

Daily said sea level rises pose a severe threat to coastal infrastructures and countries in the region are trying to head off the threat as early as they can by changing the dialogue on environmental issues.

“We are mainstreaming climate change policy in the planning of programmes and legislation,” Daily told IPS.

Part of that effort is convincing foreign donors and the treasuries of heavily indebted countries like Jamaica that the upfront costs associated with planning for climate change are about the best investment any country can make.

“It’s been shown, if you don’t start investing, for every dollar not spent on adapting, you will spend six or seven within a few years,” said Corno. “These costs will continue to skyrocket unless you have a long-term plan.”

With additional reporting by Patricia Grogg in Havana.

A fisherman and other Gulf Coast residents at a community meeting in New Orleans in 2010. Experts say that trauma related to the record-breaking BP oil spill in the region could last for decades. Credit: Erika Blumenfeld/IPS

By Lucy Westcott
NEW YORK, Aug 15 2013 (IPS)

Although Hurricane Sandy made her final sweep through the Northeastern United States nearly 10 months ago, for many people the stress caused by the storm lingers.

(See Part One and Part Three of the series)

In Lower Manhattan, two hotlines, the Disaster Distress Helpline (DDH) and Project Hope, which is part of the New York City-wide helpline Lifenet, and specifically for those affected by Sandy, are at the frontline of disaster counselling, listening to myriad concerns ranging from queries about post-storm open hours of drug rehabilitation programmes to anxious parents reluctantly sending their children back to school in the days after the Newtown, Connecticut school shooting last December. Both programmes are administered by the Mental Health Association of New York City.

“Typically the kind of disasters that result in a spike of calls at the national level are those that are larger in scale. The impacts tend to be greater in terms of loss of life, loss of property or the potential for psychological distress on a sizeable population,” Christian Burgess, director of the DDH, told IPS.

Following the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on New York City, there was a need for a nationwide, phone-based crisis counselling service, Burgess says. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) established the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in 2005, but created an entirely separate hotline for disaster counselling after the 2010 BP oil spill.

Transitioning from the Oil Spill Distress Helpline, the DDH went live in February 2012, receiving its first major spike in calls following Hurricane Isaac, which tore through the Gulf Coast on the seven-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

“It’s not therapy, it’s not a substitute for therapy. Really, it involves listening,” Burgess says, comparing the helpline to triage for mental health.

Counsellors are trained to listen for symptoms of distress that may indicate the need for crisis intervention, like suicidal or homicidal intent, and callers may also be at risk of depression or substance abuse.

The DDH saw spikes in calls after the Newtown shootings, in which a lone gunman killed 20 elementary school students and six staffers, and the Boston Marathon bombing in April, as well as the Oklahoma tornadoes in May.

“School shootings in particular tend to trigger stronger feelings of distress, simply because it’s easier for a large part of the population to identify with the sadness and grief,” Burgess says. “It shakes our foundation of what is supposed to happen, the order of things… especially if you were already feeling vulnerable before the event.”

Burgess says that the majority of calls following the Newtown shooting didn’t come from Connecticut, but from all over the country.

After a major disaster, repeated coverage on the 24-hour news cycle, sensationalised headlines and the easy accessibility of Internet allow for the vicarious trauma of rewatching distressing events, which adds to anxiety, Burgess says.

“The event in and of itself is traumatic… but it’s heightened by the constant media exposure, particularly for those who would have been at risk before the event,” Burgess said.

Trigger events still loom, like the State Department’s closure of 19 U.S. embassies across North Africa and the Middle East in early August. The DDH have received calls from people concerned about what the terror alert means, Burgess says.

Calls related to Hurricane Sandy marked the first time the DDH received sustained levels of calls over a period of time, Burgess says. At its peak, Sandy resulted in a 2,000 percent increase in calls from two weeks prior, before the forecasts began to take shape. Texts increased by 600 percent.

“In December we were starting to get longer calls from people, and mental health concerns were coming to the surface,” Burgess says, due to fewer resources and the emotional fatigue of still-displaced people.

Melany Avrut, programme manager for Project Hope, which has received nearly 4,000 calls since the hurricane, told IPS that the needs of callers have changed. In the weeks following the storm, callers wanted to know about filing FEMA applications, but six months later, there were more concerns about anxiety, mood and children having trouble sleeping.

“A big component of Project Hope is using your strength… recognising what [people] have used in the past to get them through a hard time,” Avrut says. “They want to talk about what it was like to go through this traumatic experience.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released new guidelines on how to care for those with mental health issues following trauma. The guidelines emphasise the use of behavioural therapies, such as cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) and eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) rather than relying on medications.

Although unusual, EMDR can be effective, Dr. Mark van Ommeren, a scientist in the WHO’s department of mental health and substance abuse, told IPS.

It likely works when a patient, focusing on the traumatic event, follows a therapist’s hand with their eyes. The working memory is taxed as the patient thinks about both the event and their eyes working to track the hand. The painful memory becomes less prominent, and upon revisiting the memory, it is less vivid and emotional in the long-term memory, van Ommeren says.

For people living in disaster areas who are vulnerable to mental health issues, van Ommeren suggests that stress management is a good way to prepare, as it makes going through difficult moments a slightly easier, adding that there are no concrete studies about this.

To contact the Disaster Distress Helpline, call 1-800-985-5990, or text “TalkWithUs” to 66746. To contact Project Hope, call 1-800-LIFENET (1-800-543-3638). 

Excerpt:

By Lucy Westcott
NEW YORK, Aug 14 2013 (IPS)

Like many people living in the path of Hurricane Sandy last fall, Lauren Scrivo needed more battery power. Despite a call offering help from the mayor of Fairfield, New Jersey, where Scrivo lives with her family, her concerns went far beyond extra water bottles and flashlights.

An emergency shelter at Seward Park High School in Lower Manhattan during Hurricane Sandy that disabled people had a hard time accessing. Credit: Center for Independence of the Disabled, New York (CIDNY)

Scrivo, a communications specialist at the Kessler Foundation, has a form of muscular dystrophy and uses a ventilator and power wheelchair. When the electricity went down during the storm, she only had battery power to fuel the machine; leaving the generator running outside was too risky.

“When we lost power it was a little scary, we didn’t know how long it would be for. I couldn’t leave the generator running at night because people were stealing them, so [I] had to use battery power,” Scrivo told IPS.

The gas shortage also presented an enormous danger for Scrivo as her generator began to run low on fuel.

“You can’t just go out and stand in the gas line,” she said. “If we couldn’t fuel our generator, we wouldn’t have been able to recharge my [ventilator] batteries or use my other necessary medical equipment.”

Now Scrivo, along with the global disabled community, will have the opportunity to voice her concerns after the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) launched a survey asking people with disabilities about their experience living with and preparing for disasters.

The survey, believed to be the first time global data on emergency planning and disabilities is being collected, asks participants what kind of emergency, from landslides to insect infestations, their communities are vulnerable to, and whether they have been involved in municipal emergency management planning.

“We know from a number of major disasters that disabled people are overlooked… twice as many [disabled] people died in the Fukushima disaster [than non-disabled people],” Denis McClean, spokesperson for UNISDR, told IPS from Geneva.

Roughly 10 percent of the world’s population is living with a disability, according to data from UN Enable, the United Nations body that focuses on disability issues.

“It’s quite clear that we need to pay more attention and talk to disabled people,” McClean said, adding that disabled people are at a particular disadvantage when it comes to early response in emergencies.

New York City’s disabled population, which numbers over 800,000 according to data from the Center for Independence of the Disabled, New York (CIDNY), recently had to deal with devastation from Sandy.

During the storm, there were 118,000 disabled people in the Zone 1 evacuation area alone, according to CIDNY.

Milagros Franco, a disaster case manager for Sandy survivors at the Brooklyn Centre for Independence of the Disabled (BCID), believes that disaster planning and response for disabled people in New York City is inadequate.

“I was kind of snobbish… I got some food beforehand, I had two flashlights. I live in Manhattan, so I didn’t expect the lights to go out,” Franco, who has cerebral palsy and uses a power wheelchair, told IPS.

The day before Sandy made landfall in New York, Franco’s superintendent told her the building’s elevator would be shut down as the lobby of her East 21st Street building is prone to flooding. Although she lives on the second floor, “When you’re in a wheelchair, that’s pretty far,” Franco says.

Franco was stuck in her building for three days, but did have a friend with her who ventured to 34th Street for food and phone recharging. In lieu of the buzzer system, which was a victim of the power outage, Franco lowered her keys, tied to a piece of rope, out her window to let her friend inside.

But some people aren’t so lucky to have a support system, said Margi Trapani, communications and education director at CIDNY. Enlisting the support of family and friends is one of the main ways the City of New York tells disabled people to prepare for disasters, along with preparing a “go bag” of emergency supplies and knowing how and when to evacuate.

Trapani’s organisation, alongside BCID and two individual plaintiffs, filed a lawsuit against Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City of New York in 2011 after perceiving a lack of help from the city for people with disabilities during disasters in the decade following the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks. The case was heard in March, with the judge’s ruling expected at the end of the summer.

