A group of women clean a street after the passage of Hurricane Irma, in the Havana neighborhood of Vedado in September 2017. Women play a leading role in mitigating the impacts of climate change, a phenomenon to which they are also the most vulnerable. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Oct 21 2018 (IPS)

When people ask marine biologist Angela Corvea why the symbol of her environmental project Acualina, which has transcended the borders of Cuba, is a little girl, she answers without hesitation: “Because life, care, attachment, the creative force of life lie are contained in the feminine world.”

Acualina is a little philosopher dressed in an ancient Greek tunic in the colours of the Cuban flag – red, white and blue. She teaches, gives advice, issues warnings and provides guidelines on how to reduce risks to the environment. Her educational message is broadcast on TV and spread through other means, ranging from stickers to books.

This environmental education initiative created by Corvea in the coastal neighbourhod of Náutico, in Playa, a municipality on the northwest side of Havana, just celebrated its 15th anniversary. It is an area plagued by pollution, mainly coming from the mouth of a river, and from an open coast that causes flooding of the sea or the river during extreme climatic events.

“This is my way of developing, on a voluntary basis, organisational capacities to protect the environment, and adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change. We developed this experience in many ways,” the 69-year-old expert, who has received international awards for her work on behalf of the environment, told IPS.

Corvea pointed out that in the face of the impacts of global warming, women are not only protagonists, but are also the most vulnerable. “In general, women are overburdened with work and in the face of a disaster, everything is magnified, the care of children and older adults, food and water shortages,” she said.

“The sixth sense that they attribute to us is activated with more power than normal and we have no other choice but to act, in the end we end up more tired than men: they are occupied (busy working) while we are occupied (working) as well as preoccupied (worried about and caring for everyone) – we have a double workload,” concluded the biologist, whose awareness-raising messages are tailored to children but also reach adults.

According to official reports, Cuban women currently make up 46 percent of the state labour force and 17 percent of the non-state sector. At the same time, they make up 58 percent of university graduates, more than 62 percent of university students, and 47 percent of those who work in science.

In politics, nine of the 25 cabinet ministers and 14 of the 31 members of the State Council are women, as are 299 of the 612 deputies of the National Assembly of People’s Power, the local parliament. The Minister of Science, Technology and Environment has been Elba Rosa Pérez Montoya since 2012.

The first head of this ministry, created in 1994, was scientist Rosa Elena Simeón. She was succeeded by José Miguel Miyar Barrueco, Pérez Montoya’s predecessor.

The data point to a steady increase in professional qualifications and in the level of female participation in Cuban society. However, they continue to be more vulnerable to the impact of climate change, which has intensified the force and frequency of hurricanes and exacerbated periods of drought.

Angela Corvea sits in front of the image of Acualina, the educational project she created 15 years ago in Cuba to teach children – and their families – how to reduce environmental risks, including climate risks, in an island nation where the impacts of rising temperatures are very noticeable. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

The response of men and women to this type of disaster is usually different. “Women generally assume the greatest responsibility during evacuations, packing up necessary personal belongings and water and food, often on their own with the children and the elderly in their care,” journalist Iramis Alonso told IPS.

Alonso, who specialises in scientific and environmental issues, added that women “tend to take longer to get back to work after these events, depending on how quickly support services are restored, such as day care centres. That affects them from the point of view of income more than men.”

“All efforts and conflicts are complicated by disasters, because women in every sense are more vulnerable, both at home and at work, where a machista organisational culture still reigns,” sociologist and academic Reina Fleitas told IPS.

In her opinion, disaster management policy should include a gender perspective, because solutions to the problems they generate have to be related to the different impacts and capacities created by people for recovery.

The researcher regretted that “vulnerability studies do not always include a gender focus, there is resistance to recognising that there is a feminisation of poverty that does not mean an increase in the number of women living in poverty, but rather the intensity of how they live.”

“It is known that the vast majority of Cuban women have double workdays and when a natural disaster occurs their efforts triple,” environmental educator Juan Francisco Santos told IPS.

They are the ones who have to prepare the food for the family, “who have to come up with meals, in many cases working magic to figure out how to cook,” she said.

Several women walk in the rain towards their homes carrying food, as part of their preparations for the imminent arrival in Cuba of Hurricane Gustav, in 2008, in a Havana neighbourhood. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

In her view, there are several factors that increase women’s vulnerability to the effects of climate change. In the first place, she mentions the domestic role assumed by the majority of women and, as heads of households, they suffer greater tensions in the face of shortages during extreme events.

Santos said the aging of the population also plays a role, “because most of them are responsible for the care of both the very young and the elderly,” as well as “the lack of understanding of what it means to be a woman, on the part of men and of many women, and society as a whole.”

The educator attributed the “differentiated” responses of men and women to the danger of disasters.to “cultural constructions.”

The male provider, the woman (mother) protector, the man guarding the home, the woman in charge of domestic chores, the man “in the vanguard” and the woman “in the rear,” are the stereotyped roles that still remain widespread, he said.

“Faced with a natural disaster, we will continue to reproduce the world as we conceive it,” warned Santos.

According to the State Plan for Confronting Climate Change, approved by the Council of Ministers on Apr. 25, 2017, officially known as the Life Task, scientific studies confirm that Cuba’s climate is becoming warmer and more extreme.

The average annual temperature has increased by 0.9 degrees Celsius since the middle of the last century.

At the same time, great variability has been observed in storm activity and, since 2001, this Caribbean island nation has suffered the impact of 10 intense hurricanes, “unprecedented in history.”

Since 1960 rainfall patterns have changed and droughts have increased significantly, and the average sea level has risen by 6.77 centimetres to date. Coastal flooding caused by the rise of the sea level and strong waves represent the greatest danger to the natural heritage and buildings along the coast.

Future projections indicate that the average sea level rise could reach 27 centimetres by 2050 and 85 centimetres by 2100, causing the gradual loss of the country’s surface area in low-lying coastal areas, as well as the salinisation of underground aquifers.

The island nation of Dominica, once know as a modern-day Garden of Eden, was ravaged by Hurricane Maria in September 2017. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
ROSEAU, Dominica, Dec 4 2017 (IPS)

McCarthy Marie has been living in the Fond Cani community, a few kilometres east of the Dominica capital Roseau, for 38 years. The 68-year-old economist moved to the area in 1979 following the decimation of the island by Hurricane David.

But even though David was such a destructive hurricane, Marie told IPS that when Hurricane Maria hit the island in September, islanders witnessed something they had never seen before.“How many of the countries that continue to pollute the planet had to suffer a loss of 224 percent of their GDP this year?” --Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit

“The entire city of Roseau was completely flooded,” Marie told IPS. “There is a major river flowing through the centre of the city. The river rose pretty quickly and that was compounded by the fact that we have five bridges crossing the river and a couple of those bridges, especially those we built more recently, were definitely built too low so they presented a barrier to the river and prevented the water from flowing into the sea as it would otherwise have done.”

Hurricane Maria, a category five storm with sustained winds reaching 180 miles an hour, battered the Caribbean nation for several hours between Sep. 18-19. It left 27 people dead and as many missing, and nearly 90 percent of the structures on the island damaged or destroyed.

Marie said Dominicans have been talking a lot about climate change for quite some time, but the island was not fully prepared for its impacts.

And while Dominicans in general have not been building with monster hurricanes like Maria in mind, Marie said he took an extraordinary step following his experience with Hurricane David.

“I prepared for hurricanes by building my hurricane bunker in 1989 when I built my house. When the storm [Maria] started to get serious, we went into the bunker and we stayed there for the duration of the storm,” he said.

“I have been seeing more and more buildings going up that have concrete roofs but it’s not the standard by far. The usual standard is a house made of concrete and steel with a timber roof. So, most of the houses, the damage they suffered was that the timber roof got taken off and then water got inside the house and damaged all their stuff.

“We need to build houses that can withstand the wind, but the wind is not so much of a big problem. Our big problem is dealing with the amount of water and flooding that we are going to have,” Marie explained.

Like Marie, Bernard Wiltshire, who is a former attorney general here, believes Dominica is big on talk about climate change but the rhetoric does not translate into tangible action on building resilience.

He cited the level of devastation in several countries in the Caribbean over the last hurricane season.

“We certainly did not act fast enough in Dominica, we know that. And from looking at what happened in Puerto Rico and in Antigua and Barbuda, I didn’t see any evidence that we have really come to grips with what is required to make us more resilient in the face of those conditions that are going to confront us,” Wiltshire said.

“It brings us to the question how do we make ourselves more resilient, what do we do? I would say we have to look not just to the question of making buildings stronger and more rigid, but we also have to look at ways in which the community is made more resilient; our pattern of production and consumption, we’ve got really to reorient our society to eliminate the causes that prevent those communities from being able to withstand the effects of these disasters.”

Dominica acts as a microcosm of the climate change threat to the world, and the island’s prime minister, Roosevelt Skerrit, has called for millions of dollars of assistance so the country can build the world’s first climate-resilient nation.

“How many of the countries that continue to pollute the planet had to suffer a loss of 224 percent of their GDP this year?” asked Skerrit.

“We have been put on the front line by others. We were the guardians of nature, 60 percent of Dominica is covered by protected rain forests and has been so long before climate change,” he said.

The island’s Gross Domestic Product has been decimated, wiped out due to severe damage to the agriculture, tourism and housing sectors.

It is the second consecutive year that all 72,000 people living on Dominica have been affected by disasters.

Skerrit is convinced that the only way to reduce the number of people affected by future severe weather is to build back better to a standard that can withstand the rainfall, wind intensity and degree of storm surge which they can now expect from tropical storms in the age of climate change.

As Dominica seeks to become the world’s first climate-resilient nation, Skerrit said they cannot do this alone and need international cooperation.

But Wiltshire said Caribbean countries must shoulder some of the blame for climate change.

