Erin Myers Madeira who leads the Nature Conservancy’s Global Programme on Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities says that communities outperform the government and other stakeholders in stopping deforestation and degradation. The Akaratshie community from the Garu and Tempane districts have been able to restore degraded land. Credit: Albert Oppong-Ansah/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 7 2019 (IPS)

Sustainable land management is becoming more important than ever as rates of emissions, deforestation, and water scarcity continue to increase. But what if you don’t have rights to the land?
While the impact of agriculture on land is well known, the relationship between land degradation and land tenure seems to be less understood.

In fact, research has shown that insecure land tenure is linked to poor land use as communities have fewer incentives to invest in long-term protective measures, thus contributing to environmental degradation.

“Establishing secure tenure and secure rights to territory and resources for indigenous people and local communities is one of the most important things we can do around achieving positive outcomes for conservation,” said Erin Myers Madeira who leads the Nature Conservancy’s Global Programme on Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.

“Communities outperform the government, other stakeholders in stopping deforestation and degradation,” she added to IPS.

Despite holding customary rights to more than half of the earth’s lands, indigenous people and local communities legally own only a 10 percent slice.

Resources and Rights also found the legal recognition of community forest tenure rights also still remains adequate, amounting to just over 14 percent of forest area as of 2017.

While this is partially a result of a lack of government policies, land grabs by companies which fail to acknowledge communities’ ancestral lands are increasingly common around the world.

In 2006, 200 families lost access to their land in Cambodia’s Sre Ambel district to make way for a sugar plantation.

In Liberia, Liberian farmers were evicted after the government allocated 350,000 hectares to Malaysian multinational corporation Sime Darby, causing widespread resentment and conflict in the area.

According to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), 35 percent of the remaining available cropland across Africa has been acquired by large entities, with over 70 million hectares allotted for biofuels.

Many have put up a fight against the expanse but it came with a deadly cost.

According to Global Witness, a record 201 environmental defenders were killed in 2017 trying to protect their land from mining, agribusiness, and other industries.

Drone visual of the area in Upper East Region, Ghana prior to restoration taken in 2015. Credit: Albert Oppong-Ansah /IPS

People-Led, Better-Led

Karina Kloos Yeatman, the Women’s Land Rights Campaign Director at Landesa, highlighted the importance of people-led conservation and sustainable land management but the first step is land rights.

“If we aren’t looking forward and thinking about land use and land tenure security and finding more solutions to help people make long term investments to sustainably use their land, we are going to continue to see an even larger influx of climate migrants and people being displaced,” she told IPS.

Yeatman particularly pointed to successes of how secure lands rights have led to increase long-term investments in sustainable soil and forestry management.

For instance, smallholder farmers with secure rights in Ethiopia were 60 percent more likely to invest in soil erosion prevention.

In forests where indigenous land rights have been recognised, deforestation rates have dramatically declined.
In Bolivia, deforestation is 2.8 times lower within tenure-secure indigenous lands.

This has not only helped halt land degradation, but such measures have also mitigated forest-based emissions and curbed global warming.

Both Yeatman and Madeira noted that land rights alone is not enough to promote sustainable land management, but rather four pillars. These are securing the rights to territories and resources; support strong community leadership and local governance; promoting multi stakeholder collaborations, allowing local communities to engage in high levels of decision-making and; identifying environmentally sustainable economic development opportunities in line with communities’ cultural values and sustainable management.

“It’s when you have the four of those ingredients that is when you end up with enduring conservation, communities who have the power to protect those peoples and who can also benefit economically from their stewardship of those places,” Madeira said.

In an effort to curb logging and deforestation, Peru’s Shipibo-Conibo indigenous communities residing in the Amazon enlisted over 6,000 hectares—80 percent of their territory—into the country’s conservation programme and helps manage the land in a way that provides sustainable sources of income.

As part of the National Programme for Forest Conservation, communities receive 3 dollar per year for every hectare they assign to conservation which amounts to potential earnings of at least 18,000 dollar. In order to receive the payment, they must commit to protecting the forest.