“During 9/11, people with disabilities had been left off the map,” Trapani told IPS. “There were a lot of respiratory problems and mental health issues [after], tonnes of issues no one was prepared to deal with.”

Hurricane Sandy revealed the inadequacy of emergency shelters for the city’s disabled population. Issues with the shelters include non-accessible and stairs-only entrances, lack of accessible bathrooms and cots, and staff who are underprepared to respond to disabled people, Trapani says.

More inclusion of disabled community in the emergency management planning process is a step the city can take to improve its response, Trapani says.

“Our community can help in these situations… we’re experts in figuring out how to deal with problems,” she says.

When a disaster strikes at short notice, there is sometimes a limit to how ready people can be.

“No matter how prepared you think you are, you’re never prepared until after the fact,” Franco said, adding that at least now she has a hand-crank radio.

(See Part Two and Part Three of the series)

Excerpt:

The Carlos Manuel de Céspedes plaza in central Santiago lost a large number of trees, which will take years to replace. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
SANTIAGO DE CUBA , Aug 10 2013 (IPS)

Nine months after Hurricane Sandy, the worst disaster to hit this city in eastern Cuban in decades, local residents say they are now better prepared for catastrophes.

“We have more information now, and more awareness of what happened, which was very hard to accept,” 31-year-old musician Melly Álvarez, who lives in the hard-hit centre of Santiago, told IPS.

“We never thought something like this could happen to us. Since Sandy we keep alert to meteorological warnings and we take precautions, to avoid further surprises,” she said.

Experts say every city in this Caribbean island nation should take precautions against hurricanes, especially places like Santiago de Cuba, which is in mountainous terrain and has densely-populated residential buildings.

“Education must be stepped up in parts of the country that don’t suffer these things frequently or with great intensity, to increase awareness of the risks,” meteorologist José Rubiera said in a recent interview with IPS.

The collapse of an adjacent building caused serious damage to Álvarez’s house, still only partially rebuilt despite a huge effort by her family. “At first there was corruption in the distribution of materials, but the authorities took measures and the reconstruction process was accelerated. It is more organised now,” she said.

The housing sector undoubtedly took the brunt of the up to 200 kilometres an hour winds that swept the city in the early hours of Oct. 25, 2012.

According to official figures, 15,888 housing units were completely destroyed and 22,000 partially collapsed. The total number affected is equivalent to half the housing stock in this city 847 kilometres from Havana.

Many buildings lost their roofs, and families are impatient over the delays in replacing them. “We need six million square metres of roofing and the country produces barely one million,” Madeleine Cortés, vice president of the state administrative council in Santiago province, told foreign journalists.

People whose homes were damaged receive a state discount of 50 percent on the cost of building materials and low-interest bank loans with long-term repayment plans. In the case of families who were left without a home, the state pays the cost of bank loans, while it also subsidises the lowest-income families.

Cortés said that as part of the recovery strategy, a programme has been designed to build 21,400 housing units for those affected by Hurricane Sandy, as well as families in the poorest neighbourhoods, by 2019.

According to the authorities, every new building must take into account the risk of hurricanes and earthquakes.

In Mar Verde, a beach community west of the city of Santiago, close to the spot where Hurricane Sandy made landfall, more than 40 families are waiting for new housing to be built to replace their homes, which were laid waste by the sea. In the meantime, they are living in cabins that used to be rented out to holiday makers.

“They are looking for solid land further away from the coast, as had been decided before the disaster,” said Heriberto Téllez, a 53-year-old caretaker of an agricultural cooperative who, like his neighbours, hopes that the new homes will come equipped with the electrical appliances that were swept away by the waves.

“We are a poor country, not everything can be done all at once. It will be our turn soon,” he told IPS.

Campesinos or small farmers from the southern coast of the province of Santiago said the worst thing in that area was the aftermath of the hurricane.

“Usually you’re happy because the cyclones bring rain,” Carlos Arias, president of an agricultural cooperative in the area, told IPS. “But Sandy did not alleviate the intense drought in these parts. It has barely rained at all in the last nine months.”

The farmer added that due to post-disaster stress, rabbits, pigs and other farm animals stopped breeding, hens laid fewer eggs, cows gave less milk and even bees did not make honey for a time. “We will be feeling the effects of the catastrophe for several years,” he said.

The government of President Raúl Castro reported in late July that the damage caused by Sandy to housing, roads and utilities like electricity and telephone lines in the three most heavily affected provinces – Santiago de Cuba, Holguín and Guantánamo – and by heavy rainfall and flooding in the central region of the country was estimated at seven billion dollars.

In Santiago alone, losses amounted to some 4.7 billion dollars, according to the provincial authorities, including 2.6 billion dollars due to total or partial destruction of housing.

In 2008, tropical storm Fay and hurricanes Gustav, Ike and Paloma damaged 647,111 housing units in the country.

Extreme weather events have compelled the Cuban government to devote the majority of its housing resources to replacing homes damaged by hurricanes and heavy rains. The country has a housing deficit of approximately 700,000 units, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

The eastern part of this island of 11.2 million people is also at risk from earthquakes due to its proximity to the Bartlett or Cayman Trough, a complex fault zone that forms part of the tectonic boundary between the North American and Caribbean plates. This poses yet another threat to housing in the region.

Coastal erosion exposes columns for lights leading to the runway of Vance Amory International Airport in Nevis. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
CHARLESTOWN, Nevis, May 19 2013 (IPS)

The Caribbean does not have the luxury of time for decisive action on climate change and global warming. In fact, it is on the brink of calamity, according to a prominent scientist.

Conrad Douglas, a Jamaican scientist who has published over 350 reports on environmental management and related matters, has warned that “urgent action at all levels [is] required now”, cautioning the region against complacency in dealing with climate change.

Noting that earlier models forecast that an atmosphere of 350 parts per million (PPM) of carbon dioxide would place the planet at a catastrophic tipping point for climate change, Douglas cited new information which put the new tipping point at 450 PPM.

“There are 445 million PPM of carbon dioxide, which is a mere five PPM of carbon dioxide away from the…limit that was projected for catastrophic global tipping points,” he told IPS.

With the projected loading rate at 2.5 PPM per year, Douglas said that within two years, the earth would reach a point where even more catastrophic events would wreak havoc on the planet, its societies and its economies.

“We’ve gotten to a juncture at which the entire planet is facing a precarious situation,” Douglas said. “We are heading towards a dangerous place on planet Earth.”

“Potentially irreversible consequences”

Last year was the warmest in recent history, including the highest temperatures since temperatures began to be recorded in 1895."We are heading towards a dangerous place on planet Earth."
-- Dr. Conrad Douglas

“We know about Hurricane Sandy…and the destruction which it caused in our region and the eastern seaboard of the United States,” Douglas said, noting that parts of the United States and the Caribbean are still recovering from that storm.

Douglas’ colleague, John Crowley, said that the planet’s nitrogen cycle had been severely thrown out of balance because of the massive overuse of inorganic fertilisers.

“That, according to the specialists, is having catastrophic and potentially irreversible consequences that require a major rethink of agricultural systems, including but not limited to fertiliser use,” he told IPS.

Both scientists are among dozens who gathered here from May 15 to 16 for a UNESCO-sponsored sub-regional meeting on environmental policy formulation and planning in the Caribbean region.

“It was clear already in 2011 when we [first took stock of] these issues that the knowledge about climate change in the Caribbean is insufficient and insufficiently connected to the real dynamics of Caribbean societies,” said Crowley, a UNESCO representative.

In 2009, a group of Jamaican artists launched a national public education campaign on climate change. It was part of a project implemented by Panos Caribbean, a regional organisation that helps journalists cover sustainable development issues, and Jamaica’s National Environment Education Committee (NEEC).

The artists produced a package of information designed to educate the Jamaican public. It consisted of a theme song titled “Global Warning”, a series of public service announcements, a mini album of songs on climate change, and a music video for the theme song.

A global issue

Even as deliberations continue here today, the general assembly of the United Nations in New York is meeting on sustainable development and climate change.

“I think we have finally awakened to the urgency of the situation, that we have tested and exceeded the globe’s capacity for absorbing and assimilating the pollutants that we make and discharge,” Douglas said.

“What we need now is nothing less than a Manhattan type project to rescue the planet.”

Marcus Natta, senior project analyst in the Ministry of Sustainable Development in St. Kitts, told IPS the meeting was very timely.

“What is important about this particular conference is that we are focused on action. I think unlike many other meetings, if we could truly achieve the action part after the planning and get the implementation, then we would have really achieved success,” he said.

The tiny island of Nevis is described as one of the few remaining unspoiled touches of paradise and one of the little-known wonders of the Caribbean. Douglas hoped that actions taken at the meeting would help preserve it as such.

“We hope that in the context of what faces us today – the phenomenon of climate change – that its beauty and charm will be preserved long into the future as we take wise and timely action to protect the habitat of mankind and all living creatures,” he urged his colleagues.

“This we must strive to do as we protect ourselves from ourselves. It’s our attitudes and values, our failure to change our behaviour that has led us to this critical point,” he warned, adding that the current path mankind is treading “threatens at the very least to plunge us into a perpetual cycle of poverty and misery”.