“I don’t want us in the Caribbean simply to point fingers at the bigger countries and completely ignore our own role. There is a problem I think, in our islands, if not causing climate change, in contributing to the degree of damage that is actually done, the severity of these disasters,” Wiltshire said.

“In Dominica for example, one of the most obvious things was the deluge of debris from the hillsides, from the interior of the country, carried by the rivers down to the coast. It is up there where we have unplanned use of the land, building of roads, the construction of houses without a proper planning regime. So, we ourselves have a role to play in this where for example we are giving away our wetlands and draining them for hotel construction,” he added.

Head of the Caribbean Climate Group Professor Michael Taylor said climate change is happening now and Caribbean residents no longer have the luxury to see it as an isolated event or a future threat.

“I think the first thing that we have to think about is how in the Caribbean are we really perceiving climate change and not necessarily only at the government level but at the individual level, at the community level,” he said.

“Do we perceive climate change as something that is an event or are we beginning to recognise that climate change for us in the Caribbean is a developmental issue? We have to begin to see that climate change is interwoven into every aspect of our lives and it impacts us daily. It’s where you get your water from, the quality of your roads. Until we begin to realise that climate change is interwoven into life then we will always be almost with our foot on the backburner, always trying to catch up.

“We do have resource constraints within the region, we do have other pressing issues which sometimes tend to cloud over both at the community level going right up to the government level, but I think climate has put itself on the forefront of the agenda and that said, we need now to mainstream climate into the very short-term planning and at all levels of community going right up through government and even regional entities,” Taylor added. 

This article is part of a series about the activists and communities of the Pacific and small island states who are responding to the effects of climate change. Leaders from climate and social justice movements from around the world will meet in Suva, Fiji from 4-8 December for International Civil Society Week.

One of the walkways built by the community of Santa Rosa de Aguán to connect the local houses with the beach to preserve the sand dunes. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
SANTA ROSA DE AGUÁN, Honduras , Mar 26 2014 (IPS)

At the mouth of the Aguán river on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, a Garífuna community living in a natural paradise that was devastated 15 years ago by Hurricane Mitch has set an example of adaptation to climate change.

“We don’t want to make the sea angry again, we don’t want a repeat of what happened with Mitch, which destroyed so many houses in the town – nearly all of the ones along the seashore,” community leader Claudina Gamboa, 35, told IPS.

Around the coastal town of Santa Rosa de Aguán, the stunning landscape is almost as pristine as when the first Garífunas came to Honduras in the 18th century.

To reach Santa Rosa de Aguán, founded in 1886 and home to just over 3,000 people, IPS drove by car for 12 hours from Tegucigalpa through five of this Central American country’s 18 departments or provinces, until reaching the village of Dos Bocas, 567 km northeast of the capital.

From this village on the mainland, a small boat runs to Santa Rosa de Aguán, located on the sand in the delta of the Aguán river, whose name in the Garífuna language means “abundant waters.”

Half of the trip is on roads in terrible conditions, which become unnerving when it gets dark. But after crossing the river late at night, under a starry sky with a sea breeze caressing the skin, the journey finally comes to a peaceful end.

A three-year project to help the sand dunes recover, which was completed in 2013, was carried out by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) through the Global Environment Facility’s (GEF) Small Grants Programme, with additional support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).

The project sought to generate conditions that would enable the local community to adapt to the risks of climate change and protect the natural ecosystem of the dunes.

The initiative enlisted 40 local volunteers, almost all of them women, who went door to door to raise awareness on the importance of protecting the environment and to educate people about the risks posed by climate change.

“They called them crazy, and thought the people working on that were stupid, but I asked them ‘don’t stop, just keep doing it.’ Now there is greater awareness and people have seen the winds aren’t hitting so hard,” Atanasia Ruíz, a former deputy mayor of the town (2008-2014) and a survivor of Hurricane Mitch, told IPS.

She and Gamboa said the women played an essential role in raising awareness on climate change, and added that thanks to their efforts, the project left an imprint on the white sand and the local inhabitants.

People in the community now understand the importance of protecting the coastal system and preserving the dunes, and have learned to organise behind that goal, Gamboa said. “It’s really touching to see the old women from our town picking up garbage for recycling,” she said.

The sand dunes act as natural protective barriers that keep the wind or waves from smashing into the town during storms.

“When the sea got mad, it made us pay. When Mitch hit, everything here was flattened, it was just horrible,” Gamboa said.

Some people left town, she said, “because we were told that we couldn’t live here, that it was too vulnerable and that the sea would always flood us because there was no way to keep it out.

“But many of us stayed, and with the knowledge they gave us, we know how to protect ourselves and our town,” she said, proudly pointing out how the vegetation has begun to grow in the dunes.

In late October 1998, Hurricane Mitch left 11,000 dead and 8,000 missing in Honduras, while causing enormous economic losses and damage to infrastructure.

Santa Rosa de Aguán was hit especially hard, with storm surges up to five metres high. The bodies of more than 40 people from the town were found, while others went missing.

The effort to recover the sand dunes along the coast included the construction of wide wooden walkways to protect the sand.

In addition, the remains of cinder block houses destroyed by Mitch were finally removed, to prevent them from inhibiting the natural formation of dunes.

The project also introduced recycling, to clear garbage from the beach and the sandy unpaved streets of this town, where visitors are greeted with “buiti achuluruni”, which means “welcome” in the Garífuna language.

Lícida Nicolasa Gómez is an 18-year-old member of the Garífuna community who prefers to be called “Alondra”, her nickname since childhood.

“I loved it when they invited me to the dunes and recycling project, because we were deforesting the dunes, hurting them, destroying the vegetation, but we’re not doing that anymore,” she said.

“We even made a mural on one of the walls of the community centre, to remember what kind of town we wanted,” she added, with a broad smile.

The mural of scraps of plastic and other recyclable materials made on the community centre wall by the people of Santa Rosa de Aguán to celebrate their way of life and the beauty of Garífuna women, and remind the town of the need to mitigate climate change. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

The mural includes scraps of plastic, metal, tiles and bottle tops. It reflects the beauty of the Garífunas, showing people fishing, crops of mandioc and plantain, and the sea and bright sun, while reflecting the desire to live in harmony with the environment.

The sand dunes are up to five metres high in this small town at the mouth of a river that runs through the country’s tropical rainforest.

Hugo Galeano, from GEF’s Small Grants Programme, told IPS that Santa Rosa de Aguán became even more vulnerable after Hurricane Mitch, which affected the local livelihoods based on fishing, farming and livestock.

For this community built between the river and the sea, flooding is one of the main threats to survival, said the representative of the GEF programme.

Ricardo Norales, 80, told IPS that, although the sand dunes and vegetation are growing, “the location of our community means we are still exposed to inclement weather.

“With the project, we saw how the wind and the sea don’t penetrate our homes as much anymore. But we need this kind of aid to be more sustainable,” he said.

The history of Santa Rosa de Aguán is marked by the impact of tropical storms and hurricanes, which have hit the town directly or indirectly many times since it was founded.

But the sand dunes are once again taking shape along the shoreline, where the community has built walkways to the sea.

Local inhabitants want their town to be seen as an example of adaptation to climate change and the construction of alternatives making survival possible. Several of them said they did not want an “ayó” – good-bye in Garífuna – for their community.

The seafront wall in Guanímar accelerates erosion and land loss. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
HAVANA, Mar 25 2014 (IPS)

The road to Guanímar, a fishing village on the southern coast of Cuba, is as narrow as the future of its 252 inhabitants, who don’t want to abandon the area despite its vulnerability to hurricanes, storm surges and flooding.

“If they can’t fish, the people here won’t know how to make a living,” Maricela Pérez, 63, who lives just a few metres from the beach, tells Tierramérica with a look of anguish.

“We can’t stand to live anywhere else. We were born and raised here,” says Mayelín Hernández, a homemaker who returned to the coast two years ago.

She says many of the families who have been relocated to safer areas by the local government have returned to this settlement of 152 precarious shacks, to keep fishing in the Gulf of Batabanó as their forebears did.

“They close up their house in Alquízar (a nearby town) and they spend more time here, in the ‘quimbos’ (shacks built with materials salvaged from the remains of houses destroyed by hurricanes),” says the 41-year-old Hernández, who comes from a fishing family. She left a small rural property nine km from the coast to return to the beach.

The old dilemma of leaving everything behind for safety reasons has reemerged with the new zoning regulations being implemented in Cuba for residential or commercial areas or protected zones, such as the coastline.

The policy is aimed at combating irregular and illegal building and land-use practices and updating the land registries and zoning plans for Cuba’s 168 municipalities.

Guanímar is along a stretch of coastline south of Havana which, along with the northern coast in the capital, is the area most vulnerable to flooding and high winds during storms in this archipelago located in the Caribbean hurricane corridor

Scientists estimate that by 2050, the rising sea level will have covered an additional 2.3 percent of the national territory.

The new zoning laws put a priority on the country’s 5,746 km of shoreline, which includes the Isla de La Juventud – the second-biggest island in the Cuban archipelago – and 2,500 keys and islets, and on the enforcement of six specific laws, especially decree-law 212 on management of coastal zones, in effect since 2000.

The laws prohibit activities that fuel natural soil erosion, such as construction or the use of vehicles in the dunes; roads or walls parallel to the shoreline; the felling of mangroves; and the introduction of exotic species.

One example of strict application of the law is the city of Holguín, 690 km northeast of Havana, where sun and beach tourism is flourishing. As of July 2013, the local authorities had demolished 212 public buildings that had been built on the dunes.

“The aim is to protect the environment and carry out climate change adaptation actions,” Yailer Sánchez, an environmental inspector in the government’s Environment Unit, tells Tierramérica.

Construction of private buildings on the sand is the most frequent violation of decree-law 212, according to Sánchez. The objective of the authorities is to eliminate all illegal buildings and relocate the inhabitants within the next two years.

