Sink or swim? Islands innovate to thrive in a high-stress world
BARCELONA, (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - When the Caribbean island of Barbuda was battered by Hurricane Irma last September, about 90 percent of homes were destroyed or damaged, and the entire population had to be evacuated.
Since the school year ended last month, the pace of families returning from neighbouring Antigua - where many lodged with relatives or in state-run centres - has picked up, even though reconstruction is unfinished, the Red Cross said.
Almost half of Barbuda’s roughly 1,800 people have gone back, as the cash-strapped, twinisland nation works on ways to protect people from future disasters while waiting for promised aid funds to rebuild homes which could take years.
“It’s going to be a long and painful process,” Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“We just have to rely mostly on our resources, and to find creative ways to generate income to continue the recovery efforts.”
In the face of serious and growing threats, experts detect a sea change in many of the world’s 57 small island states and other remote island economies that share development challenges.
They are finding innovative alternatives to lurching from one crisis to the next - whether the problem is extreme weather, mass tourism, plastic waste, water shortages or migration.
Barbuda, aware it will take time to get back on its feet even as this year’s hurricane season began in June, aims to stay safer in future - like many of its Caribbean neighbours.
Brennan Banks, Red Cross operations manager for the Irma response, said the aid agency plans to build a new office on Barbuda that can double up as an emergency shelter.
It is also offering free first-aid training to locals and fixing up rainwater-collection systems, while working with the government to improve early warning on the two islands.
Such solutions - often developed at least partly with islands themselves - are already improving lives, and protecting communities and environments on a small scale.
But their fledging efforts need far more funding to make a difference - and lessons learned in these living laboratories must be shared widely, say officials and resilience experts. of
SHELTER IN A STORM Hugh Riley, secretary-general the Caribbean Tourism Organization, believes the region is better prepared for this year’s hurricane season, even if it is still vulnerable.
“Every time we have an incident of some kind, we learn from it,” he said. “The whole business of rebuilding stronger has resonated with us, rebuilding better has resonated with us, rebuilding smarter has resonated with us.”
Recent improvements include better government coordination, communications systems that work more smoothly, and faster evacuation plans, he said.
According to a June report from the World Bank, building back from a disaster stronger, faster and in a way that includes everybody can yield major dividends for small island nations.
Doing so would reduce losses in people’s wellbeing by an average 59 percent across a sample of 17 island states, it said, compared with 31 percent for all 149 countries in the study.
For Antigua and Barbuda, the reduction would be as large as 78 percent.
Co-author Stephane Hallegatte said the benefits of reconstruction that also protects against future disasters are comparatively large for small islands because they face a high level of risk and exposure to storms and other natural threats.
Many tend to have low-quality housing unable to resist even moderate hazards, the World Bank economist noted.
“There is a lot of potential for improvement,” he said. “There are very cheap opportunities.”
Those can be as simple as giving local people who repair their own homes tougher roofing materials, and teaching them how to attach the roof more firmly so it stays on in high winds.
When the British Virgin Islands were blasted by Hurricane Irma in September, more than a third of the territory’s 7,000 homes were destroyed or sustained major damage, authorities say.
Construction workers have flocked in from all corners of the Caribbean, working marathon shifts to rebuild.
But materials - from windows to plywood and galvanised roofing – are only arriving in dribs and drabs from Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland, with delays of up to three months.
The government is working on a new building code tailored to more extreme weather, and has set up a $15-million assistance programme to help lagging residents build back.
Yet some in the relatively affluent British overseas territory, which has a population of just 32,000, are falling through the cracks.
“It’s as if the hurricane happened yesterday,” said 55-yearold government employee Albert Wheatley, surveying the debris of his pink wooden house now overgrown with weeds. “And I don’t know when this will change.”
One way to cut long waits for financial help after a disaster is to use social welfare systems to channel cash to recipients, said the World Bank’s Hallegatte.
After top-strength Cyclone Winston hit Fiji in February 2016, the government used its three main social assistance programmes to deliver top-up payments, equivalent to three months of regular benefit, to help residents recover.
But many small island states have “very little” in terms of social welfare, Hallegatte noted.
Disasters can trigger the establishment of such schemes, however, and the World Bank is now seeing greater government interest, he said.
“If there is one place on Earth where you really want to design your social protection system considering natural disasters ... that will be small islands,” he added.
Resilience advisor Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy said helping islands withstand the pressures they face requires a broad view, encompassing everything from nature and culture, to economics and the law.
The Island Resilience Initiative he leads is working with Palau, the Marshall Islands and Fiji in the Pacific to track their progress towards the global development goals agreed by the 193 U.N. members in 2015, and decide on priority projects.
The aim is to pave the way to an approach “much more angled on resilience and ‘precovery’ rather than constantly talking about recovery” after disasters, said Sarkozy-Banoczy.
In the British Virgin Islands resort of Cane Garden Bay, the onslaught of Hurricane Irma made residents realise rapid development to cater for mass tourists disgorged by cruise ships had damaged their natural defences, putting them in harm’s way.
They have since formed a volunteer committee to restore coral reefs, wetlands, mangroves and ponds that trap rainfall running off hillsides, to protect the village from future floods and storms and preserve its natural beauty.
“You have to have a balance, or you lose what you love,” said local celebrity Quito Rymer, a reggae singer-songwriter now rebuilding his restaurant and hotel wrecked by the hurricane. “We have decided to take things in our hands.”
CLIMATE CHALLENGES
Scientists say warmer air and warmer seas around the globe are increasing rainfall and wind speed in storms - and may have intensified the two top-strength hurricanes that battered the Caribbean last year, causing about 235 direct deaths and losses estimated at $130 billion.
In its latest flagship report published in 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pointed to rising sea levels as one of the most widely recognised climate change threats to low-lying coastal areas on islands and atolls.
Combined with extreme events like storm surges, it identified “severe sea flood and erosion risks” for islands, with saltwater degrading groundwater supplies.
Other risks from hotter seas include increased coral bleaching and reef damage, which could undermine coastal protection, fisheries and tourism, hurting island communities and costing jobs, scientists said in the report.
Mindful of those risks, some islands in the Caribbean - the world’s most tourism-dependent region - are looking beyond beach holidays for fresh ways to entice tourists, from music festivals to fertility vacations and sports camps.
Kate Brown, executive director of the Global Island Partnership (GLISPA), an alliance spearheaded by island leaders, believes many islanders are painfully aware of climate change and wider environmental threats.
In Vanuatu, Palau and the Seychelles, for example, they are already acting to manage the risks - whether by introducing locally managed marine reserves or banning plastic bags and straws, she said.
“You can go to a village virtually anywhere, and they understand that climate change is impacting them,” she added.
“Heaps of changes are being made ... There has been a big shift away from waiting for other people to do things.”
PEOPLE AGAINST PLASTIC
One area that has seen a “huge push”, said Brown, is action to clean up plastic waste, which is polluting the oceans to the tune of 8 million to 13 million tonnes per year.
Eight million tonnes is like covering an area 34 times the