Midtown New York skyline with the Empire State Building in the background (with electricity), in the foreground is Alphabet City and the East Village without power, Tuesday night, Oct. 30, 2012, after Hurricane Sandy. Credit: David Shankbone/cc y 2.0

By George Gao
NEW YORK, Feb 18 2013 (IPS)

The “Spirit of America” is one of 10 ferries that carry passengers from Manhattan to Staten Island. Its keel – which lies on the bottom of the boat and carves through the waters of New York Harbour– was built with steel from the collapsed Twin Towers.  

While embarking, one can take in a panoramic view of some of New York’s diverse waterfronts: from the shores of Battery Park – the front lawn of Lower Manhattan’s skyscrapers – to the iconic Liberty and Ellis Islands, and to the industrial piers of Red Hook.

“New York City has more miles of waterfront than Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago and Portland combined,” said New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg at Brooklyn Bridge Park in March 2011, while unveiling a plan to make the city’s 837 kilometres of shoreline more resilient to climate change.Communities with lots of political power and influence are going to get resources...The question is, are we insuring that our most vulnerable communities are getting the same type of support, so they can recover from major storms like Sandy?

But atop the “Spirit of America”, a glance from one waterfront to the next presents a clear disparity in landscape and lifestyle.

According to a September 2012 New York Times article, the poorest one-fifth of New York City residents made 8,844 dollars in the previous year, while the richest one-fifth made 223,285 dollars. These figures rival income inequalities in the global south.

On Sep. 17, 2011, those who were critical of the economic system that gave way to such disparities touched off the Occupy Wall Street movement in Zucotti Park, in the Wall Street financial district in Lower Manhattan.

And when Hurricane Sandy swept through the waterfront on Oct. 29, 2012, its destruction was disproportionate as well.

A storm doesn’t discriminate, but people do

“A storm doesn’t discriminate where it hits based on race or class,” said Albert Huang, senior attorney in the Natural Resources Defence Council’s (NRDC) urban programme.

Even Wall Street was without power after Hurricane Sandy struck. Stores and restaurants were closed for days, traffic lights hung uselessly from their poles and subway entrances leading underground were as dark as caverns; similar plights were seen across New York’s five boroughs.

“Where we see the disparity, usually, is in the response to a disaster,” Huang told IPS.

According to Huang, neighbourhoods that suffered most during the aftermath of Sandy were low-income neighbourhoods, people of colour and elderly populations – many of whom live in public housing developments in places like Red Hook, the Far Rockaways and Coney Island.

These public housing developments, run by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), shelter five percent of the city’s population.

“Communities with lots of political power and influence are going to get resources. They’re going to get all these different kinds of amenities,” explained Huang, who coordinates the NRDC’s work on environmental justice.

“The question is, are we insuring that our most vulnerable communities are getting the same type of support, so they can recover from major storms like Sandy?”

Mold and moisture

Climate change and storm surges also exacerbate pre-existing mold and moisture problems in public housing, said Huang. According to a June 2011 report by the National Academy of Sciences, the build-up of mold and moisture in indoor environments contributes to health-related issues.

Mold and moisture is especially worrying in areas with already poor air quality, such as in East Harlem and the South Bronx, said Huang. Those neighbourhoods are surrounded by three highways and contain heavy air pollution. Their residents suffer from the highest levels of asthma in the country.

“(One) thing (a child) should have… is to come home and be able to breath inside your apartment. I mean, you already have a tough enough time breathing outside your apartment,” said Huang.

In NYCHA buildings, mold and moisture are worsened by broken pipes and leaking roofs. In January 2013, Bloomberg and NYCHA Chairman John Rhea announced a plan to address all 420,000 backlogged open repair work orders by the end of 2013.

But Huang worries that even if NYCHA does address all 420,000 work orders, it would not be enough.

“They show up with bleach and sponges and they wash off all the mold (from) the walls, (but) until you eliminate the moisture problems inside the walls, you’ll continue to have mold problems,” he explained.

“You can’t just do the cosmetic stuff,” he added.

SMIAs on the waterfront

Significant Maritime and Industrial Areas (SMIAs) are characterised by New York City as places along the waterfront that contain dense clusters of industrial firms and water-dependent businesses; they were also designated in 1992 as areas to be protected and encouraged for continued use in this fashion.

When the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance (NYC-EJA) started mapping SMIAs onto designated storm surge protection zones, they noticed something quite worrisome.

“What we immediately realised was that every single one of these SMIAs were in storm surge zones”, said Eddie Bautista, executive director of NYC-EJA.

On top of that, NYC-EJA layered maps from all the public environmental databases they had access to – ranging from New York State superfund sites to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s toxic waste inventories – and they discovered troubling overlaps.

“There are only six of these SMIA communities in the city,” Bautista told IPS, listing them as the South Bronx, Sunset Park, Red Hook, Newton Creek, the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the North Shore of Staten island.

“They are classic environmental justice communities,” he added.

Bautista cited a number of chemicals present in these areas, chemicals that the community would be exposed to during storm surges. They include trichloroethylene, which is a carcinogen; Naphthalene, which causes liver and kidney damage and harms eyesight; and N-hexane, which affects the brain.

“Half the businesses that were impacted by Sandy were industrial businesses,” he said. “For our communities, this presents a clear and pertinent danger.”

“We know that these (storms) are going to become more frequent and more intense,” he said. “If you know there are communities who, based on their profile, are vulnerable… to do nothing, to not act is an abdication of basic government responsibility.”

A few months ago, NYC-EJA proposed a series of recommendations to the city in order to make sure SMIA residents were aware that they lived in storm surge areas.

A plan was put forth, and a date had been set for voting in the city planning commission – Oct. 29, 2012.

But something else happened that day.

“Ironies abound, they had to cancel the hearing (for) the city’s coastal zone management plan because of a severe weather event and storm surges,” said Bautista.  “You can’t make this stuff up.”

New York Harbour is Lower Manhattan’s first line of defence against rising seas. Credit: George Gao/IPS

By George Gao
NEW YORK, Feb 11 2013 (IPS)

During World War II, a German U-boat made its way into New York Harbour. It fired two torpedoes at a British tanker, splitting the hull in three places and igniting it in flames. The captain and 35 members of his crew burned to death.

Seventy years later, New York Harbour is Lower Manhattan’s first line of defence against another threat: the rising tides of the sea.

New York is situated on three large islands, one peninsula and a collection of smaller islands. In this sense, rising sea levels and increasingly erratic storm surges has rendered it water-bound.

Flooded subway systems, large-scale power outages and flurrying toxic waste along the coast during the onslaught of Hurricane Sandy brought attention to the city’s floundering climate resiliency strategies.

New and re-emerging ideas to improve resiliency have varied in shapes and sizes. They include inflatable subway-tunnel plugs, large storm barriers off the coast, a series of artificial islands, and porous membranes that cling to and protect Manhattan buildings.

Five to six years ago, New York representatives approached Jeroen Aerts, a professor at the VU University Amsterdam’s Institute for Environmental Studies, for advice on storm surge protection.

“At that time, nobody was really interested in flood risk in New York. Mayor (Michael) Bloomberg was mainly focusing on sustainability issues,” he told IPS. “After Hurricane Irene (in 2011), they said, ‘well, maybe we have to look at other options, like storm surge barriers.’”

Aerts is currently conducting a cost-benefit analysis, weighing the price of constructing storm barriers against the price of upgrading current legislation – such as building regulations, zoning codes and flood insurance. “What we do is we compare both strategies as to how much they reduce flood risks,” he explained.

Asked if storm surge barriers are used in other cities, Aerts cited several in the Netherlands, and the Thames barrier in London. “There’s (also) a large one just being finalised in St. Petersburg in Russia,” he said.

“One condition is that they (remain) navigable, because New York is a port city,” said Aerts, explaining that vertical or rotating floodgates would allow tides and boats to pass unimpeded.

One variation consists of a northern barrier in the East River, coupled with a larger southern barrier that spans from Sandy Hook in New Jersey to Breezy Point in New York. “That one (would) cost 15-16 billion dollars,” he said.

Peter Stillman, a professor of political science and environmental studies at Vassar College, told IPS that storm surge barriers often raise environmental justice issues.

“Unless the surge hits the barrier straight on, some of the surge and its energy will travel along the barrier and hit the places where the barrier stops much harder,” he explained.

In this case, the Rockaways and parts of New Jersey would receive the brunt of future storm surges, he added.

Stillman said that there exist other strategies, which work to mimic how nature protects landscapes. He cited oyster beds, wetlands, and artificial islands and reefs.

Aerts argued that while there’s a need for green projects in the area, he worries it may not be enough to protect the city from future storm surges on par with Hurricane Sandy.

Aerts noted that, nonetheless, the debate surrounding storm surge barriers, along with the time needed for its design and construction, delays the city’s protection against storm surges for a few decades. “Meanwhile, you have to do something else, right?”

He advocated for updating policies and building codes to encourage the construction of more resilient buildings.

Working with nature

Kate Orff, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, told IPS, “The new frontier in infrastructure is not solely in hard, grey mono-functional infrastructure.

“What I’ve been calling for is a hybrid approach, which integrates some protective hard infrastructures,” she continued. “It’s a big picture look of regenerating the sort of ecological protective infrastructure that we used to have.”