Because of the sensitive nature of the issue, the government says the 245 coastal communities in the area will receive “special treatment” in the process.

But the enforcement of the new zoning laws has altered the heavy calm that usually reigns over Guanímar, except during the four months of summer, when thousands of people flock to its beach, visitors fill up all of the houses and shacks, and locals do brisk business selling fried fish and other tasty snacks.

“This is the best beach around here,” says Hernández. “Why not admit it: we don’t want to leave. We quickly measured when (the authorities) came and said they were going to remove everyone with houses 50 metres from the sea…Mine’s 53 metres away,” she adds.

Narciso Manuel Rodríguez, a 59-year-old fisherman who owns his own boat, comments that “They say they’re going to give people homes away from here. But I prefer to evacuate during storms and come back, like I always have.”

The policy is to relocate the inhabitants of at-risk areas, and block construction of new homes.

Rodríguez’s daughter was resettled in Alquízar after Hurricane Charley destroyed her home on Aug. 13, 2004.

Another group of families from Guanímar was relocated to the town in 2008 after the area was hit by Hurricanes Gustav and Ike.

Gustav “hit with all it had” when it passed four km off the coast, the fisherman says.

In October 1944, Guanímar experienced one of the worst storm surges in Cuban history, that was up to six metres high and penetrated as far inland as 12 km.

When there is a threat of hurricane or tidal wave, the 57 families who live right along the beach pack up their belongings, including their small livestock and pets, on local government trucks.

“At those times, people feel that the risk is real,” says Guanímar town councillor Ricardo Álvarez.

The local population “doesn’t know very much about environmental problems. We don’t even get the newspaper here,” he says.

Álvarez says people need information and should participate more in decision-making. “It’s important to understand that these things are difficult for people to deal with,” he adds.

The government shop that sells the basic food and other products provided at subsidised prices under the ration card system will also have to be removed from the dunes, as a result of the new zoning laws.

“Services are gradually being lost,” Álvarez complains.

The primary school closed six years ago. And a physiotherapy hospital that offered treatment based on medicinal mud, which was devastated by the 2008 hurricanes, was never rebuilt.

“People get used to living with the danger, and have their reasons for wanting to stay where they are,” biologist María Elena Perdomo tells Tierramérica. “Educational work is needed to convince people, and when the time comes, legal measures can be taken as well.”

A study by architect Celene Milanés found that in 2012, 90 to 95 percent of residents surveyed in the beachfront towns of Chivirico and Uvero and the coastal city of Santiago de Cuba, in the east, were unfamiliar with decree-law 212.

Coastal areas are home to 60 percent of the world population, who are at risk due to rising sea levels. More than 180 countries have large populations in low-elevation coastal zones, and 130 countries have major cities within a few km of the coast.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

A cleric prays with Colleen James in Cane Grove, St. Vincent hours before it was confirmed that James' sister had died in the Christmas Eve floodwaters. Her two-year-old daughter was still missing. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Jan 31 2014 (IPS)

The rise in natural disasters in the Caribbean due to climate change has led to increased suffering for both men and women, much of it as a consequence of socially constructed roles based on gender, experts say.

So although women typically suffer more during natural disasters, gender policies that specifically focus on helping men when disasters strike are also needed, according to a disaster management official in the Caribbean."[Women] connect to the whole concept of social capital - relying on each other, family connections and friends." -- Elizabeth Riley

“In the Caribbean region, discussions on gender are relegated to conversations on women,” Elizabeth Riley, the deputy executive director of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA), told IPS.

However, she said, experience of natural disasters in the region show that there is a need for psycho-social support programmes for males following a disaster.

A report prepared for the United Nations Development Programme entitled “Enhancing Gender Visibility in Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change in the Caribbean” noted that men often lacked coping skills in the aftermath of a hurricane and were prone to alcohol abuse, stress, and anger.

Riley said reports from regional disasters showed women, on the other hand, responded to such events “by connecting to the whole concept of social capital – relying on each other, family connections and friends.”

She said women in these disasters occupied themselves with consoling children through story-telling, communal cooking and “encouraging people toward a place of recovery.” Other reports showed that men did show some resilience in tackling the reconstruction of their homes.

Reports of natural disasters in the region highlight other male vulnerabilities.

Riley said other reports show that “elderly men are abandoned and incapable of fending for themselves.”

“It is very closely connected to a culture where men have multiple partners and when they reach old age they do not have social capital for support,” she said.

“That is the result of the socially constructed role of men being macho” by having children with several women, she said. “It puts a level of burden on the state because the support for older men is significantly less than that for women,” she said.

In its 2004 macro-economic and social assessment of the damage wrought by Hurricane Ivan in Grenada, the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States noted that “69 percent of the victims were males, and 70 percent of all deceased were over 60 years old.”

Men may be more likely to suffer physical harm in a natural disaster, said Dr. Asha Kambon, a consultant who worked for 20 years with UN-ECLAC, specialising in natural disasters and their impact on small island developing states. “We women are not as prone to risk-taking as men,” she noted.

Though women typically die in greater numbers than men in a natural disaster, Kambon told IPS the ratio of male to female deaths depended very much “on the environment, on the circumstances.”

For example, in the recent floods that occurred over the Christmas holidays in St. Vincent, Dominica, and St. Lucia, all six of the deaths in St. Lucia were of men, most of whom were attempting to drive through the floods.

She recalled that during floods in Guyana in a recent year, several men died from leptospirosis because of walking through flood waters, whereas no women died from this illness. Kambon said this was because the women took the recommended medication and avoided contact with the flood waters.

Nevertheless, natural disasters do place a special burden on women in the region in ways that mirror the experiences of women worldwide.

In the Caribbean, schools and churches are the most likely buildings to be used as shelters following a natural disaster. This increases the women’s burden of care, said Kambon, since “women are responsible for the children and the elderly, and very often the schools are not reopened rapidly following a disaster. So they have to look after those children, and they cannot go out and look for work.”

According to “Making Risky Environments Safer,” published by the U.N. Division for the Advancement of Women, “Domestic work increases enormously when support systems such as childcare, schools, clinics, public transportation and family networks are disrupted or destroyed” due to natural disaster.

Many poor women in the Caribbean are employed at the lowest end of the tourism industry, and since disasters typically do severe damage to the industry, many are left unemployed because their skills are not easily transferable.

“Men are able to get into the marketplace faster because the skills they possess are transferable. Also, men often have some construction skills so they can get jobs in those sectors and earn an income,” Kambon said.

Women are less likely to be employed in the “cash for work” programmes that are frequently implemented following a disaster to rebuild a country’s infrastructure and to provide paid employment, said Riley, since men have the advantage of greater physical strength.

Kambon said that women are also less likely to be employed in such rebuilding programmes because of being restricted to the home in caring for elderly relatives and children.

Perhaps “a cash for care” programme could be implemented, she said, with a view to providing an income to women who would look after dependent members of the community, thus freeing other women to go out and look for work.

She said such considerations underscore the importance of knowing the gender ratio of the community when devising disaster response programmes.

According to “Making Risky Environments Safer”, “Emergency relief workers’ lack of awareness of gender-based inequalities can further perpetuate gender bias and put women at an increased disadvantage in access to relief measures and other opportunities and benefits.”

Further, in the aftermath of recent regional disasters, there was the issue “of the safety and well-being of women and children,” Kambon said, since there is often a breakdown of law and order.

Bathroom facilities also presented a problem for women in emergency shelters.

“What was adequate for men was completely inadequate for women, in terms of cleanliness, safety, location and the ability to use them,” Kambon said.

Beach erosion in Antigua. Chief Environment Officer Diann Black-Layne said even beaches without construction are eroding. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
WARSAW, Nov 20 2013 (IPS)

Diann Black-Layne grew up in a single parent home with nine siblings on the tiny Caribbean island of Antigua. Still, life was easygoing and enjoyable, she recalls. For her, it was paradise.

But paradise was lost in 1979 when Hurricane David, at that time considered the strongest storm ever to hit the Caribbean, came roaring in, followed 10 years later by Hurricane Hugo."Hurricane Luis hit in 1995 and it sat on the island for two days and it destroyed 90 percent of the homes, and just thinking about it I get goose pimples." -- Diann Black-Layne

Since 1995, Antigua and Barbuda has withstood the fury of five more hurricanes.

“My mom, who is more than 20 years my senior, experienced only one hurricane, and I have experienced nine,” Black-Layne told IPS.

Black-Layne is now the chief environment officer and her country’s ambassador for climate change. She longs for the paradise in which she grew up, but acknowledges that the era of her childhood is likely gone forever.

“The beaches are now eroding, even beaches without any construction on them. We have salt water intrusion. It’s getting hotter and farmers are struggling more to produce so it’s very different now,” she said.

Antigua and Barbuda has a combined population of 89,000 and while most people are aware that something is happening with the climate, for the majority, the two-week United Nations Climate Change Conference at the national stadium in Poland is just another talk-shop.

“They are just trying to focus on ensuring that their homes are ready in the event of a storm and that’s all they are focusing on right now, making sure that they have enough money to pay their home insurance which can be like 10-20 percent of your monthly mortgage payments,” Black-Layne said.

“I understand what is happening and that is the reason why I leave my three kids and my husband to come here,” she added.

She is very clear about what she wants to achieve out of these negotiations, not just for Antigua and Barbuda, but for the other small developing states of the Caribbean region.

“Antigua is already paying for adaptation and it’s costing us a lot of money. We are saying that what a U.S. citizen or an EU citizen pays for adaptation, we should be on the same level. Our interest rates are much higher, two [to] three times than what an American would pay,” she said.

“We need access to capital at the same rate they get access to capital. That would ease the strain significantly and that is possible. That is what we are negotiating now under the convention. That is the key.”

Denis Antoine, Grenada’s ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations, told IPS that the Caribbean delegation is approaching the negotiations with “a united front” and the issues for the region are capacity building, financing for development, mitigation and adaptation.

