Caribbean life at serious risk

Raft of future disasters needs strong defences Project aims to boost use of e-vehicles

BOGOTA, July 27, (RTRS): As if hurricanes were not menacing enough, small Caribbean islands risk losing their entire way of life unless they urgently strengthen defences against a raft of future disasters, according to a climate change official.

“You don’t even need to have a hurricane to get extensive damage … a tropical storm or depression, it comes and sits over a particular island or territory and it deposits rain,” said Ulric Trotz, deputy director at the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC).

“For us small island nations, basically everything comes to a stop. As a region, we are very exposed to climate risk … and our projections show that this will be exacerbated,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Trotz — whose organisation coordinates the entire region’s response to climate change — said that along with the annual hurricane season, the Caribbean now faces extreme weather each year, from flooding to landslides.

Fishing and farming communities living in coastal areas and the tourism industry — vital for Caribbean economies — often bear the brunt of damage and loss of income.

Caribbean nations can now face as much rainfall as they would normally get over a period of months in the space of a few days, with drainage systems unable to cope, Trotz said.

“A lot of the damage now comes from extreme precipitation. So that translates into floods, landslides, loss of life, loss of livelihoods,” said Trotz, a science advisor.

“We have some serious concerns about the viability of Caribbean life as we know it.”

One key way to make coastal areas more resilient to storm surges and rising sea levels, linked to global warming, is to protect marine, coral and mangrove ecosystems, Trotz said.

Reefs act like breakwaters reducing wave strength, while salt-tolerant mangroves can buffer against hurricane winds and storm surges and cut wave height.

“As far as the human body is concerned, the healthier the body is, the more resilient it will be in terms of dealing with some of the threats, diseases,” Trotz said.

“So the same principle applies here, MELBOURNE, July 27, (RTRS): Australia is building a superhighway offering free charging stations in a bid to boost use of electric vehicles, the northeastern state of Queensland said on Thursday, most of its route fringed by the Great Barrier Reef tourist attraction.

The move comes as governments around the world regulate to cut emissions by boosting the use of electric vehicles.

Britain this week said it would ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2040, following France. The mayors of Paris, Madrid, Mexico City and Athens have said they plan to ban diesel vehicles from city centres by 2025.

Australia’s new superhighway, an 1,800-km (1,118-mile) stretch of mostly coastal road alongside the Great Barrier Reef, will be supplied by renewable energy, State Minister Steven Miles said in a statement.

“This project is ambitious, but we want as many people as possible on board the electric vehicle revolution, as part of our transition to a low-emissions future,” he added.

Eighteen towns and cities will make up the first phase of the superhighway,

that the healthier our ecosystems, the healthier our reefs, wetlands and mangroves are, the more they will be able to resist some of the impacts of climate change,” he said.

Across the Caribbean, scores of projects are underway to restore battered coral reefs, establish artificial reefs, replant damaged mangroves and place millions of acres of marine areas under protected areas by 2020.

Some Caribbean nations also face water shortages exacerbated by longer droughts linked to climate change, Trotz said.

In several islands of the Grenadines, a pilot seawater desalination project using solar power is underway.

In Guyana, to better cope with drought and changing rainy seasons, rice farmers are using water harvesting and drip irrigation systems, and are receiving which will become operational in the next six months, making it possible to drive an electric vehicle from the state’s southern border to the far north, he added.

The road runs from Coolangatta on the border of neighbouring New South Wales to the city of Cairns, in Australia’s far north. Brisbane-based charging station maker Tritium will supply most of the project’s charging stations, a spokeswoman for the state government said, with Schneider Electric supplying the rest.

Tritium’s commercial director, Paul Sernia, confirmed the company had supplied its products.

The government’s early support for the project is a signal to the market that Queensland is serious about electric vehicles, said Behyad Jafari, chief executive of Australia’s Electric Vehicle Council.

The step “provides certainty to unlock investment to grow our economy and create new, high skilled jobs,” he added.

Australia’s uptake of electric vehicles lags other nations, but is set to increase to around 12,000 by 2020 and about 1 million by 2030, Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg said in May.

short-term weather forecasts allowing them to better decide when to plant crops.

But more defensive action is hampered by a lack of funds.

Despite the United Nations Green Climate Fund, set up in 2010 to help poor countries tackle climate change, red tape means many small island nations are unable to access funding.

“The bottom line is that we don’t have the resources,” Trotz said. “It’s not that we don’t have any idea about how we need to build resilience.”

It can take from nine months to up to eight years to get funds from donors, Trotz said.

“The longer you delay, a lot of the assumptions you have made in the first instance are no longer valid … we have to find some way of shortening that whole process.”