Orff explained, “In many cases, we’ve decimated our inland islands with dredging, or we’ve collapsed our reefs through pollution or through over-harvesting… these are ecological infrastructures that were once in place that have been destroyed.”

One of Orff’s ideas is to nurture an oyster culture in the Bay Ridge Flats. The project, entitled “Oyster-tecture”, includes reefs – of oysters, mussels and eelgrass – that would attenuate waves and filter millions of gallons of New York Harbour water.

Oyster-tecture was inspired by Orff’s roots in Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay, which “has a commitment to marine life and a functioning harbour – a harbour that is very active with boats and people and so on.

“But the key thing,” she said, “is that I’m sort of bringing this into a degraded urban condition, and trying to integrate it into, essentially, a new blue public-space system.”

According to a report by the NYS 2100 Commission – which was convened by Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, in response to Hurricane Sandy – NYC has lost 80 percent of its tidal wetlands and almost 200,000 acres of its oyster reefs.

Guy Nordenson, a professor of architecture and structural engineering at Princeton University and a member of the NYS 2100 Commission, told IPS, “I think some combination of engineered flood protection, offshore natural barriers, and onshore dunes and natural levees are necessary.”

The report also recommends further research into storm surge barriers, including its ecological effects – on aquatic life, on erosion, and on physical oceanographic conditions.

Adaptation mode

According to Aerts, people will continue moving into low-lying cities around the world. He estimated an additional one million people in New York City by 2040, even with foreboding storms.

“I don’t know any example of a city that retreated after a major event,” he said, with Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Katrina (2005) in mind.

Stillman warned, “In a sense, we are in trouble in the greater New York-New Jersey area, because human beings have built homes – frequently expensive second homes… in areas that we are now learning (to be) very precarious in the case of storms.”

Orff, who is also the founding principal of SCAPE – a landscape architecture and urban design office, was slated to present at a Feb. 9 conference entitled “Waterproofing New York City”.

Ironically, the event was postponed when a winter storm covered the Northeast megalopolis in snow and flooded New York’s neighbouring coastlines.

On climate change, Orff told IPS, “We’re already in the mode of adaptation, which is simply assuming that our carbon dioxide emissions will be continuing to move exponentially upwards.

“What’s missing from the conversation is a discussion about carbon – carbon in cities and America’s carbon footprint,” she added.

Orff recalled her own experience during Hurricane Sandy: “I don’t think there’s anything like seeing water lapping at your feet on West End Avenue that provides a wakeup call. I can’t imagine what else could be more dramatic and focusing than water overtaking one of America’s celebrated international cities.”

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.”

By IPS Correspondents
Dec 18 2012 (IPS)

From Zimbabwe to El Salvador, women in poor countries suffer the brunt of climate change, but also learn to recover from disasters, to adapt and even to find opportunities in the new weather conditions.

The road linking Sweetes Village to Bendals Village in Antigua was washed out during Hurricanes Earl and Omar. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
ST. JOHN'S, Antigua, Dec 4 2012 (IPS)

Tourism-dependent Antigua may have been spared the ravages of superstorm Sandy, but the island is nevertheless feeling its effects on environmental, political and economic fronts.

The country is preparing for a drop in visitors from the United States, a key source of tourists for Antigua. Tourism Minister John Maginley pointed to the importance of the northeastern states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, which were hit hard by Hurricane Sandy and which he called “the destination’s largest source market in the United States”.

University of the West Indies (UWI) Professor Norman Girvan has suggested that the economic impact of Sandy could be as bad as that of the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sep. 11, 2001. “We will see a downturn…from now until January and February,” he said. “I think the initial impact will possibly be as great as 9/11, but in terms of the long-term effects it is too early to tell.”

Local officials say Sandy, which brushed Antigua as a tropical storm, has served as a wake-up call for the country, blowing the topic of climate change back to front and center.

“Events like Hurricane Sandy tend to bring our focus back,” Diane Black-Layne, chief environmental officer in the environmental division of the government of Antigua and Barbuda, told IPS. “There are a range of adaptation measures that have to take place.”

“We now have to adjust to a new world or to a new norm…every single country will experience extremes in weather fluctuations at a frequency that is unprecedented,” she added. Although many remain skeptical about climate change, Black-Layne said she was pleased to see that the Antigua and Barbuda government is taking steps to prepare the island.

She pointed out that in the Land Use Plan recently passed by Parliament, “climate change issues have been taken into consideration.” She added, “In a few years when we are reviewing applications for development, especially on the coastline or in flood prone areas, we will have to take climate change into consideration.”

“If you think you can go to a minister and the minister would tell you, ‘Yes, build whatever you want, wherever you want,'” she warned, “the sea will come and take away your building or insurance companies will not insure you.”

In July, Agriculture Minister Hilson Baptiste announced that the government intended to join with the Nature Conservancy, a global climate change organisation, to take advantage of its debt-for-climate-adaptation swap. The body is expected to pay off Antigua and Barbuda’s debt of 18 million U.S. dollars to Brazil in exchange for the country’s involvement in coastal zone management.

The government has until the end of 2012 to put its proposal in writing and submit it to the Nature Conservancy.

Signs of change

Brian Cooper, a British scientist who moved to Antigua in 1986, told IPS he has been observing stronger rainfall and other signs of a changing climate on the island over the past few years.

“Certainly we’ve witnessed a renewed intensity and frequency of storms. We have seen what I think has been quite a departure from what we’ve experienced before, that many of the storms have very far-flung rain bands which are often a great distance from the centre of the storm,” he said.

“In the case of [Hurricane] Omar in 2008 we didn’t feel anything much of it until after it had passed… [when] we we got this rain band ,which didn’t last very long but it dumped a tremendous amount of rain in the south of the island. There was tremendous flooding in the Body Ponds Valley and Bendals Village was cut off for a while because water was flowing over the bridge going into Bendals by several feet.”

“We had the same thing with [Hurricane] Earl in 2010, a tremendous burst of rain that had similar effects,” Cooper added.

A local resident, Winston Derrick, now in his sixties, pointed to the destruction of a road, which he said had existed since his childhood, as clear evidence of the effects of climate change. Just days ago, he tried to drive from Sweetes Village to Bendals Village but could not, he said. “The road has become impassable. It’s all washed out.”

Cooper said a combination of Earl and Omar washed out the road, with which he too is familiar.

“That is the result of some of the torrential rainfall that we have been having particularly in the southwest part of the island. I’ve been living in Sweetes for about 10 years and I used to drive down that road and I can’t drive there now,” he said.

But despite all the evidence, Dr. Cooper said people are still not taking climate change as seriously as they should.

“Most of it is too far away,” he said. “I think when we had that series of hurricanes people were beginning to think, ‘Okay, what’s happening?’ But it is also difficult for…scientists to pick up changes that happen over a long period of time,” he told IPS.

Black-Layne disagreed. “It is frightening when you have to listen to the science and the projections,” she said, especially when one has children who will be affected by these changes. “To some extent you are saddened by the slow pace in which the world is reacting,” she added. “It’s terrifying what is happening and what is going to happen.”

Yet Black-Layne still believed Antigua and Barbuda and other Caribbean countries can draw positive lessons from the effects of climate change.

“We have to make national policy decisions and legislative decisions to make sure that from this terrible thing we will benefit from it in the end, or [that] we can come out as close to the top as possible,” she concluded.

Day labourers of Hempstead, Long Island. Credit: Rebecca Hanser/IPS

By Rebecca Hanser
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 4 2012 (IPS)

Undocumented immigrants have played a significant role in recovery efforts since Hurricane Sandy swept the northeast United States one month ago. But despite their contributions, they have been left in the storm’s wake with little financial, legal or moral support.

According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), almost 236,000 New Yorkers requested financial relief after Hurricane Sandy, which brought devastation, hardship and billions of dollars in damages.

But for day labourers – men and women without full-time employment, who search for temporary work to make ends meet – natural disasters such as Sandy mean opportunities for work, even if workers are unauthorised and ill-equipped for the job. These factors often lead to dangerous working conditions and exploitation.

These day workers are usually undocumented immigrants, predominantly from Latin America who, unaware of their rights, often fall victim to unscrupulous employers who not only fail to pay them but also expose them to dangerous working circumstances that leave them vulnerable injury or even death.

Risky business

“After the hurricane, we mostly did cleaning jobs in hotels, at the beaches and parking lots because everything was flooded or covered in dirt and mud,” José, a 43-year-old Honduran immigrant, told IPS. José was one of the many day labourers waiting for work at a parking lot in Hempstead, Long Island.

“No one protects us here, neither our employers, nor the clients,” Ruiz, a 72-year-old Honduran, told IPS. “We are on our own. We don’t have protection but someone has to do the job. After Sandy, many labourers got sick and injured because with such natural disasters you don’t make it out without coming down with something.”

Local authorities and government agencies have emphasised the need for licensed and experienced professionals to handle the post-Sandy cleanup, but these rules are often broken amidst chaos and disaster. Because of the hurricane, many contractors, homeowners and other victims hired day labourers.