He emphasised the need for financing for climate change and for the developed countries meet their commitment to ensure that the small island developing states are afforded the opportunity to develop their economies.

“The greenhouse gas is not spilled by us. We are not the perpetrators but we are called upon to spend our own local funds so our case is that it is double jeopardy,” Antoine told IPS.

“We would like to take away a higher ambition on the part of the developed countries to maintain their pledge and to ensure that we do not roll back from the position that we have had coming into this COP meeting. We are here to ensure that we do not lose ground.”

John Ashe, the president of the U.N. General Assembly and a fellow Antiguan, told the opening of the first High-level Segment of COP 19 on Tuesday that the picture was “bleak”.

“And if we use the same arguments, the same stalling tactics, that picture will only get bleaker,” he said, pleading with the parties to ensure that a deal is reached in 2015 and that it “be comprehensive and of necessity bind us all. To avoid the usual last minute dash where we leave everything to that magical twelfth hour, I urge you to begin serious considerations right here, right now in Warsaw.

“We have now entered the era of super storms, and the human tragedies and ravages such storms and typhoons bring are part of our daily vernacular,” Ashe added. “However, we in this room must never ever become inured to this.”

But mere hours after Ashe’s call, the Group of 77 developing countries and China walked out of negotiations on loss and damage at 3:55 am (Warsaw time) on Wednesday over the draft negotiating text seen as insufficient in meeting the needs of developing and vulnerable countries.

“As the Philippines continues to count the lives and livelihoods cost by Super Typhoon Haiyan, we appeal to governments across the world not only for sympathy but also for solidarity by supporting the institutional arrangement to address loss and damage,” said Aksyon Klima Philipinas national coordinator Voltaire Alferez.

Aksyon Klima, a network of more than 40 civil society organisations, also called out the developed countries, which led to the frustration in the latest talks on loss and damage.

But despite the recalcitrance of some rich nations, the Caribbean is taking the initiative in some areas. Black-Layne told IPS that Antigua and many of the other countries have been hit by storms so often that they’ve passed some of the best building codes in the region.

“That for us is a success story. Hurricane Luis, a category two storm, hit in 1995 and it sat on the island for two days and it destroyed 90 percent of the homes and just thinking about it I get goose pimples because you remember that,” she told IPS.

“The success story is that one year later we got hit by a category three storm and we had only 10 percent damage. So in one year we were able to recover, rebuild, and we built back better.”

Rainwater harvesting is practised in the rural areas of Trinidad, though this open, unfiltered method poses hazards that the design promoted by the Global Water Partnership-Caribbean seeks to avoid. Credit: Jewel Fraser/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Oct 27 2013 (IPS)

A centuries-old system for ensuring water security is making a comeback in the Caribbean.

It’s known as rainwater harvesting, and it is now becoming a formal part of the region’s strategic planning in the face of not only more and stronger storms, but droughts as well. By 2100, there could be a 20 to 30 percent decrease in precipitation, research shows, making every drop count."The first thing to go in hurricanes is the water." -- Lovaan Superville of NIHERST

“Rainwater harvesting is, in fact, seen as one of the important tools to ensure resilience and redundancy in Caribbean water supplies, in particular to augment existing municipal water supplies,” Dr. Natalie Boodram, manager of the Global Water Partnership-Caribbean (GWP-C), told IPS. “Rainwater can provide a backup water supply in case of disruption.”

One advantage is that the technology is already in place, with many householders, especially in rural areas, creating catchments for rainwater running off of their roofs to supply them with water for daily household use. In the Virgin Islands, slightly more than half of homes use RWH to supply all their water needs.

An estimated 500,000 people in the region at least partially depend on RWH, with the heaviest users including Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, the U.S. and British Virgin Islands, the Turks and Caicos and the Grenadines.

Earlier this month, ministers from the Caribbean Community meeting in Barbados launched a Water, Climate and Development Programme for the Caribbean (WACDEP) that promotes rainwater harvesting as one of the approaches to secure the region’s water supplies.

While RWH has existed for hundreds of years, Boodram says that municipal systems which depend on surface water supplies have displaced it in many parts of the Caribbean, so there’s a need to “re-establish a rainwater harvesting culture in the region.”

The GWP-C has undertaken a number of Caribbean rainwater harvesting projects, as part of its parent body’s worldwide initiative to support the integration of water security and climate change adaptation into development planning.

The aim was to eliminate some of the common problems associated with rainwater harvesting, such as “exposure to air pollution, animal droppings, contaminants from poorly maintained roofs, among other debris,” Boodram explained.

The technology promoted by GWP-C with the help of its partners, particularly the Caribbean Environmental Health Institute, involves a first-flush diverter.

“The first-flush system which forms the bottom part of the downpipe is used to divert the initial water with pollutants from the roof, ensuring that these do not enter the water tank/storage device being used. The first flow of water containing roof debris would then settle at the bottom of the downpipe with the cleaner water settling on top, allowing clean water to enter the storage component,” she explained.

That design was used by Trinidad and Tobago’s National Institute of Higher Education, Research, Science and Technology (NIHERST), which partnered with GWP-C to introduce rainwater harvesting technology to rural communities in Trinidad “with a focus on outfitting disaster shelters, namely, schools,” said NIHERST Senior Project Officer Lovaan Superville.

“Because of climate change, we need to be disaster prepared,” she said, adding that “the first thing to go in hurricanes is the water.”

NIHERST outfitted 15 schools with the rainwater harvesting technology, and provided a few of them with solar panels as a backup energy source as well. To ensure maintenance, Superville said they trained about 25 persons in each community, that is, Toco, Moruga, and Barrackpore.

“The materials used to make the rainwater harvesters are easily available, easy to clean. It’s out of local materials and so it is not expensive,” she said. “Any plumber or electrician, once trained in how our system works, can easily duplicate them.”

Interviews with the principals of some of the schools in Trinidad’s southeast communities of Moruga and Barrackpore confirm that the rainwater harvesters have thus far been a success.

Benjamin Santoo, the principal of Rochard Douglas Presbyterian school, told IPS that when the school cleaned the tap water tank, “it has four inches of slush. When we clean the rainwater tanks, we have no such problem.”

“Water used to come once a month [through the mains],” he added. “We depended on water trucks to give us water Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Because of the school population, 500-plus, the water that we had was not enough for both drinking and flushing toilets.”

In many instances, schools received pipeborne water from the municipal supply only twice a week, sometimes less. With the installation of the rainwater harvesters, they have been able to save the pipeborne water for drinking and use the rainwater for flushing toilets, watering gardens, and carrying out school projects.

Dr.  Henry Smith is director of the Water Resources Research Institute, University of the Virgin Islands, where low groundwater resources have made it difficult to ensure a steady water supply.

“Rainwater harvesting at individual installations allows users access to a source that they can manage independently to their benefit as they develop a good understanding of their own needs, what they can expect from rainfall in their local area, and also what other sources of water might be available to them,” he told IPS.

“Harvesting can be a low-cost alternative, or supplement, that is based on relatively simple technology that could make a major difference to many people who might otherwise not be provided for as a result of climate change.”

Local maize production has gone down in several parts of Mexico. Cobs in a crib in Yaluma, Chiapas. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Oct 15 2013 (IPS)

A month after Hurricanes Ingrid and Manuel caused the worst destruction from a natural catastrophe in Mexico in 30 years, another disaster has come to light: hunger in communities that are supposedly served by a rural food supply programme.

The stories repeat themselves in 14 municipalities in the mountains of the impoverished southwestern state of Guerrero, as indicated by the people who have come to the municipal seats to ask for assistance, like three men from the village of Los Laureles who walked three days and crossed rivers using ropes to reach the town of Coyuca.

“We need food, everything has run out, we don’t have anything to eat,” one of them, Gregorio Angulo, told IPS. He came to ask for a helicopter to fly out the elderly and pregnant women.

Guerrero was the state that was hit hardest by the combined impact of the two nearly simultaneous hurricanes: Ingrid, which swept through the Gulf of Mexico Sept. 12-17, and Manuel, which formed in the Pacific Sept. 13-20.

But “hunger was already here,” the president of the National Confederation of Community Councils of Abasto, Porfirio González Cortés, told a newspaper in the southern state of Oaxaca, the second-most damaged state.

With dozens of federal highways cut off by the hurricanes, availability of low-cost locally-grown foods is key in rural areas of this country of 118 million people. The state food distributor Diconsa – the acronym for Distribuidora Conasupo Sociedad Anónima – was created to that end in the 1970s.

Through a network of slightly over 25,000 stores that serve poor communities of fewer than 2,500 people, Diconsa has a mandate to offer 22 staple foods, including maize, beans, rice, sugar, oil and pasta, at subsidised prices.

For years, the system regulated the market in the poorest regions of the country. During the 1999 floods, for example, it guranteed supplies for isolated communities.

But in the last 15 years, it has lost operational capacity and budget.

An assessment of Diconsa’s performance, carried out this year by Conejal, an autonomous public agency, found “problems in ensuring constant, regular supplies in the stores.”

In addition, in 10 percent of the rural communities served by the programme, the Diconsa stores were the only place to buy food, but only one-third of all of the stores had all of the 22 products they were supposed to sell.

From 1998 to 1999, the federal budget for all food aid programmes was cut in half – including Diconsa, Liconsa (a milk distribution system) and Fidelist (a now-defunct programme that provided corn tortillas at subsidised prices).

In 2000, the authorities wanted to completely eliminate the subsidies for Diconsa, but a major mobilisation by the community councils kept them from doing so.

It was reported at the time that the budget assigned, 41 million dollars, barely covered the operating costs. This year, only 14 million dollars were earmarked for the programme, according to the government’s Federal Expenditures Budget 2013.

The basic basket of 22 subsidised staple products costs some 220 pesos (just under 20 dollars), while in a regular grocery store or supermarket the price goes up to between 230 and 330 pesos.