A significant proportion of the money received is thus invested back into the forest and its communities who engage in activities such as ecotourism and the sustainable extraction of forest resources.

Farmers undertaking periodic pruning at vegetation Susudi, in the Upper East Region of Ghana. Credit: Albert Oppong-Ansah/IPS

One Step Forward, Many More To Go

While tenure can look different in various contexts, Madeira highlighted the importance of governments and companies respecting land rights as well as the inclusion of indigenous people and local communities to shape sustainable land management planning.

“A lot of the development decisions are made far away from the ground in board rooms. The extent to which indigenous people and local communities are excluded from those decisions, you’re going to get these poor outcomes,” she told IPS.

Yeatman urged corporations to be aware of the complexities surrounding land tenure and support local communities to ensure a sustainable future.

“[Companies] often have 50-100 year leases and if they want the land to be sustainable, they need to help those farmers secure their land rights and help have access to information and inputs to diversify so that they are not degrading their lands,” she said.

Consumers also have a role to play, Yeatman noted, as they delve into the stories behind the products and companies they buy from.

Oxfam’s campaign Behind the Brands provides a scorecard, assessing how the world’s 10 largest food and beverage companies are measuring up against a number of indicators including support for women farm workers, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and respecting rights to and sustainably using land.

For instance, French multinational company Danone and American manufacturer General Mills are ranked among the lowest on the land indicator as it has not committed to zero tolerance for land grabs and does not require its suppliers to consider how such acquisitions affect livelihoods.

While it is easier said than done, there have already been positive developments across the world.

Most recently, the Malaysian government file a lawsuit against local government of Kelantan state for failing to uphold the land rights of its indigenous people Orang Asli, many of whom lack formal titles, as it continues to grant licenses to logging companies and agricultural plantations.

“Rapid deforestation and commercial development have resulted in widespread encroachment into the native territories of the Orang Asli,” Attorney-General Tommy Thomas said in a statement.

“Commercial development and the pursuit of profit must not come at the expense of the Temiar Orang Asli and their inherent right, as citizens of this country, to the land and resources which they have traditionally owned and used,” he added.

Similarly, Myanmar, which has among the highest rates of deforestation in Asia, plans to transfer over 918,000 hectares of forest land to community management by 2030 in order to help prevent illegal logging and allow traditional residents to practice sustainable forestry.

There is still a long way to go but action is necessary to prevent the dwindling of land and natural resources essential for everyone’s survival.

Purse-seiners have been unsustainably fishing the bigeye tuna in the Phoenix Islands Protected Area. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
WASHINGTON, May 9 2014 (IPS)

After years of claiming untruthfully that the world’s most fished marine protected area was “off limits to fishing and other extractive uses,” President Anote Tong of the Pacific island state of Kiribati and his cabinet have voted to close it to all commercial fishing by the end of the year.

The action, if implemented, would allow populations of tuna and other fish depleted by excessive fishing to return to natural levels in the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), a patch of ocean the size of California studded with pristine, uninhabited atolls.The move comes at a time global fish populations are steadily declining as increasingly efficient vessels are able to extract them wholesale from ever-more-remote and deep waters around the globe.

While no-take zones of comparative size exist in Hawaii, the Chagos Islands and the Coral Sea, none are as rich in marine life, making this potentially the most effective marine reserve in the world.

The news drew high praise from scientists and environmentalists.

“This is a big win for conservation and long overdue,” said Bill Raynor, ‎director of the Indo-Pacific Division of The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest conservation organisation. “Now I hope that the other Pacific countries that are contemplating giant marine reserves will follow PIPA’s example.”

These include Palau, where President Tommy Remengesau has suggested closing off its entire Exclusive Economic Zone to commercial fishing, as well as the Cook Islands and New Caledonia, which are studying how much fishing to allow on protected areas even larger than the Phoenix.

“This is fantastic news,” said Lagi Toribau of Greenpeace. “The area will provide a crucial sanctuary for the region’s marine life from highly migratory tunas and turtles to reef fishes and sharks.”