“This government has lied and abandoned us! They don’t care about us. And that’s why we have to unite as one, and be a family to each other, because if they don’t care for us, who [will]?” added Ruiz.

A 52-year-old Salvadoran by the name of Lucas is one of the day labourers responsible for bringing attention to this situation. “The government should listen to us,” he said. He said that demonstrations have brought the labourers confidence. “The last one was even aired on television and got people talking about and noticing us. Finally we are not invisible anymore,” he added.

Describing post-Sandy in Long Island as a “war zone”, day labourer Francisco, 46, fled from his native country of El Salvador because of the civil war. After travelling on foot and by train and bus, he eventually wound up in New York, searching for work. “I’ve travelled a long and dangerous road to get here in hope of a better future. Instead I ended up as a day labourer.”

Calls for more safety and protection

As the number of day labourers has risen, so have centres that pursue better working conditions for them. Among these organisations are the Workers Justice Project (WJP), the NDLON and El Centro del Inmigrante (ECDI).

These centres aim to achieve economic and social empowerment through education, leadership development and counselling. In order to reduce labourers’ chances of being exploited, they also teach them about their rights and the laws that support them.

“We are always fighting for our lives while doing this work and there is so much insecurity every day, whether we will have work or not, because we depend on patrones [employers] who come…to offer us work,” Carlos, 50, from El Salvador told IPS.

Jorge, a 52-year-old Honduran, highlighted the problem that all day labourers face: “Most patrones are abusers. They hire us to work for them but refuse to pay us. We have no right to file a complaint because we are undocumented immigrants.”

Hurricane Sandy has made it more difficult for these centres to assist and counsel day labourers on their quest for work in hard-hit areas of New York.

“Our centre in Brooklyn was unfortunately badly damaged by the flooding,” said Ligia Guallpa, director of the WJP, during a press telebriefing. “Basically we’re left without a centre.” She expressed concerns over the day labourers who are currently working on the reconstruction of particularly battered areas like Coney Island and Sea Gate.

“Now, more than ever there is a need for these day labourers,” Guallpa emphasised. “Many of these workers are now being picked off the street instead of coming to the centre first, which means that they are being exposed to all kinds of violations.”

Guallpa called the entire situation “very unfortunate”, estimating that more than 10,000 day labourers are helping to reconstruct parts of New York and New Jersey in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

Physical and legal safety

Guallpa added that having the centre operate again would be critical so that “the labourers can help rebuild the communities with proper equipment, training resources and assistance”.

Nadia Marina Molina, programme coordinator at the NDLON, agreed with this, pointing out that day workers need not only sufficient information but also proper equipment, which employers often don’t provide. In this spirit, her group has developed a “health and safety material series…for workers and organisations who want to distribute them”.

Located on the north shore of Staten Island, El Centro del Inmigrante (ECDI) had a little more luck than WJP and was not affected by the storm. As a result, they could start on recovery efforts immediately.

“Already twenty families came to our centre for work […] of which most stayed with friends and family because they had to evacuate their homes,” explained Gonzalo Mercado, executive director at ECDI, during the telebriefing.

So far, neither of the centres experienced any type of immigration enforcement actions against illegal and undocumented immigrants, identity checking procedures, arrests or deportation.

Guallpa hoped that none of these actions would come soon, and with good reason. “A lot of day labourers are actually members of the community,” she emphasised, “who live and work here and work hard to rebuild”.

Stress and anguish are normal reactions among people who go through a natural disaster. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
SANTIAGO DE CUBA, Nov 23 2012 (IPS)

“The city looked as if it had been bombed. On the way to my office, I passed people who had the same shocked look on their faces as I did. We would look at each other, and even though we were strangers, we’d ask ‘How did things go for you? Did anything happen to your house?’ It was a kind of warm solidarity that did me a lot of good.”

This is what a journalist in Santiago de Cuba told IPS, as she described at least one positive aspect of the collective reactions after a disaster like the one suffered by this eastern Cuban city on Oct. 25, when Hurricane Sandy, despite the weather alerts and government warnings, caught a large part of the population off guard.

The estimates of economic losses caused by the storm in eastern Cuba have not yet been published. But the damage was severe, and 11 people were killed.

But there is another, less-noticed, dimension: the psychological impact, which can be seen in people’s eyes when they talk about losing everything – their homes, their furniture, their household appliances, even their memories.

“I was really scared. I crawled into a cabinet when the wind tore the roof off my room. My neighbours pulled me out of the house and helped me cross the street to where other families whose homes were also damaged had taken shelter,” 70-year-old Isabel de la Cruz, from the city of Guantánamo, which was also hit hard, told IPS.

Depression, anxiety, despair, irritability and aggressiveness are all symptoms shown by people around the world who have gone through a natural disaster.

“Just think, we fell asleep with the beauty and woke up with the beast,” said a local resident who worked in a hotel that was totally destroyed by the storm.

“People are depressed and disoriented,” said Father Eugenio Castellanos, the Catholic priest at the shrine of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, Cuba’s patron saint. “I have noticed psychological imbalances because of the losses suffered, in more than a few people,” he told IPS.

The priest estimated that 90 percent of the homes in El Cobre, a village near Santiago de Cuba, felt Sandy’s impact.

Juan González Pérez told IPS that in the days after the hurricane, there were outbreaks of violence in some areas, especially when people stood in line to buy basic products that had been scarce.

“We had been without electricity for many days, and they started to sell kerosene for cooking,” said Pérez, a local spiritualist leader. “Although there was enough for everyone, there were arguments and fights in the line. When people get desperate, they tend to get aggressive.”

He said he told his followers “to come together, get along, share with people who don’t have enough, and not to give in to despair.”

In Mar Verde, a beach neighbourhood where Sandy made landfall 15 km from Santiago, Dr. Elizabeth Martínez has provided assistance to more than 100 people who are being housed in summer cabins that were not destroyed because they are set further back from the shore.

“The psychological impact is huge. But no one here was killed, and no one is sick,” she said.

After the hurricane hit, healthcare efforts were mainly focused on preventing epidemics from breaking out. “We are holding meetings on health in the neighbourhood, teaching people how to avoid transmissible diseases, and about the importance of purifying water before drinking it,” she said.

According to experts, between one-third and one-half of any population exposed to natural disasters suffers some kind of psychological problem, although in the majority of cases it would be considered a normal reaction in the face of extreme events.

But because of the impact of climate change, weather events like hurricanes threaten to increase in intensity.

“When I found my neighbours in the lower floors, we were in shock. But someone said: ‘We’re going to get into the entryway that is blocked by these fallen trees,’ and we started working, although at first no one was talking,” said one woman who works in the tourist industry. In the first few days after the storm, many people were on the streets removing rubble and cleaning up.

Due to the greater frequency and intensity of tropical storms, health authorities in Cuba began to focus in the 1990s on the psychological impact of hurricanes and other natural disasters. In 2008, when the country was hit by three hurricanes, the government ordered that more attention be given to the question by health authorities.

In an article on the issue, Dr. Alexis Lorenzo Ruiz explained that psychological and social aspects of disasters are taken into account, both in the training of personnel and in the organisation of health programmes that reach the entire country, with an emphasis on the most vulnerable sectors, such as children, adolescents and the elderly.

From a mental health point of view, in natural disasters, the entire population “suffers tension and anxiety to a greater or lesser degree, directly or indirectly,” Katia Villamil and Orlando Fleitas wrote, noting that the impact in such circumstances is more severe among low-income sectors.

The two professionals said the most frequent reactions ranged from “normal” ones, like manageable anxiety or mild depression, to emotional numbness, exacerbation of pre-existing psychiatric conditions or post-traumatic stress disorder.

Hurricane Sandy caused damage not only in Santiago de Cuba but also in the eastern provinces of Guantánamo and Holguín. The government of Raúl Castro has not yet announced the amount of economic losses, although preliminary, partial figures released a few days after the storm mentioned an estimate of 88 million dollars.

By Rebecca Hanser
NEW YORK, Nov 19 2012 (IPS)

Dee Knight experienced Hurricane Sandy in several different capacities. As a reporter and an organiser, not only did he report on the aftermath of the hurricane, but he was also a part of “Occupy Sandy”, a response to the hurricane based on solidarity and charity.

The People’s Power Assembly Movement (PPAM), for which Knight is an organiser, and the Workers World Party, for whose Workers World newspaper he is a reporter, both support the Occupy Sandy hurricane relief operation, a coordinated community relief effort aiming to organise and distribute resources and volunteers to aid people affected by Hurricane Sandy.

Dee Knight, a reporter for the Workers World newspaper and a member of the hurricane relief group Occupy Sandy. Photo courtesy of Dee Knight.

Knight draws a powerful lesson from his experiences. “To heal and protect our broad community, as many of us as possible need to come together, working in solidarity with the most affected victims,” he told IPS.

Knight spoke to IPS U.N. correspondent Rebecca Hanser about his experiences at the distribution centres during Operation Sandy and the tenacious efforts of the Occupy forces to support survivors of Sandy and help rebuild New York’s hard-hit neighbourhoods.

Q: What is the “Occupy Sandy Hurricane Relief Operation”? How and when was it founded?