But there have been numerous complaints that the Diconsa stores sell other products, including junk food, at the same, or even higher, prices as other stores.

And the system draws very little on small-scale local agricultural production but depends instead on a costly centralised distribution system in this vast country chequered with remote, hard-to-reach places. In fact, many of the food products are imported.

Mexico is one of the world’s biggest importer of food, according to the National Association of Rural Producers’ Enterprises (ANEC).

In this country, which belongs to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), known as the “rich countries club”, there were 27.4 million people who did not have enough food in 2012, according to official figures.

Nearly 14 of every 100 preschool children are stunted – low height-for-age – a sign of chronic malnutrition. And among the country’s sizeable indigenous minority, stunting affects 33 out of every 100 children in that age group.

In Guerrero, María Natividad saved up every last cent in July and August. She had saved up enough to buy, as she does every year, enough meat, beer and Coca-Cola to fill up two refrigerators. But none of it was for herself.

With luck, sales on the long Independence Day weekend (Sept. 16) would bring her enough income to last through Christmas. Her shop, which is in her small two-story home, is on the banks of the Azul river that borders Santa Fe, a leading tourist town in the state of Guerrero.

But in the wee hours of the morning of Sept. 15, the Azul river overflowed in a question of minutes, flooding 100 metres beyond its banks. Natividad’s house was nearly completely submerged, and when the water receded, a mixture of mud and garbage completely filled the lower floor.

A month later, her only source of income is gone. And although tourism is the main source of livelihood for the entire town, the authorities have dragged their feet on the local residents’ requests, because as a town that normally draws tourists it is towards the end of the list in terms of urgency.

Natividad is one of the thousands of people in Guerrero who have not received any help, neither cash nor food. “No one has come to Santa Fe,” she told IPS.

The floods, which killed 157 people, damaged half a million hectares of crops. The devastation drove up prices of lemons, onions, beans, maize and tomatoes.

In addition, several dozen people are still missing, half a million people lost their homes and businesses, and 1.2 million homes were damaged.

With additional reporting by Ximena Natera (Coyuca y Santa Fe, Guerrero).

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

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Aug 20 2013 (IPS)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resilience and hard truths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A street on the outskirts of Santiago de Cuba after Hurricane Sandy struck the city in October 2012. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Jul 10 2013 (IPS)

Rather than talk about forecasts for hurricanes at the start of this year’s season, Cuban meteorologist José Rubiera prefers to discuss the importance of reducing the country’s vulnerability and improving preparedness.

Experts at Cuba’s Meteorology Institute predict that in this year’s hurricane season – Jun. 1 to Nov. 30 – 17 tropical storms will form, including nine possible hurricanes, in the Atlantic hurricane region, which includes the North Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. And they say one of the big storms could hit Cuba.

At the start of his interview with IPS, the director of the Meteorology Institute’s forecast department clarifies that the Atlantic hurricane region is a very large area into which any city, such as Havana, fits millions of times, because “they are tiny dots on a map.” That means it is impossible to know ahead of time where a hurricane will hit.

“The prospect of an active season only means that the overall meteorological conditions …are conducive to more storms than in a normal year,” said Rubiera, who is also vice president of the hurricane committee of the Fourth Region of the World Meteorological Organization.

Q: The 2012 hurricane season was very active. After three calm years in Cuba, Sandy swept through the eastern region, wreaking havoc and taking many people in the area by surprise. Why?

A: There were many factors. In first place, only two hurricanes had passed through Santiago de Cuba, neither of them very intense, and they were moving from east to west: Ella in 1958 and Inez in 1966.

Sandy was the first storm to run from south to north across the province of Santiago de Cuba. The eye of the hurricane hit land early in the morning of Oct. 25, near Mar Verde beach, to the west of the city of Santiago.

Sandy’s eyewall (the ring of high winds surrounding the eye) crossed the city of Santiago de Cuba, which is in a mountainous area and has buildings with a high degree of concentration of population. And the city’s inhabitants do not have years of experience of what hurricanes are like.

Q: Did Sandy leave any lessons for Cuba?

A: I think so. Sandy’s lesson was that all hurricanes are dangerous and that the effects they can cause should never be underestimated. And also, that all big cities have to be prepared, because there are larger numbers of vulnerable people than in cases of isolated or smaller populations.

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.

Q: What conditions are favourable to this kind of intense, devastating hurricane?

A: I wouldn’t say it was very intense. By the time it reached Cuba it had already gone down to a category three storm. Yes, I would say it intensified quickly, but that’s not the same thing.

Only 17 hours passed from the time Sandy became a category one hurricane, just to the south of Jamaica, until it reached the coast of Santiago de Cuba. In that short period of time it escalated from category one to category three.

Why did that happen? Well, the conditions were extremely favourable for that to happen. The seawater temperature was extremely high, 31 degrees, and in the upper atmosphere the conditions favoured great atmospheric instability.

Q: Was that a new phenomenon?

A: With the last few hurricanes, in these first years of the 21st century, we have got used to cases of rapid intensification, like Wilma, which went from a category one to a category five hurricane in just 18 hours as it passed through the Caribbean in October 2005.

That is a manifestation of what we are experiencing in a time when the seawater temperature is rising and the conditions in the upper atmosphere are favourable to rapid intensification. These cases are now somewhat more frequent; it means something is changing.

Q: There seems to be a consensus that climate change is not causing more hurricanes, but that these storms will become more intense. What is your view on this?

A: Exactly. Although a hurricane is a phenomenon on a very small scale, compared to the models used to estimate climate change, there are certain elements that seem to indicate that the number will not grow, but will be the same or perhaps even smaller. But the intensity of these storm systems will increase, just as rainfall levels will get higher as we approach 2100.

That is the consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and of experts on tropical storms who have discussed the issue. I agree with that appraisal.

Q: What challenges does climate change pose for meteorology?

A: Climate change poses challenges in many aspects. For meteorology, the biggest challenge is knowing with the greatest possible certainty what is going to happen. That is not currently possible. There is a factor of uncertainty, but it has its limits. For example, temperatures may rise one degree or they may rise up to four degrees.

That is, there are things that we are sure about. If greenhouse gases continue to be emitted, the temperature is going to rise, but how much? That is the factor of uncertainty, which depends to a large degree on the models we use to make predictions. That is one of the challenges, to be able to know to some degree what is going to happen in the future.

Q: How is the relationship between the meteorological services of Cuba and the United States?

A: Relations between the U.S. and Cuban specialists are very good. They have been here, we have been there. There is a very smooth exchange of information.

The Cuban government authorises their hurricane hunter aircraft to overfly our territory when the requests are made through diplomatic channels. There have never been problems in that sense.

Excerpt:

Arcides Pérez makes concrete blocks by hand in Grego, in Ciego de Ávila province. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
CIEGO DE ÁVILA, Cuba, Jul 5 2013 (IPS)

Houses with sturdy masonry walls and reinforced concrete roofs, looking like they could survive any tropical storm or hurricane, are sprouting up on the outskirts of this city in central Cuba, thanks to the development of local production of construction materials.

“People in this neighbourhood, which is fairly new, have been improving their little houses. We support the neighbours and workers of the area, who buy the materials, and we lend them the block-making machine,” said Arcides Pérez, the owner of a small block-making factory. “We only charge them for the electricity used,” he told IPS.

Operating on the outskirts of Ciego de Ávila, 434 km east of Havana, this noisy artisanal factory can produce up to 1,000 cement blocks a day when supplies are available. It also has three moulds to make different types of asbestos cement water tanks, all marked “Arcides, C. de Ávila.”

Two cement mixers, wheelbarrows, spades and an electrically driven machine turning out two blocks a minute are operated by seven men, while two women work finishing the blocks and preparing the raw materials. The team offers transportation of the tanks and installs them on rooftops or as cisterns.

To get raw materials, Pérez and his group travel to cement factories in Sancti Spíritus and Santiago de Cuba, 360 and 847 km east of Havana, respectively, to pick up discarded rubble that they then mix with cement bought in state stores to make their blocks and tanks.

Housing construction is a priority in Cuba’s current economic reforms. Among the first changes was the sale of construction materials in national currency, diversification of supply and provision of credits and subsidies for low-income families.

The authorities hope that within two years, 70 percent of the productive activity in the housing sector will be carried out by private actors, as they seek to revitalise a sector that has been centralised by the state for decades.

A good proportion of homes are in need of structural repairs, owing to the deterioration of housing stock caused by the economic problems Cuba has experienced for over 20 years, non-fulfilment of building programmes, the high prices of materials and labour, and damage from cyclones that frequently strike this Caribbean island.

Sandy, the hurricane that hit the eastern part of the island in October 2012, damaged 137,000 homes in Santiago de Cuba, 65,000 in Holguín and 8,750 in Guantánamo, the other two cities most affected in the area, according to a report by the Cuban office of the United Nations.

Extreme weather such as torrential rainfall will increase due to climate change in the Caribbean region, where the housing sector has received the least attention in the last decade, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

Storms and extreme weather events will tend to increase at a faster rate, meteorologist José Rubiera told IPS.

In 2008, hurricanes Fay, Gustav, Ike and Paloma wreaked the most destruction on record since 2001, damaging 647,111 houses in Cuba, of which 84,737 were totally demolished, according to the state National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI).

Given this scenario, the main challenge remains boosting production of construction materials, a problem that is beginning to be met by local solutions. Private initiatives like Pérez’s are increasing the limited access to building blocks, one of the materials for which there is greatest demand at the state stores.

“We sell blocks at five pesos (25 cents of a dollar) apiece, the same as the state,” said Pérez. “Securing the materials is problematic because there are shortages in the stores. For the last three months I have only been repairing and building tanks, as well as transporting and installing them, because of the lack of cement,” he said.