The move comes at a time global fish populations are steadily declining as increasingly efficient vessels are able to extract them wholesale from ever-more-remote and deep waters around the globe.

The international fleets of industrial purse-seiners, dominated by Spanish, Asian and U.S.companies, have converged on the Western and Central Pacific since the start of the millennium after depleting the stocks elsewhere.

The result has been a fast and unsustainable decline of the bigeye, the most prized for sushi after the fast-disappearing bluefin, and more moderate shrinking of the yellowfin and skipjack populations. The fishery’s own scientists have called for a reduction of the catch by 30 percent, but instead it has increased by that amount.

In contrast, for years, Tong’s Wikipedia page has stated, “In 2008, his government declared 150,000 square miles (390,000 km2) “of [the] Phoenix Islands marine area a fully protected marine park, making it off limits to fishing and other extractive uses.”

In a speech still he gave at the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit two years ago still visible on Youtube, Tong mentions “the initiative of my country in closing off 400,000 square kilometres of our [waters] from commercial fishing activities,” calling it “our contribution to global ocean conservation efforts.”

In fact, when PIPA was created, only in the three percent of the reserve that’s around the islands, where virtually no fishing was going on, was it banned. In the rest of the reserve, the catch increased, reaching 50,000 tonnes in 2012 – an unheard-of amount in any protected area.

In an interview in Tarawa, the capital island, a year ago, Tong had brushed aside objections and said he had no intention of ending fishing in the reserve entirely anytime soon. The management plan called for closing another 25 percent next year if Kiribati’s Western partner, the Washington-based Conservation International, donated 8.5 million dollars into PIPA’s trust fund.

The money would be to compensate Kiribati for losses in income from fishing licenses stemming from closure – losses many experts said were entirely imaginary, as PIPA makes up only 11 percent of Kiribati’s waters and the fishing vessels could easily catch the far-traveling tuna elsewhere, they said.

But following reports in the international media, including IPS, on the contrast between Tong’s claims and reality, he said in a press release last September that closing the reserve to all fishing, far from entailing sacrifice as he had previously insisted, would make good business sense for his people.

Ashley McCrea-Strub, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, argues that a complete closure “would create both capital and interest.” She explained that the much-reduced tuna, billfish and sharks populations would likely double inside the reserve to reach their natural, original levels within a couple of decades: that’s the capital.

“PIPA is big enough that some of the tuna will spend all their lives inside it, so they’ll be able to reproduce freely,” she said. “Once the density gets high, more fishes are going to start venturing outside the reserve in search of food and can be caught outside the border,” she said. “That’s the interest.”

Though PIPA is the signature project for Kiribati’s two foreign partners, Conservation International (on whose board Tong sits) and the New England Aquarium, neither organisation has made any announcement. The news came in a short, anonymous paragraph posted on PIPA’s website reporting that the cabinet on Jan. 29 voted to close the reserve to all commercial fishing by the end of the year.

An Internet search found that One Fiji television station’s website ran a story on the vote on Feb. 27, quoting Kiribati Radio (which lacks a website). Fiji One said the measure was taken “as a commitment towards protecting and conserving its marine resources as well as a bid to attract donors to invest in the PIPA Trust Fund,” which has five million dollars.

Asked why there had been no public announcement for what marine scientists said was the most far-reaching marine closure in years if enforced, Gregory Stone, who first suggested creating the reserve and is now a vice president at both Conservation International and the New England Aquarium, did not respond to several e-mailed requests for comment.

Agriculture Under Secretary for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Service (FFAS) Michael Scuse (left) tours a drought stricken corn field with Doug Goyings, on the Goyings farm in Paulding County, Ohio on July 17, 2012. Credit: USDA

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Oct 21 2013 (IPS)

As the planet heats up and larger populations demand larger water supplies, the United States will be left high and dry if it fails to address a worsening water shortage.