A: Occupy Sandy Hurricane Relief Operation was a group of Occupy activists who decided to set up the operation and using the network they created during Occupy Wall Street. They assigned themselves tasks, like surveying the relief needs of Hurricane victims.

They also recruited other organisers and coordinators appealing for help from churches and other institutions in order to build an infrastructure to appeal for, receive, organise and deliver the aid, as well as to canvas affected neighbourhoods to determine people’s precise needs and deliver aid.

Q: What do you think makes the Occupy Sandy operation different from, for example, other state-led operations or those organised by local authorities?

A: At the all-important level of vision and goals, “Occupy Sandy” implies a set of values and understandings – the key thing is that it is “horizontal” and not “vertical”, meaning it is people-to-people solidarity and mutual aid.

As an all-volunteer program, it depends on people’s willingness to give what they can to help others. And there is recognition that the storm hit all of us in various ways, and the damage and hurt caused to those most affected also affects all the rest of us.

In order to heal and protect our broad community, we need to come together, as many of us as possible, and work in solidarity with the most affected victims.

Q: What is your opinion of the debate that surfaced after Sandy on the role of climate change and global warming in contributing to such natural disasters?

A: I share the view of the Occupy Sandy organisers, that this disaster was a direct result of climate change, just as the terrible droughts last summer in the Midwest, which knocked out a huge fraction of the corn and wheat crops, were. It was a wakeup call for all of us that if concrete steps are not taken immediately to reduce and reverse the damage caused by fossil fuels, we can look forward to more disasters of this type.

Also, as Occupy Sandy says, the responsibility lies with the official power structure, which is the captive servant of giant corporations, especially the energy monopolies that only want to profit from fossil fuels, and therefore work hard to prevent a transition to sustainable, renewable energy.

In general, the profit system imposes social structures in which the needs and interests of the general population, especially the poor, come last, while profits come first. This has to change if we are to prevent future disasters.

Q: During the operation, what moment resonated the most with you?

A: I was moved by the Occupy Sandy coordinator who ran the orientation for volunteer canvassers. He insisted on a type of “efficiency” that was slower rather than faster: instead of focusing on the quickest possible delivery of a high volume of supplies, the focus would be on taking the time to understand people’s needs, including their need to be heard and understood.

The coordinator also urged us to find those people in the community who are already emerging as leaders, based on their awareness of other people’s needs and their ability to help get things done. These people, he said, should be supported, and enabled to do more, especially knowing that the current stage of solidarity and struggle will surely be followed by even more challenging stages, in which the communities try to rebuild, and in some cases, resist efforts to displace them by opportunist developers or politicians interested in gentrifying their neighbourhoods, as happened in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina.

Q: How were your experiences in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy?

Where I live in the northwest Bronx, the damage was relatively slight – mainly trees downed. But my wife was recruited to work as a nurse in an evacuation centre. I work in Yonkers, operating a car repair service, that was fortunately spared any physical effects of the storm.

But the Yonkers population was traumatised, with 30 to 40 percent losing electricity, and trees down everywhere. Gas lines were hours long. Our car repair business lost some business, but we were very lucky.

Excerpt:

Sandy arrives in Marblehead, New York on Oct. 29, 2012. Credit: Brian Birke/cc by 2.0

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Nov 8 2012 (IPS)

I am aware that my arrival last week helped re-elect U.S. President Barack Obama. Superstorms like me don’t play politics, but it should be clear by now that your refusal to tackle global warming has serious consequences. Higher sea levels and amped-up hurricanes like me are just two of them.

There is an awful price to pay for burning coal, oil, and natural gas, I’m sorry to say.

Putting hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere is trapping more of the sun’s heat energy. CO2 is the planet’s natural heating blanket but those extra hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO2 have made that blanket thicker. And it is getting thicker every year.

Nearly 200 people were killed in the 10 days I travelled from Jamaica to Canada. Most of the deaths were in the United States. The U.S. remains by far the largest emitter of CO2. With a fraction of the world’s population, the U.S. is responsible for nearly 30 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions from 1860 to 2009. On a person by person basis, U.S. citizens have one of the biggest CO2 “footprints”.

Some of you have known for a long time how dangerous CO2 is. The first international conference to address the climate-disrupting impacts of burning coal, oil, and natural gas was held 24 years ago. At “The Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security”, your politicians and scientists concluded:

“Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war”.

They accurately warned of a dangerous temperature increase without action to reduce emissions. (Conference summary statement)

Knowing all this, your oil, coal and gas corporations were allowed to grow to become the world’s most powerful and profitable industry. You gave, and continue to give, those corporations who are making the planet less habitable billions of tax dollars in subsidies.

Now there is so much CO2 in the atmosphere the entire planet is .8 degrees C (one degree F) hotter and that temperature will at least triple. This additional heat energy being trapped by the extra CO2 amounts to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day 365 days per year. This has spawned more and more destructive extreme weather events. This “new normal” will only worsen as more CO2 is released.

The refusal to tackle global warming has led to nearly 400,000 deaths and more than 1.2 trillion dollars is being lost every year mainly due to damage to food production and from extreme weather linked to climate change. Air pollution caused by the use of fossil fuels is also separately contributing to the deaths of at least 4.5 million people a year. These deaths and costs will only worsen with every additional tonne of CO2.

In human terms CO2 is forever. Your countries’ emissions today will disrupt the climate of your children, grand children and great grandchildren. To minimize the severity and intensity of flooding, droughts, destructive storms and crop failures your CO2 footprint needs to grow smaller and virtually disappear over the next few decades.

The US CO2 footprint has been getting smaller in recent years. The recession, closures of old coal plants and more natural gas has resulted in fewer emissions. Others are doing their part. The British are 18 percent below their emission levels in 1990 and aim to get down to 34 percent by 2020. The US is still well above its 1990s levels. This ongoing failure to act has cost the US its global leadership position.

Studies show the U.S. could become an advanced, 21st century low-carbon society thriving on 100-percent renewable energy sources by 2030. The entire planet could run on 100-percent renewable sources by 2050.

This does not appear to be your future. The fossil fuel industry is too powerful and has instilled a fear of change amongst many of you. What you should be truly fearful of is the worsening of powerful storms that kill, the floods that destroy and droughts that will cause hunger for your children and your children’s children.

As you sow, so shall you reap.

Hurricane Sandy Speaks is written by lead international science and environment correspondent at IPS Stephen Leahy.

Sandy viewed from space on Oct. 29 at 16:55 GMT, 40 km from Atlantic City with winds of 144 km an hour. Credit: NASA – Public domain

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Nov 5 2012 (IPS)

Hi, this is Sandy. By the time you read this, I’ll be gone, after dissipating into increasingly weaker remnants of strong winds, heavy rains and snowfall in the Great Lakes region of North America.**

I am saddened by the damage and loss of life but am truly surprised you are so shocked by the extent and severity. I was born on Oct. 22, and over the course of 10 days I killed more than 150 people and caused tens of billions of dollars in damages in numerous countries in the Caribbean and on the east coast of the United States.

Haven’t you noticed hurricanes, cyclones and other storms have become more powerful in recent years? And that extreme weather events like record flooding, droughts and heat waves are happening more frequently?

In 2012 extreme weather records were broken all over the U.S. In 2011 there were 14 separate billion-dollar-plus weather disasters in the U.S. including flooding, hurricanes and tornados.

Did you notice my relatives? They’ve been all over the planet. In the past 20 years extreme events have had major impacts on developing countries like Bangladesh, Burma and Honduras that have suffered most in terms of damages and lives lost.

Last year, we displaced 38 million people with climate-related disasters such as the flooding in Pakistan and China.

And all this is happening in part because the air and sea have become warmer over the past 50 years.

The world has already warmed 0.8 C since the pre-Industrial era and will rise at least 1.6 C even if emissions of the hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning coal, oil and natural gas ended today. (There is a time lag in the climate system. The current global warming is the result of CO2 emissions from the 1950s to 1970s.)

You should bear that reality in mind. There is twice as much warming to come, guaranteed. I’m sorry to say it may be too late to do enough to prevent a threefold or even fourfold increase in the current warming.

You can dial down the thermostat if you really want to.

You should also know there are more superstorms or “Frankenstorms” (more properly anthrostorms, since we are caused by human activity) like me coming. Not today or next week, but in the near future.

The climate is now supercharged with extra heat energy. I’ve called it like being on steroids. The climate is 0.8 C warmer. That’s the average increase over the entire planet. Many places are much warmer, such as the Arctic where it is two to three degrees warmer on average now.

Canada is 1.3 C warmer today than 50 years ago. It will be four degrees warmer in a few decades. Temperatures in the U.S. will not be far behind.

In a few decades the entire planet will be two to three degrees warmer. That might not sound like much, but it means a 200 to 300 percent increase over today.

Storms and extreme weather are powered by heat energy. I don’t want to think what will be coming.

But it doesn’t have to go that way. Believe it or not, the reality is that humanity is in control of the global thermostat.

The increase in temperatures in the air and oceans is mainly due to emissions of CO2. Those emissions of CO2 come from burning coal, oil, and gas and cutting down most of the world’s forests (trees take CO2 from the air to grow).

The U.S. could shift from energy sources emitting CO2 to 100 percent renewable energy sources by 2030, as studies published in Scientific American have shown.