Sixty-year-old Rodobaldo Ibarne, employed at a state construction firm, decided to make blocks to order privately. Equipped only with a spade, a wheelbarrow and a mould, he and another worker turn out up to 80 blocks a day in Grego, a neighbourhood on the outskirts of the municipality of Ciego de Ávila.

“The state stores cannot keep up with demand,” Ibarne told IPS. He cannot expand his business because of health problems and lack of space.

Production of several basic materials in Cuba fell in 2012, according to the latest figures from ONEI. Metal roofing sheets, asbestos cement tiles and black steel beams declined the most. In 2011, 32,640 housing units were built in the country, while 32,103 were completed in 2012.

To improve housing, researcher Fernando Martirena is designing more ecological and economical construction materials to be mass-produced. At the same time he is strengthening production and using local capabilities by creating small ecomaterials workshops.

Siguaney, a factory in Sancti Spíritus, began production in April of the first 240 tonnes of ecological cement developed by the state Centre for Research and Development of Structures and Materials (CIDEM), headed by Martirena, at the “Marta Abreu” de Las Villas Central Univesrsity in Santa Clara.

The product, made from metakaolin (obtained from the mineral kaolin) and unheated limestone, will be marketed from 2014. “It cuts production costs by 28 percent and contributes to mitigating the effects of climate change by reducing carbon dioxide emissions during the manufacturing process,” Martirena told IPS.

CIDEM has worked directly with Cuban communities since 1995 on a low-energy system for local production of recycled construction materials, like micro-concrete roof tiles, CP40 pozzolanic cement, prefabricated materials, red ceramic aggregates and bricks, and other appropriate technologies for rural and peri-urban areas.

Drenched in Havana. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Jun 10 2013 (IPS)

The new cyclone season in Cuba is forecast to be highly active, and it announced its arrival with intense rains that caused rivers to burst their banks and flooded extensive areas in the western province of Pinar del Río.

However, Andrea, the first named tropical storm of the year, did not reach hurricane force.

The heaviest rains fell in Pinar del Río, in the extreme west of this Caribbean island nation, starting in early June when a low pressure system built up in the Gulf of Mexico. It gradually turned into tropical storm Andrea, with maximum sustained wind speeds of 95 kilometres per hour and gusts of higher wind speed.

The western provinces of Artemisa and Mayabeque, adjacent to Havana, were also affected by the rains. The capital city suffered less intense rainfall than Pinar del Río.

Andrea moved away from the westernmost part of Cuba on Thursday Jun. 6, heading for U.S. territory, where it made landfall with maximum sustained winds of 100 km per hour on the west coast of the southeastern state of Florida.

A tropical storm becomes a category one hurricane when its winds attain speeds between 118 and 152 km per hour.

In Cuba, the persistent heavy rains have caused some damage but have also brought benefits.

“There has been a lot of rain around here, but the maize fields have really benefited. We also saved on irrigation water,” María Antonia Lemez, who works on a state farm in Mayabeque, told IPS. She said other crops were undamaged as well.

Even in Pinar del Río, the most affected province, it wasn’t all bad news, as its 24 reservoirs filled up with 187 million cubic metres of water in barely six days, raising the level of the reservoirs from 50 to 83 percent of total capacity, according to official figures.

According to preliminary reports in the newspaper Granma, whole towns and villages in that province, which is frequently in the path of tropical storms, are under water.

“All the lowlands are under water because of persistent rain or river flooding,” reported the newspaper, which estimated some 3,000 people were evacuated to relatives’ homes or shelters.

“The rains have been very heavy. In my house, which was repaired not so long ago, water started coming in through the cracks between the walls and the doors,” Sarilena Ramos, a Pinar del Río resident, told IPS over the phone.

Another woman, who requested anonymity, said that it hadn’t rained so much in Pinar del Río “for many years, even when there were hurricanes.”

Granma’s list of damages included some 40 tobacco curing barns. Seventy percent of the national production of tobacco leaf comes from Pinar del Río.

Agricultural damage was also significant, but the extent will not be known until the floodwaters recede, the woman said.

In Havana the rainfall was not heavy and reservoirs are no more than 30 percent full. The authorities were keeping an especially close eye on the coastal areas, which are prone to flooding, although the rain did not cause “a critical state” in any of the 15 municipalities of the capital, Granma said.

A report from the Climate Centre at the Institute of Meteorology says the rainy season in Cuba lasts from May to October and comprises approximately 80 percent of annual rainfall. The months of heaviest rainfall are May, June, September and October.

The report adds that rainfall depends on the influence of mobile weather systems from the tropics, such as tropical waves and low pressure areas over the Atlantic, and their interaction with systems in middle latitudes, as well as the presence of tropical cyclones, mainly from August to October.

The forecasting centre at the Institute of Meteorology predicts high activity this season, with the formation of an estimated 17 named tropical storms. Nine of these could reach hurricane category in the northern Atlantic ocean, which includes the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean sea.

Meteorologist Maritza Ballester was quoted by the Cuban media as saying there was a high risk that at least one hurricane would reach Cuba, based on the number forecast and the oceanic and atmospheric conditions expected this year.

However, Ballester stressed that the predictions are based on statistics and probabilities, which means it is essential to make advance preparations before every hurricane season, even when the risk forecast for the country is low.

Every year Cuba puts into practice its internationally renowned system of prevention and preparedness, run by the civil defence service, to mitigate the impact of the frequent hurricanes that tear through the island and other extreme events such as droughts and floods, and thus reduce the loss of human lives to a minimum.

In spite of this, material damages tend to be heavy. In 2008, three hurricanes struck the island and cost the nation ten billion dollars, according to official figures.

On Oct. 25, 2012, Hurricane Sandy pounded Santiago de Cuba and two other eastern provinces with particular fury, causing 11 fatalities and serious economic damage.

The consensus among scientists is that hurricanes may be more destructive in future because of the effects of climate change. They recommend a strategy aimed at reducing vulnerability to natural disasters and at educating the public to increase risk awareness.

Sandy was the 18th tropical storm in the 2012 season, and the 10th to reach hurricane force. It buffeted Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas, Bermuda, the United States and Canada, leaving in its wake billions of dollars worth of damage and nearly 200 dead.

Cyclones this season will be named in the following order: Andrea, Barry, Chantal, Dorian, Erin, Fernand, Gabrielle, Humberto, Ingrid, Jerry, Karen, Lorenzo, Melissa, Nestor, Olga, Pablo, Rebekah, Sebastien, Tanya, Van and Wendy.

Nicaraguan rescue brigades providing assistance in Haiti during the 2010 earthquake. Credit: Courtesy of the Nicaraguan army

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, May 3 2013 (IPS)

Nicaragua, which is prone to natural disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes and flooding, is confronting them with prevention measures and community drills and training in high-risk areas.

The army’s civil defence unit and different government agencies began to put in place a permanent plan for safety, prevention, preparedness and assistance in the most vulnerable areas in 2010, Colonel Néstor Solís, the head of civil defence, told IPS.

The programme has been complemented with legal action and educational campaigns aimed at blunting the impact of natural catastrophes in high-risk areas that are home to 2.1 million of Nicaragua’s six million people, according to the risk map drawn up by the civil defence unit, which forms part of SINAPRED, the national system for disaster prevention, mitigation and attention.

Commander Javier Amaya, director of the national school for fire fighters, said courses to “strengthen local capacities to confront and reduce the risk of disasters” are organised with support from the army’s humanitarian rescue battalion and ecological battalion, which were created to operate in the case of natural catastrophes and emergencies.

The population of the Pacific coastal region, the most heavily populated and flattest part (with the exception of a string of volcanoes) of this impoverished Central American country, receive instruction on what to do in the case of earthquakes, volcanoes or tsunamis; people along the eastern coast are trained to deal with hurricanes and flooding; and people in central Nicaragua, a landscape of high mountains and large rivers, are instructed in what to do in the case of flooding, landslides and forest fires.

This year, the alert has been sounded especially in the autonomous North Atlantic and South Atlantic regions on the Caribbean coast.

According to William Gray, Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University in the U.S., nine of the 18 named Atlantic storms forecast for the next hurricane season – June to November – will be full-fledged hurricanes.

The two autonomous regions, which cover nearly the entire eastern coastline of the country, has an over 60 percent likelihood of being hit by four of the hurricanes, said the executive secretary of SINAPRED, Guillermo González.

Some 50,000 people – mainly from the Miskito, Sumu, Rama, Garifuna and Creole minority ethnic groups – who live in 16 municipalities in the country’s Atlantic regions, are at particularly high risk because their homes are flimsy shacks along the so-called “route of the cyclones”.

The area has suffered wholesale destruction from several hurricanes throughout the history of the country. The most recent were Hurricanes Joan in 1988, Mitch in 1998, Beta in 2005 and Felix in 2007.

Urban sprawl in seismic zone

Solis said the left-wing government of Daniel Ortega has a general plan to address all kinds of natural disasters, not just hurricanes. “We prepare on a daily basis for any scenario, including worst-case scenarios, because we don’t know when we might face a difficult situation,” he said.

The capital city Managua, home to 1.5 million people, is especially vulnerable to earthquakes.

Poverty and a lack of urban planning has led to the mushrooming of squatter settlements, where seismic building codes are flouted, even though the city is crisscrossed by 18 fault lines and experiences numerous seismic events every month.

The local authorities estimate that some 300,000 people live in 120,000 irregularly built dwellings in the city.

A study on Managua’s vulnerability, carried out by SINAPRED in 2010 and updated this year, predicts that more than 30,000 people would be killed and 53,000 homes destroyed if the capital were hit by an earthquake registering 6.9 on the Richter scale.

“I never thought there were so many dangers to my family in my neighbourhood. I can’t imagine a disaster happening, but at least now I know how to act to protect my people,” Luis Antonio Carrión said during a training session in a poor neighbourhood on the west side of Managua.

