Leonard Nurse

Climate Change in the Caribbean: The Water Management Implications

Concerns over the status of freshwater availability in the Caribbean region and in particular the eastern Caribbean states have been expressed for at least the past 30 years. There is a growing realization that availability will be vulnerable to extremes of climate behavior and increasing demand for water. Climate modeling for the Caribbean region under a range of scenarios suggests a continuation of a warming in average temperatures, a lengthening of seasonal dry periods, and increases in frequency of occurrence of drought conditions. Using information from the most recent IPCC report and regional downscaling, the authors suggest what some of the macrolevel changes in temperature and rainfall might be and the implications for water resources availability. This article evaluates the existing availability of water resources, the implications of the most recent climate change modeling for the Caribbean region, and the impact of on existing service provision strategies.

Scenarios for coastal vulnerability assessment

Coastal vulnerability assessments tend to focus mainly on climate change and especially on sea-level rise. Assessment of the influence of nonclimatic environmental change or socioeconomic change is less well developed and these drivers are often completely ignored. Given that the most profound coastal changes of the twentieth century due to nonclimate drivers are likely to continue through the twenty-first century, this is a major omission. It may result in not only overstating the importance of climate change but also overlooking significant interactions of climate change and other drivers. To support the development of policies relating to climate change and coastal management, integrated assessments of climatic change in coastal areas are required, including the effects of all the relevant drivers. This chapter explores the development of scenarios (or ‘plausible futures’) of relevant climate and nonclimate drivers that can be used for coastal analysis, with an emphasis on the nonclimate drivers. It shows the importance of analyzing the impacts of climate change and sea-level rise in a broader context of coastal change and all its drivers. This will improve the analysis of impacts, key vulnerabilities, and adaptation needs and, hence, inform climate and coastal policy. Stakeholder engagement is important in the development of scenarios, and the underlying assumptions need to be explicit, transparent, and open to scientific debate concerning their uncertainties/realism and likelihood.

The implications of global climate change for fisheries management in the Caribbean

Concerns about the socio-economic impacts of observed and projected climate change have been high on the research agendas of scientists for the last several decades. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the recent observed warming is largely human induced, and the trend will continue well into the next century owing to ‘thermal inertia’, related to the concentration of greenhouse gases already emitted to the atmosphere. While there is a dearth of research on the effects of climate change on commercial and artisanal fisheries in the Caribbean, valuable insights can be gleaned from observations in other jurisdictions. This paper concludes that the consequences of climate change on Caribbean fisheries are likely to be mostly negative. Adverse impacts are expected to manifest themselves through habitat alteration and loss, reduced abundance and diversity, and shifts in distribution induced by changes in ocean currents. Stakeholders in the regional fishing industry might therefore wish to give greater credence to the challenges posed by climate change and climate variability than currently appears to be the case. Appropriate response strategies may not require radical changes in current approaches to management, but rather more effective implementation of existing and proposed arrangements.

Disaster risk insurance and catastrophe models in risk‐prone small Caribbean islands

Post-catastrophe recovery and financial liquidity have long challenged small Caribbean islands. These states are vulnerable to multifarious natural hazards that often cause considerable socioeconomic dislocation. Such events inflict heavy losses on businesses and households, and significantly disrupt all aspects of government operations. After Hurricane Ivan devastated the economies of some islands in September 2004-with estimated losses of as much as 200 per cent of gross domestic product in some cases-regional governments, aided by the World Bank and international donors, approved the creation of a regional catastrophe insurance scheme. This parametric-based mechanism is underpinned by derivatives-based catastrophe modelling whose outputs determine policy triggers and pay outs. Hazard models, particularly catastrophe models, are not widely accepted as yet. Despite recent advancements, major concerns have rendered them peripheral tools for many establishments. This paper reviews the regions vulnerabilities and examines constraints on the application of these models and suggests a means of improving their efficacy and acceptability.

Projected SST trends across the Caribbean Sea based on PRECIS downscaling of ECHAM4, under the SRES A2 and B2 scenarios

The Caribbean Sea and adjacent land areas are highly sensitive to the projected impacts of global climate change. The countries bordering the Caribbean Sea depend heavily on coastal and marine assets as a major source of livelihood support. Rising sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are known to be associated with coral bleaching, ocean acidification, and other phenomena that threaten livelihoods in the region. The paucity of SST systematic observations in both the Caribbean Sea and adjoining Western Atlantic waters is a limiting factor in the projection of future climate change impacts on the region’s marine resources. Remote sensing of SST by satellites began only within the last three decades and although the data collected so far might be insufficient to provide conclusive definitions of long-term SST variations in the Caribbean waters, these data along with the output from climate model simulations provide a useful basis for gaining further insights into plausible SST futures under IPCC SRES scenarios. In this paper, we examine the recent SST records from the NESDIS AVHRR satellite data and NOAA Optimum Interpolation (OI) sea surface temperature V2 and provide a comparative analysis of projected SST changes for the Caribbean Sea up to the end of the twenty-first century, under the SRES A2 and B2 scenarios’ simulations of the sea surface skin temperatures (SSsT) using the Hadley Centre’s regional model, PRECIS. The implications of these projected SST changes for bleaching of coral reefs, one of the region’s most valuable marine resource, and for rainfall are also discussed.

Confronting the Challenges of Sewerage Management in the Caribbean: A Case Study from the Island of Barbados

On a clear day on the west coast of Barbados, a vacationer walking barefoot on white sand past modern, high-end hotels, swaying palms, and the clear blue-green sea will be hard pressed to find anything amiss. It’s a paradise, to most minds, to which upward of a half million tourists flock each year. The idea that Caribbean islands like Barbados continue to face concerns over wastewater and sewage management is not likely to intrude into most vacationers’ imaginations. Yet evidence for it lies just beneath the surface of the sea: coral reefs are under threat or degrading throughout the waters surrounding the Caribbean islands.1 A growing body of research has identified two of the most serious contributing factors as coastal developments that give rise to sewage discharge and sediment and pollution from inland sources. Estimates hold that these and other human activities threaten nearly two-thirds of the reefs in the region.2 As in other developing countries, sewerage infrastructure in the Caribbean has not kept pace with the ecoby Leonard Nurse, Adrian Cashman, and John Mwansa CONFRONTING THE CHALLENGES OF SEWERAGE MANAGEMENT IN THE CARIBBEAN:

International Opportunities for Broad Scale Coastal Simulation

The preceding chapters of this book have looked at the details of Integrated Assessment on the UK coast, especially in Norfolk. In addition to explaining this analysis in detail, the book aims to look for wider and more generic lessons about Integrated Assessment for coasts. In this regard, this chapter turns the focus to other parts of the world and the ‘global’ coast in general. Through diverse coastal examples from Australia, Bangladesh, Barbados, Italy, Japan and the USA, the opportunities and challenges associated with transferring the Tyndall Coastal Simulator approach to other locations are critically evaluated.