By 2060, the gap between water supply and demand could grow to nearly four billion cubic metres per year – 10 times the amount of water used by the desert-bound city of Las Vegas.“If you go to the western U.S., people are still in that mindset of trying to withdraw as much water as they can, as long as they can pump faster than their neighbour." -- Betsy Otto of WRI

“Water shortage has huge ramifications not just for the entire national economy – as farmers, ranchers, cotton producers have to cope with less and less water – but also for the natural system itself,” Adam Freed, the director of the Securing Water Programme at the Nature Conservancy, an environmental organisation here, told IPS. “And climate change is only going to make it worse.”

According to a new trend analysis by scientists in the public and private sectors, U.S. population growth of nearly one percent and rising global temperatures will result in a clear and significant supply-and-demand imbalance.

Dr. Robert Mace, deputy executive administrator of water science and conservation at the Texas Water Development Board, which monitors aquifer levels throughout the state, told IPS that “2011 was both the hottest and driest year on record in Texas. Statewide agricultural losses [across all crops and livestock] that year totaled 7.62 billion dollars, making it the most costly drought in history – more than 3.5 billion dollars higher than the 2006 drought losses, which was the previous costliest drought on record.”

In the future, 16.7 percent of water supplies in the state are projected to come from agricultural irrigation conservation strategies, according to the 2012 State Water Plan.

In Texas and across the United States – as across the world – initiatives addressing water shortages are already emerging. Clean water funds and water efficiency infrastructure in a host of Western cities make clear that the reality of the looming problem has already begun to dawn on some policymakers.

Organisations such as the Nature Conservancy are creating so-called water funds, conservation projects that aim to guarantee a continuous supply of clean water all along the watershed. One way to do that is by encouraging upstream farmers and downstream municipalities to enter into financial agreements with one another, with cities and utilities paying the farmers to “send” them clean and abundant water.

The money helps upstream users finance water restoration and conservation projects. There are currently 15 water funds projects worldwide, including two major projects in the United States, in the often-parched states of New Mexico and Texas. More are on the way.

Thus far, some of the success of these projects comes from the financial incentives for the upstream stakeholders. Farmers realise that securing their water supply is in their long-term interest, as they are less likely to have to import water from somewhere else.

“Finding the balance between conserving our resources while protecting our economy and the people who rely upon it will always be a difficult task,” Tracy Streeter, director of the Kansas Water Office, told IPS.

The Ogallala Aquifer, which runs under eight Great Plains states and provides nearly a third of all irrigated water in the U.S., is falling, but “reducing the amount of pumping to sustainable levels would cause economic devastation”, she said.

“While some will argue we’re not doing enough, fast enough, a culture of conservation aimed at reducing the decline of the Ogallala is emerging in western Kansas,” Streeter added.

Downscaling to the local

A report by the U.S. Department of the Interior recently noted that one of the country’s most at-risk areas is the Colorado River Basin. This watershed, running through seven western states and two Mexican states, is the largest water source in the United States.

The Basin’s two reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lade Meade, are also the country’s largest reservoirs. And according to Ken Nowak of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the U.S. federal agency that oversees water resource management, the two lakes are quickly drying out.

Cities across the western half of the country are scrambling to stop that from happening.

Founded in 2007, the Water Utility Climate Alliance, or WUCA, is a network that brings together 10 of the nation’s largest municipal water providers.

“WUCA has been doing some really great work. What they’re getting at is trying to understand what the science behind climate change is really telling us,” Betsy Otto, the director of the Aqueduct project at the World Resources Institute (WRI), a think tank here, told IPS.

“But the biggest problem with climate change estimates is that they only give us the global picture. The real challenge is then to downscale them to the local level and understand them.”

In Seattle, a co-chair of the WUCA network, city officials realised that their water demand estimates were far too aggressive, and did not reflect the city’s real needs.

“By carefully looking at the data, they suddenly realised they needed much less water than the estimates suggested,” Otto says. “So they started to bring their demand down, by simply saving water.”

In part, this achievement comes from simple strategies such as the city’s decision to distribute free energy-saving showerheads to all single-family homes, or the creation of water audits helping home- and business-owners understand how they can bring down their water waste.

The city of Seattle now claims to have enough water for the next 30 years.