The fury of the elements

Because of the low level of rainfall in the last rainy season (May to November), Nicaragua had an unusual number of forest fires in the dry season (December to April).

Fires destroyed 15,375 hectares of forests from Jan. 1 to Apr. 18, including 9,084 in protected reserves, where thousands of fire fighters, volunteers and specially trained members of the military were deployed to fight the flames.

During the rainy season, the training courses focus on communities that are vulnerable to flooding, to create evacuation plans in case of landslides or hurricanes, said the general director of Nicaragua’s fire fighters, Brigade Commander Miguel Ángel
Alemán.

“Every year brings a new threat, worse than the previous ones,” Alemán said during a course attended by IPS. “Climate change has shown us that nature has the capacity to produce the worst disasters imaginable.”

In the last 20 years, Nicaragua has suffered the impact of 44 extreme climate events.

According to the Climate Risk Index compiled by the charity Germanwatch,
Honduras, Myanmar and Nicaragua were the “most affected” by extreme weather for the period 1992-2011.

These events claimed on average 160 lives a year in Nicaragua and 329 in neighbouring Honduras, according to the Index.

Organising the people

Nicaragua’s natural disaster preparedness and prevention plan is backed by the country’s leading environmental organisations.

Kamilo Lara of the National Recycling Forum, which groups dozens of environmental organisations, told IPS that the plan would have a short-term positive impact in terms of assistance for vulnerable populations, and that as people get organised and become aware of the dangers posed by climate change, the long-term positive impact will be felt too.

The government is providing instruction to 2,000 young people who will go door-to-door to teach people how to take the necessary measures in their own homes in preparation for possible disasters.

In addition, 250,000 pamphlets will be distributed, containing information on shelters and assistance centres, environmental advice and recommendations for good ecological practices.

Scientist and ecologist Jaime Incer Barquero, an environmental adviser to the government, applauded the plans for training, assistance, preparedness and prevention.

“I never saw the country making such a big effort to come together to combat the threats posed by climate change,” he commented to IPS. “But I sincerely feel that more education and awareness-raising is needed, not only to know how to act in the face of disasters but also to know how to prevent and avoid them.”

Repairing the roof of a house damaged by Hurricane Sandy. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Dec 28 2012 (IPS)

“Adaptation to climate change is urgent and must be part of development,” said Bárbara Pesce-Monteiro, the United Nations resident coordinator in Cuba, assessing the damage done by hurricane Sandy in the eastern region of the country.

She said the damage was very serious, especially in Santiago de Cuba, a city of almost half a million people and a services hub for other towns. In order to support the country at such a difficult time, the United Nations system in Cuba designed an action plan that will serve as a framework for assistance from the international community.

The plan, to be put into effect over the next six to 18 months, will benefit three million people in the most affected provinces: Santiago de Cuba, Holguín and Guantánamo. The main areas of concern are early recovery, housing, water and sanitation, health and education.

Sandy, regarded as the most devastating hurricane to strike the eastern part of the island in the last 50 years, claimed 11 lives in late October and caused considerable losses in housing, educational and health facilities, agriculture and food crops, as well as major interruptions in electricity and water supply, now largely overcome.

United Nations agencies initially mobilised 1.5 million dollars in emergency funding, supplemented by an appropriation of 1.6 million dollars from the Central Emergency Response Fund of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The action plan entails seeking 30.6 million dollars to deal with the urgent needs of the population that suffered the brunt of the hurricane’s impacts, along with a strategy aimed at improving living conditions for those affected.

The authorities immediately embarked on recovery work, “but the international community wants to support the country in this task,” Pesce-Monteiro said in an interview with IPS. She explained that this humanitarian aid did not require a specific request from Cuba, as it is part of the regular U.N. mechanisms.

The devastation caused by Sandy in the early hours of Oct. 25 recalled the danger from earthquakes to which the eastern region, especially Santiago de Cuba, is exposed. “It’s an issue we have been talking over with the government for several months now,” said Pesce-Monteiro.

She said this concern is shared throughout the Caribbean region. “After the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010, we realised we were all vulnerable. In fact, the United Nations has supported and will continue to support earthquake detection centres in eastern Cuba. This vulnerability needs to be taken into account during reconstruction efforts,” she said.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has helped strengthen the capacity of local governments to reduce disaster risks in several provinces. Sixty-three risk management centres have been created at the municipal and provincial levels, as well as 209 early warning stations in the most vulnerable communities.

Pesce-Monteiro said these installations “have produced excellent results.” The United Nations is working with the other Caribbean nations to share the experiences, test their usefulness and see how they can be adapted to other countries in the region.

“There is also cooperation with the Environment Agency (under the Cuban Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment) in their studies on vulnerability” and other topics, she said.

Adaptation and climate change

The U.N. resident coordinator in Cuba was emphatic when she said that adaptation to climate change is an urgent need.

“The United Nations has been saying for years that there is no time to waste. Adaptation must be part of development,” she said.

In her view, this issue should be a seamless part of every country’s development model, whether the country is rich or poor. “All development plans must take vulnerabilities into account, in order to ensure adaptation. Ideally, they would also limit emissions (of greenhouse gases),” she said.

Pesce-Monteiro also said that it is one thing to be able to face and respond to a disaster, but quite another to build a sustainable society that is capable of preparing for and adapting to climate phenomena.

“In this field, too, Cuba has experience that can be of value to other nations,” she said.

Pesce-Monteiro was sure that the trail of disaster left throughout the Caribbean, as well as in the United States and Canada, in the wake of Sandy, has provided experiences worth assimilating. “But here we are still in the phase of responding to the damage; we want to process the lessons learned in January, and I know the Cuban state will do the same,” she said.

She added that this reflection should go far beyond Cuba itself. “Climate change is affecting all of us, so we hope that this will be another opportunity to raise awareness in all sectors about an issue that must be addressed seriously at the global level,” she said.

“We have already experienced a succession of extreme events of a very serious nature close to home, which compels us to reflect deeply and analyse the type of development we want for the future,” Pesce-Monteiro said.

“I think society is crying out for us to make the appropriate commitments so that we can move forward,” she said.

She highlighted the importance of the social forum held in June during the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Rio de Janeiro.

“It was a broad, participative forum, with strong citizen commitment. Governments are going to have to feel pressure from each one of us, and to understand that we really want a sustainable planet,” she said.

Rey Antonio: "I had never seen such high waves." Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
SANTIAGO DE CUBA, Nov 20 2012 (IPS)

You can still see broken plates, toys, books and some photographs among the rubble that was once the homes of Rey Antonio Acosta’s family and other families in Mar Verde, the beach community where Hurricane Sandy made landfall in this eastern Cuban city.

“Come here and see what pain is,” the 12-year-old boy, who will forever remember the early hours of Oct. 25, when winds of up to 200 kilometres per hour and waves nine metres high wrecked dozens of houses along the coast here, tells Tierramérica*.

He talks about how he saw the eye of the hurricane, “black and with stars in the centre,” and the calm as it passed by. “But then the waves rose higher and the wind became stronger. We heard something like the roar of a beast over us. People were crying and I thought my time had come (to die),” he said.

His young age does not prevent him from learning a lesson from Sandy. “Now that I know what a hurricane is, when the next one comes we won’t take our time evacuating,” he said. The vast majority of the citizens of Santiago admit that the devastating blow from Sandy took them by surprise, in spite of the meteorological warnings.

“We thought there would just be a bit of wind and rain, and that would be all,” says María Caridad, who lives in Santiago de Cuba, the provincial capital. Like many others in this city of half a million people, her house, which was built about a century ago, was not fit to withstand the onslaught.

“None of my neighbours took Sandy seriously,” says the 50-year-old Caridad, on whose house an adjacent wall fell, causing the roof to collapse and leaving the family at the mercy of the wind. “We took advantage of a moment’s calm to cross over to the balcony of the next-door apartment and seek shelter.”

Other people complained that in their neighbourhoods there was no electricity from an early hour, so they did not hear the last meteorological warning, announcing that the hurricane’s path would go right through Santiago de Cuba, which is densely populated and has a largely precarious housing stock that is vulnerable to disasters.

“Cyclones usually passed close to Santiago de Cuba and came from the east. Sandy came from the north, and it was the first time the eye of the hurricane passed right over us. If it had come in the daytime, it would have caused more deaths than the 11 that occurred, because people would have been out on the street,” Eddy Acosta, of the Mar Verde Civil Defence council, told Tierramérica.

Nearly three weeks after the storm, the streets of Santiago have been cleared of rubble. But the trees, stripped of foliage and with broken limbs outlined against the sky, give it a strange wintry look. Many trees were pulled up by the roots and flung against buildings and houses.

As of Nov. 12 there was still no official account of the economic damage caused by Sandy, although an estimate by the United Nations office in Cuba reckoned 137,000 houses were damaged in Santiago de Cuba, 65,000 in Holguín and 8,750 in Guantánamo, the other two eastern provinces that were most affected.

Serious damage was suffered by industry, telecommunications, electricity and agriculture, and recovery is expected to be extremely difficult in a country trying to bolster its weakened economy, and that in 2008 was ravaged by three hurricanes, which caused 10 billion dollars in losses.

The fury of wind and waves devastated not only Mar Verde, but other coastal communities like Cayo Granma and Siboney, and several tourist facilities along the shore. According to the authorities, Sandy pressed home the need for “realistic” proposals in terms of construction methods and land use planning.

Researchers studying the impact of climate change in Cuba estimate that 577 communities in the country will be exposed to floods, due to a rising sea level and the swell caused by increasingly intense hurricanes.

They recommend working to protect ecosystems like mangroves and coral reefs that provide natural barriers against tropical storms, as well as avoiding investment in construction in high-risk seaside areas.

Sandy struck densely populated areas where people were not accustomed to dealing with hurricanes and their enormous capacity for devastation, Ramón Pérez, an expert at the Institute of Meteorology’s Climate Centre, told Tierramérica. In his view, the best form of adaptation is prevention.