So don’t curse me; you’ve made me stronger with fossil fuels.

There are estimates that I caused 50 billion dollars in damages in the U.S., in addition to the several billion in damages in the Caribbean countries.

That’s a lot of money – enough to give every human on the planet around eight dollars. But it is only a fraction of the 600 billion dollars that the oil and gas industry is spending this year alone in exploration and new production, according the Harvard University research study, “Oil: The Next Revolution”.

This 600 billion dollars invested in fossil fuels will bring extreme weather no human has ever witnessed. And it will be an “investment” in extreme weather lasting more than a hundred years.

So don’t curse me if your home is flooded, your life disrupted or worse, if you’ve lost a loved one. Hurricanes and tropical storms are nature’s pressure relief valves. It’s not our fault we’ve been amped up on fossil-fuel “steroids” you’ve put into the atmosphere.

Every day, millions more tons of CO2 are added, trapping ever more of the sun’s heat.

A ton of CO2 is about three barrels of oil (159 liters each). And every ton of CO2 “lives” in the atmosphere for 100 years. That means every barrel of oil, ton of coal or cubic foot of gas burned adds more CO2, trapping more and more of the sun’s heat for the next 100 years.

It’s curious you’d spend 600 billion dollars on additional sources of fossil fuel when there is already more than enough production capacity to push CO2 levels from current the 390 parts per million (ppm) to far above 450 ppm.

It’s a curious investment when your experts and leaders say they want to return to a safer level of 350 ppm. Think about that when you forget about me.

* 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.

**Hurricane Sandy Speaks – Stephen Leahy´s blog

Excerpt:

In one night, Hurricane Sandy devastated large parts of the East Coast of the United States. But in the long run, the aftermath of the storm could have some positive effects as different religious communities learn to work side by side to tackle challenges brought on by the disaster.

“It is sometimes difficult for one faith community to come to the table and be an equal partner of discussion with other faith communities. But our experience here has been an extraordinary amount of willingness to cooperate,” Peter Gudaitis from New York Disaster Interfaith Services (NYDIS) told IPS.

NYDIS is a federation of faith-based organisations that work with disaster relief in New York City. Right now it is working in the Rockaways and on Staten Island to provide shelter and food, Gudaitis said.

“People believe that disaster relief is taken care of by the federal government and the Red Cross. But faith community response is actually the largest response to disaster – well, the largest human response, not financial,” he added.

The religious communities connected and coordinated by NYDIS represent over 80 different faith divisions. “NYDIS is the religiously most diverse emergency response organisation, and we are based in the most diverse city. We have Buddhists, Sikhs, Muslims, Jews, lots of different Christians,” Gudaitis said. “All faith communities participate united. Obviously, faith communities provide a sense of hope in times of crisis.”

Gudaitis noted, however, that getting different faith communities to cooperate is not always an easy task. NYDIS, established after Sep. 11, 2001, has experienced its fair share of inner conflicts.

“There is a lot of history between some faith communities. That makes it difficult for them to collaborate. One obvious example is the Jewish community and the Muslim community. Due to tensions in the Middle East, they have had a tense relationship here also.”

“But when there is a disaster in the U.S. they tend to work well together,” Gudaitis said. He added that “it is also a challenge to get some Christian communities to cooperate”. He believed that the experience after Hurricane Sandy might strengthen ties among different faith communities.

Debbie Almontaser, chair of the Muslim Consultative Network, which connects Muslim communities in New York City, had similar perspectives and experiences.

“We have gotten our student organisations to go out and volunteer now. They go to shelters, community houses, with Jewish and Christian volunteers,” Almontaser told IPS. “Sep. 11 helped galvanise interfaith cooperation. And this, for sure, is making people come out and work closely together.”

Almontaser also believed that the Muslim community in the United States can especially benefit from taking part in disaster relief. “In times of Islamophobia, seeing Muslim volunteers out there can change negative stereotypes,” Almontaser said. “This can really build bridges between people.”

The Muslim Consultative Network is currently emailing its members to find more volunteers for disaster relief work. The network is also “communicating with Muslim-based houses of worship on Staten Island to set up kitchens, food service”, Almontaser said.

“New Yorkers need to help each other now. Do unto others as you want others to do unto you. We have not had such a disaster since September 11….The time is hardest now, but there will also be long-term rebuilding required. I think we will see sustained cooperation between communities.”

Another faith-based relief organisation working hard at the moment is the Jewish Disaster Response Corps, which assists post-disaster rebuilding efforts across the United States.

“Right now we are looking to make sure that our community is doing good,” Elie Lowenfeld, the organisation’s founder and president, told IPS. “The strength that people take from faith in a time like this is invaluable.”

The Jewish Disaster Response Corps has experienced of interfaith cooperation in times of crisis before. After the outbreak of storms in the United States in April 2011, the Jewish organisation learnt to work together with the Islamic Circle of North America.

According to Lowenfeld, the experience sparked an interreligious dialogue, and helped to build bridges that hopefully will be useful in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. “We are out holding hands now,” he concluded.

Hurricane Sandy caused an estimated 50 to 60 billion dollars in damage. Above, a section of Marblehead, Massachusetts during the storm. Credit: Brian Birke/CC by 2.0

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Nov 2 2012 (IPS)

Killing nearly 200 people in the United States, Canada and the Caribbean and crippling much of New York City and surrounding areas earlier this week, Hurricane Sandy was the kind of extreme weather event scientists have long predicted will occur with global warming.

“Climate change is a reality,” said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo after Sandy swept through his state.

Sandy was twice the size of an average hurricane, and it hit the eastern coast of the United States, where sea levels have been rising the fastest, said Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

“All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be,” Trenberth, an expert on extreme events, told IPS.

Whether climate change caused Hurricane Sandy is the wrong question to ask, added Trenberth. He explained that climate change helped make Hurricane Sandy more destructive than it otherwise would have been.

“This is the new normal,” Trenberth said. “It doesn’t make sense to rebuild in some regions – they’ll just be swept away again.”

Oceans and the earth’s atmosphere have warmed significantly in the last 50 years due to hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted from burning coal, oil and natural gas. CO2 acts as blanket, keeping the planet warm by trapping some of the sun’s heat.

The extra heat contained by the CO2 blanket is akin to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs every day, according to James Hansen, a climate scientist who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Most of that heat has gone into the oceans, so land temperatures around the world have risen an average of only 0.8 degrees Celsius (one degree Fahrenheit). As oceans warm, sea levels rise because warm water expands. Melting glacier and ice sheets are also major contributors to sea level rise.

Warmer air can also hold more moisture. Measurements show there is now four to six percent more water vapour in the air, making rainfalls heavier.

Hurricane Sandy’s path took it from the warm waters of the Caribbean up the Atlantic coast of the United States, where waters were exceptionally warm for this time of year. Hurricanes are largely fuelled by warm water and moist air. Sandy had plenty of both.

Higher moisture levels created a stronger storm and magnified the amount of rainfall by as much as five to 10 percent in comparison to conditions more than 40 years ago, Trenberth explained.

Just one year ago, Hurricane Irene slammed into New York City, closing its subway system and forcing the evacuation of 370,000 people. Irene then moved inland to Vermont and New Hampshire, where it produced record flooding. Total damages were estimated at 16 billion dollars.

Sandy’s cost is estimated between 50 and 60 billion dollars, an amount second only to Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast on Aug 29, 2005, killing 1,836 people and destroying roughly 300,000 homes. It caused nearly 120 billion dollars in damage, with its total cost to the U.S. economy estimated at 250 billion dollars.

These extreme events will only worsen as temperatures continue to rise. Yet CO2 emissions are still increasing quickly, driven by the oil, gas and coal industries.

In 2012, more than $600 billion will be spent worldwide in oil and gas exploration and production, said Steve Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International, a U.S.-based non-governmental organisation.

“The reality is that the oil industry is driven by reaping profits from new production sites,” Kretzmann told IPS.

Massive investments in deep water drilling, tar sands and new oil and gas extraction technologies such as horizontal fracturing are driving production levels to new highs. An analysis by Oil Change International found that those investments by fossil fuel companies and their backers put the planet on the path for temperatures to rise at least eight degrees Celsius.

Leading scientists consider a temperature increase of four degrees Celsius to be catastrophic. At those temperatures, the Arctic will be eight to twelve degrees Celsius warmer. Most of the carbon-laden permafrost will thaw, with disastrous positive feedback. A rise of six degrees Celsius would render large parts of the world unlivable. Hardly anyone has considered the consequences of eight degrees.

“The world needs to aggressively invest in oil demand reduction rather than a continued unsustainable binge,” Kretzmann said.

But such change, which seems unlikely in the near future, occurs, the world will be forced to deal with the consequences.

A street in New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy, which wreaked havoc along much of the East Coast. Credit: May S. Young/CC by 2.0

By Rebecca Hanser
NEW YORK, Nov 1 2012 (IPS)

As the East Coast deals with the havoc and devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy, climate scientists are seeing yet another reason to put climate change and global warming on the current political agenda.