“Of course, these measures need money in order for them to go through,” Otto notes. “But they’re still much cheaper than having to build water reservoirs.”

Accepting limits

The broader challenge, advocates say, is to get other areas with critical current or future water-shortage problems to come up with their own plans. One of the most significant obstacles in this regard across the country may simply be the general approach to water supply.

“Water scarcity increases commodity prices,” John Mesko, a Minnesota farmer who raises grass-fed beef, told IPS. “Farmers make more and this gives them the push to invest in irrigation facilities. So it’s easy to think ‘I can afford to install irrigation, I make profits.’ That’s fine. But it’s just a quick fix. We need to prepare for the long haul.”

Indeed, unlike with surface water, there are almost no regulations on groundwater pumping. One way would be for federal regulations to put caps on allocations, or distribute permits as for surface water use.

“If you go to the western U.S., people are still in that mindset of trying to withdraw as much water as they can, as long as they can pump faster than their neighbour,” Otto warns. “They continue to think that there are simply no limits on how much you can withdraw.”

*With additional reporting by Aarthi Gunnupuri in New York.

Pedro Bara explains to indigenous people and activists the tool developed by the WWF to guide negotiations over hydropower projects in the Amazon. Credit: Courtesy of Denise Oliveira/WWF Living Amazon Initiative

By Mario Osava
SAO PAULO, Aug 27 2013 (IPS)

In the war over major hydropower dams in the Amazon jungle, everyone loses – even the winners who manage to overcome the opposition and build them, but who suffer delays, costs that are difficult to recoup, and damage to their image.

“The polarisation impoverishes the debate on the use and preservation of natural resources,” Pedro Bara, head of the WWF Living Amazon Initiative’s Infrastructure Strategy, said in this interview with IPS.

WWF stands out for seeking negotiated solutions to the dispute between economic questions and the preservation of nature. In the case of hydroelectric dams, it is calling for dialogue to resolve the confrontations between the business and government interests involved and a diverse array of opponents, including affected communities, and social, indigenous and environmental movements.

The aim is to outline a broad strategy for the Amazon rainforest, overcoming the project-by-project focus that is not based on any proven parameters.

To that end, the Brazilian chapter of WWF developed a tool based on scientific studies, which makes it possible to have an idea of what is needed to preserve water and biodiversity and keep the Amazon alive.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Q: How can nature be protected in the Amazon jungle in the face of encroachment by hydropower dams, cattle, soybeans, logging and mining companies, and roads?

A: Six years ago, we decided to ask ourselves what we would need to preserve of the Amazon rainforest from here on out. It’s not 100 percent of what’s left, but it can’t all be used for development either.

If we were completely familiar with the area’s biodiversity, it would be easy to define priority areas. But we don’t have enough information on biodiversity in the Amazon. I think we know about only 40 percent of the total, at the most.

We were forced to draw broad conclusions about biodiversity based on the variety of environments. Different environments will have different species. You make approximations. We have conducted several tests in Madre de Dios [a region in southeastern Peru] on how to plan the conservation of water in data-poor areas.

We concluded that by cross-referencing slope with surface run-off, water flows, vegetation and sources of water, you can get a good explanation of the variety of aquatic species and classify rivers by segments. We expanded that model to the entire Amazon basin.

Q: Did you choose Madre de Dios because the ecology there is representative of Amazonia?

A: No, it was because it contained different characteristics. If it was homogeneous it wouldn’t be useful. We had to work with a broad diversity of environments in order to test several models and select the best to apply in the entire Amazon region, where we identified 299 kinds of aquatic ecosystems.

At the same time, the [U.S.-based environmental conservation group] Nature Conservancy and NatureServe [an international network of biological inventories] developed a terrestrial ecological classification based on landforms, soil type, vegetation and climate.

They identified 423 terrestrial ecosystems in Amazonia. Conclusion: this biome is more diverse from a terrestrial than an aquatic point of view.

This is also an approximation, because there are many animal species that move around a lot.