“Considering that there may be more intense hurricanes in future, the first thing we need to do is prepare ourselves to deal with the present ones, including of course reduction of vulnerability (to natural disasters) and greater education,” said the expert about the lessons learned from the latest hurricane.

Sandy was the 18th tropical storm of the 2012 season, and the 10th to reach hurricane status. The winds and intense rains affected Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas, Bermuda, the United States and Canada, leaving billions of economic losses and dozens of fatalities in its wake.

* 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.

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.

People were evacuated by helicopter due to flooding in central Cuba. Credit: Agencia de Información Nacional/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Oct 29 2012 (IPS)

As the Caribbean reaches the end of October – the second-to-last month of the Atlantic hurricane season – Sandy has caused significant material losses and claimed the lives of 44 people in Haiti, 11 in Cuba, two in the Dominican Republic, one in Jamaica and one in the Bahamas.

By Monday night, it was picking up speed and was expected to make landfall in New Jersey as one of the largest storms on record.

After lashing Jamaica, where it caused flooding and more than 1,000 people sought refuge in shelters, the storm made landfall in Cuba on Thursday as a strong Category 2 storm with maximum sustained winds of 170 kilometres per hour.

Although the country’s disaster prevention and mitigation system went into action, Sandy was stronger and deadlier than expected when it hit the city of
Santiago de Cuba, 850 km east of Havana, where several generations experienced the destructive force of a hurricane for the first time.

“It slammed directly into the city,” one 70-year-old Santiago resident told IPS by telephone. “We had never seen a disaster like this. People are really sad.”

He said the destruction wrought by Sandy in Santiago de Cuba and other towns in the province was worse than that caused by Flora, a hurricane that stalled over eastern Cuba for four days in 1963, bringing heavy rains and severe flooding that left a death toll of 1,750.

“We still don’t know how much was destroyed by the winds,” said the local resident, who preferred not to be identified. On Saturday Oct. 27, the authorities in Santiago de Cuba estimated the damage at more than 2.1 billion Cuban pesos (some 88 million dollars), although the losses in construction, tourism and the sugar industry had not yet been assessed.

Over the weekend, people were still grieving for the nine people killed in the city, mainly in building collapses, and evaluating the damage caused to homes as well as schools and other public buildings. But many were out on the streets helping those in charge clear up the rubble and fallen trees.

Local people who spoke to IPS over the telephone did not conceal their concern about possible shortages of food supplies, and were also worried about how long it would take to restore power supplies, whose interruption has also left local homes without water.

“In the shop they are letting us take home some of November’s (subsidised, rationed) food, but I was only able to buy rice and coffee,” said one woman.

Holguín and Guantánamo, other cities at the eastern end of Cuba, were hit hard as well, while intense rains and flooding also affected the central part of the country, cutting off some roads.

The six spill gates on the Zaza River dam, the country’s biggest, had to be left open to release water.

After the tragedy caused by Hurricane Flora, the Cuban government decided to preserve human life first and foremost, and created a disaster prevention and preparedness system that is now renowned for reducing deaths to a minimum and mitigating the impact of hurricanes and other natural disasters.

The strategy has made Cuba the country with the lowest hurricane mortality rate in the Caribbean.

Nevertheless, Hurricane Dennis killed 16 people in 2005, and Ike claimed seven lives in 2008.

Sandy is the first tropical storm to lash this country since Ike, Gustav and Paloma caused an estimated 10 billion dollars in economic losses during the 2008 hurricane season.

In an article made available to IPS, meteorologist José Rubiera recognises that the current hurricane season has stood out with respect to other years, because there has been more than double the normal number of tropical storms, as well as “some very intense hurricanes.”

“Some additional effect may be a factor in such unusual activity, and even if it cannot be proven, it is logical to suppose that the global warming occurring around the planet could have an influence,” says Rubiera, director of the Cuban Meteorology Institute’s Forecast Centre.

He further writes that it is “difficult to find answers about the behaviour of tropical storms in a context of climate change, due to the scale on which the storms are occurring and the still low level of resolution of systems for modelling climate change.

“However, in its last report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was able to establish that although nothing can be said yet with respect to the frequency of tropical storms, the increase or decline in number, it can be predicted that they will tend to become more intense,” he adds.

Experts point out that with every degree in temperature rise, the water holding of the atmosphere goes up, which means that storms will become wetter as a result of climate change.

“In the face of the prospects for what could happen in the future, there is only one path to follow: adaptation, because we cannot make hurricanes disappear, which means we have to get used to living with them, while ensuring that they cause the least possible damage,” Rubiera writes.

Cuba’s experience in prevention, which Rubiera says is one form of adaptation to extreme events that could become increasingly destructive, is a focus of strong interest, especially for other island nations in the Caribbean, an area extremely vulnerable to climate change.

Hotel in Antigua. Most hotels in the Caribbean are built on the beaches and coasts. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
BASSETERRE, St. Kitts, Oct 17 2012 (IPS)

The postcards portray sand, sea and sun. But key players in the Caribbean tourism industry are warning that it’s time to shift gears away from the region’s threatened coastlines and instead promote inland attractions like biodiversity.

“Climate change is one of the things that is affecting the hotel industry, and the fact that most of our hotels are right on the beaches (means) they are subject to violent storms, the frequency of which has been projected to increase due to climate change issues,” hotelier and social entrepreneur Valmiki Kempadoo told IPS.

“Outside of Trinidad and maybe a large country like Jamaica, tourism is by far the largest economic driver of these smaller islands…and we have to seek new solutions, new business models that could take this thing into the 21st century,” he said.

Kempadoo is urging his regional counterparts to move their properties away from the beaches, noting that in light of the effects of climate change “having a hotel at 500 feet or 1,000 feet above sea level can help in that general direction”.

He said while the Caribbean is known best for its beaches, there are also lots of other experiences the different islands can offer.

“The climate away from the beaches is much better. It’s an incredibly fertile place where we can grow all these amazing exotic tropical fruits and vegetables that we have a world class collection of,” he said.

“We can offer beautiful hikes, we can offer beautiful views and a beautiful experience without the high humidity and the other things that come with having a hotel on the seaside,” Kempadoo added.

Dominica’s Tourism Minister Ian Douglas knows only too well the devastating effects of climate change on the tourism-dependent economies of the Caribbean.

In fact, he told IPS Dominica is probably one of the islands most affected by this global phenomenon.

“The islands are hit by hurricanes every year and that costs the islands millions (of dollars) to the point where governments have to look at some kind of disaster risk fund to mitigate against the damage,” he said.

“At least one of the islands gets hit every year and Dominica is no exception. In fact we are seeing a new phenomenon in Dominica right now where we are have massive flooding, something that was never before seen, and last year this caused considerable damage even to some of our tourism plants and equipment.”

Douglas noted that Dominica, with most of its hotels on the west coast on the Caribbean Sea, “takes a beating every year”.

And he said the island now has to grapple not only with sea surges and rising sea levels, but also severe flooding in its 365 waterways.

“We have about three of our rivers within the Canefield to Layou area experiencing massive flooding and villages had to be evacuated. Riverbanks were flooded out, bridges and homes were destroyed to the point where government had to actually give families grants for short-term replacements.

“I’ve said all of that to tell you how much climate change continues to affect Dominica. It’s an issue that we continue to grapple with. We actually have a department formulated specifically for dealing with the challenges posed by climate change,” he added.

Sam Raphael, the owner of Jungle Bay Hotel in Dominica, smiles at the suggestion from Valmiki Kempadoo.

He said when he established his jungle resort several years ago, “it was out of an acknowledgement that it is imperative that we make some radical changes and improvement to our tourism industry if it is to survive.

“A few years ago, our industry accepted a false choice between enterprise development and protecting our fragile natural environment. The empowerment and capacity building of our people to be the entrepreneur drivers of the primary industry of our region, our daily bread, was not a priority,” he said.

Nestled in the forests along Dominica’s east coast, the Jungle Bay Hotel focuses on nature-based activities and wellness of guests.

Grenada is also moving to diversify its sun, sand and sea tourism product. And as the island moves towards greater sustainability, Tourism Minister Dr. George Vincent points to the importance of the energy sector.

“We are working with the electricity company to produce alternative energy in the form of wind. We are encouraging the hotels to do solar energy to replace fuel costs. But the sustainable tourism thing is where we’re heading,” he said.

“I tell folks — long ago things like IT and languages were important. Now, they are only platforms to build on. So we are building a sustainable platform, and we will. Everything down the road is supposed to be sustainable, green, eco-friendly. So we have the energy, we have the preservation, we have the rainforest, and we have a number of marine parks that are well-preserved.

“So we’re doing fine in the area of preservation, and we are now going to convert that preservation to use, and make it work for us. So we feel that Grenada benefits greatly from preservation and conservation,” Dr. Vincent, who took over the tourism portfolio in May of this year, added.

A recent State of the Industry Conference, held here Oct. 10-12, was facilitated by the region’s tourism development agency, the Caribbean Tourism Organisation (CTO).

Secretary General Hugh Riley told delegates the Caribbean is experiencing the toughest economic conditions since the Great Depression. He urged hoteliers and other tourism stakeholders to assemble all the creativity, discipline and collective resources they have and use them wisely for the good of the region.

“We have to determine what it takes for small, vulnerable tourism economies to effectively compete in an arena that is populated by large industrialised countries with vastly superior budgets and the power to pass legislation that discriminates against us, impacts our competitive position and further shifts the balance of power in the direction of the already powerful,” he said.

“The good news is that we in the Caribbean have more than a few cards to play. We in this cluster of small populations are bold enough to assemble and decide that we can come together as One Caribbean, enlist some of this industry’s sharpest minds, elect leaders, thrash out ideas and mold them into actions that allow us to win in this environment,” he said.

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

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Aug 30 2012 (IPS)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cuba prepared for the storm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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