The storm has reignited the hotly debated topics of climate change and global warming, which environmentalists blame for Hurricane Sandy. With recovery an immediate concern, environmental groups also worry about different forms of pollution resulting from the storm.

“Sandy is what happens when the temperature goes up a degree. The scientists who predicted this kind of megastorm have issued another stark warning: if we stay on our current path, our children will live on a super-heated planet that’s four or five degrees warmer than it is right now,” said Bill McKibben, president and co-founder of the climate advocacy movement 350.org, in a press release.

Global warming is caused mainly by human activities such as burning fossil fuels like coal. This operation and others lead to higher concentrations of greenhouse gasses that raise the temperatures of both the oceans and the earth’s atmosphere.

“The fossil fuel industry is causing the climate crisis, leading to more extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy,” McKibben said. “We’re calling on Big Oil to stop spending millions to influence this election and donate the money to disaster relief instead.”

A recent report published by the Rainforest Action Network demonstrated that banks that finance and invest in carbon intensive companies are also responsible for the deteriorating global climate. They also do not properly measure their carbon footprints, despite sufficient and available guidelines to help them do so, according to the report, “Bankrolling Climate Disruption: The Impacts of the Banking Sector’s Financed Emissions“.

Climate change controversy

Not everyone agrees with the claim that global warming and climate change alone have paved the way for Hurricane Sandy.

“It’s a probabilistic issue. You can’t say that Sandy occurred because of climate change, but what you can say is that that such storms are much more likely to happen with contributing factors that include things directly related to climate change,” Steven Hamburg, chief scientist at Environmental Defence Fund, told IPS.

“Could Sandy have happened without climate change? Sure. Is it likely? No,” Hamburg added.

David Biello, an environmental journalist and associate editor at Scientific American, agreed. “Global warming didn’t spawn Sandy but it certainly contributed to the impact, with a couple of features definitely worsening it,” he told IPS.

“Higher sea surface temperatures have made the storm surge stronger,” he explained. “Normally hurricanes come up to the coast and turn right back into the ocean, but as a consequence of the major meltdown of Arctic sea ice this summer, there was a weather pattern preventing Sandy from taking that course, and [it] steered it back into land.”

One conclusion on which experts do agree is that the frequency and intensity of hurricanes like Sandy will increase over time.

“Global warming was probably a small but significant factor for Sandy. But it’s a factor that will grow over time,” Michael Oppenheimer, climate scientist and professor at Princeton University, told IPS.

“Such massive storms only happen once every 100 years, and now this kind of event is becoming more frequent, which is a huge challenge for human adaptation and resilience of our infrastructure,” Biello elaborated.

Hamburg agreed, noting, “we’re not seeing more hurricanes…It is more the different types of storms, the intensity of the storm surge.”

A political storm

Hurricane Sandy has broken the so-called “climate silence” of this year’s elections. The storm has thrown a wrench into campaign efforts, halting activities Monday and Tuesday as it became impossible to ignore the topic of climate change, which has penetrated the national dialogue.

“The presidential candidates decided not to speak about climate change, but climate change has decided to speak to them,” said Mike Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, in a press release.

Biello, the environmental journalist, believed otherwise. “I’d like to think so, but we’ve had several wake-up calls along the way, of which the biggest was Katrina, which wiped…New Orleans of the map. Unfortunately, up until now, not much progress has been made.”

Immediate concerns

The New York-based organisation Riverkeeper expressed concern about the increase in water pollution due to floating debris, oil spills, and other chemicals leaking from the fuel tanks of swamped vehicles and boats, all of which are contaminating the waters of the Hudson River and New York Harbour.

Riverkeeper also stressed the danger to public health caused by sewage overflows, which are already considered a “chronic problem”.

In a press release, the group explained that although sewage overflow is common during moderate or heavy storms, the contamination with Sandy was different because during the storm surge sewage, spilled back onto roads and into homes instead of being discharged into the river or harbour.

“This storm is not yet over,” said U.S. President Obama in a speech Tuesday at the Red Cross headquarters. “There is no time for inaction. Recovery is going to take a significant amount of time.”

U.S. President Barack Obama campaigning in Virginia on October 25, 2012. Credit: Watermarked Photography/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 31 2012 (IPS)

With less than a week left in the 2012 election campaign and much of the Northeast recovering from Hurricane Sandy, President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger, former governor Mitt Romney, are running neck and neck in the national popular vote, according to the most recent surveys.

Online bettors and seasoned political analysts, however, appear to agree that by virtue of his edge in about nine key battleground, or “swing” states, the president will most likely emerge victorious after the final ballots are cast on November 6.

Instead of a direct popular vote, the presidency is determined by the electoral college, through which each state is allocated a certain number of votes based on their representation in Congress. Almost all states use a winner-take-all formula, so that the candidate that wins a majority receives all of a state’s electoral votes. With most states either solidly “red” (Republican) or “blue” (Democratic), “purple” swing states are critical.

Residents of those states, which include Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada, are being bombarded around the clock with last-minute radio and television campaign ads as well as robocalls and other telephone exhortations on behalf of not just the presidential contenders but candidates for state and local elected positions as well.

In the critical swing state of Ohio, which nearly all analysts consider a top prize, in part because no modern Republican candidate has won the presidency without it, is also leaning toward Obama, although one top political analyst, Charlie Cook of the “National Journal”, still considers it a “toss-up”.

With one of every eight jobs in that state dependent on the auto industry, the Obama campaign has been pounding away for months at Romney’s opposition during the financial crisis four years ago to the federal bailout of an industry which has since rebounded remarkably well.

Romney may have compounded his problems there this week when his campaign began running ads falsely claiming that Chrysler’s Jeep division was outsourcing U.S. jobs to China. The assertion drew harsh denunciations from Chrysler’s CEO and General Motors.

“You have to think the Jeep/China falsehood could be the nail in the coffin there,” noted Chris Nelson, a well connected political and foreign policy analyst, in his daily Nelson Report Tuesday.

Sandy’s aftermath

While the polls have yet to reflect it, Obama may ironically benefit in the closing days of the race from the hurricane itself, primarily because it enabled him to be shown supervising the federal government’s response, effectively pushing Romney down and, in some cases, even off the news agenda.

The praise showered on the president’s handling of the “Frankenstorm” by two Republican governors, notably Chris Christie of New Jersey, was no doubt poorly received at Romney’s campaign headquarters.

His campaign was just hit Monday with a widely circulated video clip of a debate last year in which the Republican candidate suggested that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) – the national coordinator for relief efforts – be eliminated and its responsibilities off-loaded onto cash-strapped state and local authorities or, better yet, the “private sector.”

A country divided

The closeness of the presidential race is indicative of how deeply and evenly split the country is, despite clear divides along different geographic and demographic lines.

The geographic divisions between blue and red states are the most obvious. With key exceptions in each region, the old South and most of the Midwestern and Rocky Mountain states are firmly in the Romney camp. On the other hand, the Northeast and the three West Coast states are solidly Democratic, as are most of the Rust Belt states of the upper mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes region.

While geographic divisions loom large, demographic differences have also emerged as potentially decisive. In a Washington Post/ABC tracking poll, well over 80 percent of non-white voters said they intended to vote for Obama while over 91 percent of Romney’s backers are white.

Ninety-three percent of African-American voters said they would vote for Obama, and only two percent for Romney, with the rest still undecided, according to a Pew poll released Monday. If their turnout is high, their votes could be decisive in North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida, all three of which went for Obama in 2008 and are considered tossups by Cook and others.

Obama was also favoured by 69 percent of Latinos in an impreMedia-Latino Decisions survey released Monday. A high Latino voter turnout, particularly in the battleground states of Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, Virginia and Florida could also swing those states in Obama’s favour column, ensuring his victory even if he loses Ohio.

Despite repeated efforts by Romney and the Republicans to paint Obama as anti-Israel, Jewish voters appear poised to vote by a solid majority for the president. If that prediction holds, it could make a difference in the two biggest electoral prizes – Ohio and Florida.

Age groups also could play an important role, especially if younger voters (ages 18-29), who historically have been the least likely to vote, turn out at higher rates. Obama leads that age group by more than 20 percentage points, according to the Pew poll, while the numbers are nearly reversed for voters 65 and older.

Similarly, most polls show a gap between men and women voters, although it has narrowed significantly in the past month as Romney moved sharply to the political centre after hewing closely to the positions of his party’s far-right populist core during the primary campaign.

The Pew poll found a seven-percent margin for Romney among male voters, and a six-point margin for Obama among women. Until the last few weeks, the gaps for both genders were more than twice their current sizes.

Overall, the Pew poll, conducted last weekend, found a dead heat between the two men in the popular vote. Other polls released this week have found the same results or one or two percentage points in favour of one or the other – all within the margins of error, however.

Still, most analysts believe Obama is likely to win, given his edge in most of the swing states. At the online betting site, Intrade, Obama’s chances of winning are at about 67 percent, up from 55 percent in mid-October. His odds have also risen about five percent since Monday, when Hurricane Sandy hit land.

Nate Silver, the New York Times’ polling and statistics guru, now puts Obama’s odds at 77.4 percent. Silver predicted Obama will win both the popular vote (by about two percent) and the electoral vote with all swing states except North Carolina and Florida.