But with the two models I can decide what to preserve. If I can preserve a representative, functional and resistant sample of the 299 aquatic and 423 terrestrial classifications, theoretically I’m preserving the heterogeneity and biodiversity of the Amazon.

Q: But how are the priority areas chosen?

A: By the best cost-benefit ratio, keeping the area to a minimum size based on a purely economic decision.

Q: How are cost and benefit measured?

A: Benefit is opportunity: for example, protected reserves and indigenous lands, where the cost of preserving is lower. Cost is threat: deforestation and the advance of the agricultural and livestock frontier are the terrestrial costs.

Within an ecosystem classification, the model chooses the area most distant from those threats, which drive up conservation costs.

It’s a software that assembles puzzles of thousands of micro-basins, each of which has its attributes, such as belonging to this or that aquatic or terrestrial classification, the proximity of roads, or the current level of degradation.

It avoids red zones, where costs are high, and selects the sample of ecosystem in a protected area. It makes thousands of cross-references to find the best solution.

We didn’t invent anything; we use methodologies from scientific research. The national water agency [ANA] carried out a similar project, the “strategic map of the rivers on the right side of the Amazon river”, which gave us a sense of certainty.

But there are cases where I don’t have options. Aquatic ecosystem 214, for example, only occurs in one spot. If it is affected, it would definitely be lost. It is irreplaceable. And there are many irreplaceable areas.

Q: So what can you preserve?

A: We set a target: preserving 30 percent of each kind of ecosystem. But it’s only an exercise; the actual decision depends on who is at the table discussing the parameters.

Thirty percent of the aquatic ecosystems, plus 30 percent of the terrestrial ecosystems, theoretically adds up to 60 percent. But because there is some overlap, it’s actually 55 percent. That’s reasonable, because today 40 percent is covered by nature reserves and indigenous territories. It’s an arbitrary number, but it has some technical value.

Q: An index to mark the negotiation?

A: That’s where we started: we reached a definition of what we want, in response to the challenge of the hydropower plants.

If we agree that an area must be preserved for the future, it has to have a free connection with the main channel – the Amazon river – since the watershed is unified. Conservation depends on the connectivity of waterways. If the power industry wants to dam all of the rivers [in a watershed], the future of a living Amazon would be compromised.

But everything is negotiable. Our tool offers the possibility of dialogue, not a pat solution. It’s a platform of strategic evaluation to look at the big picture, contextualise projects and reach decisions based on better information. Tomorrow someone could introduce the question of archaeological sites, of quilombos [communities of descendants of escaped African slaves], etc.

Q: How did the government react to this proposal?

A: The reception is always good, until a specific interest is touched. For us, the ideal was to discuss the entire Amazon basin, but we didn’t manage to organise a forum.

The path to that opened up thanks to a December 2010 inter-ministerial decree, which created a working group to analyse environmental and socioeconomic aspects, seeking to subsidise the selection of areas to exploit for hydropower. That was what we had wanted.

The Energy Research Company [EPE] of the Ministry of Mines and Energy wanted to learn about our tool. We trained people in the ministries. They carried out their analysis.

But two years have already gone by. That’s why we decided to go public with our proposals, before the [hydroelectric] projects on the Tapajós river progressed any further.

Q: And have there been any interesting reactions in the private sector?

A: The directors of an international bank praised our ideas, telling us that they’re scared to death of getting involved in a project and later having to face protests outside the doors of the bank. The BNDES [Brazil’s National Bank for Economic and Social Development] won’t be able to finance everything on its own.

Q: Can you cite a case where this tool pointed to better alternatives?

A: On the Teles Pires river [a tributary of the Tapajós], I found out that they were thinking of building a single dam, bigger than the current one, the Teles Pires dam, without the other two that had been planned, the São Manoel and Foz do Apiacás. It might have been a better alternative, with greater potential and a smaller cumulative impact.

The river has a natural barrier and the problem of connectivity is not such a major issue. There is a myth that small hydroelectric dams have a smaller impact, but if there is a string of them, the aquatic ecosystem is broken up more.

Excerpt:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signs of change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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