Hurricanes can hit TT

Dominica after Hurricane Maria last year.
Dominica after Hurricane Maria last year.

TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO is not outside of the Hurricane Belt but merely lies on its southern edge and so can be harmed by hurricanes, learnt guests at the latest in the public lecture series by the Institute of Marine Affairs (IMA).

The lecture on the topic Oceans and climate change: What does it mean for small island states was delivered by Kishan Kumarsingh, head of multilateral environmental agreements, Ministry of Planning and Development, on June 8 at UWI, St Augustine.

To make his point about TT’s potential vulnerability to hurricanes, he recalled, “Last year Hurricane Brett partially hit us.” Seeking to answer a public question as to how terrible climate change really is, Kumarsingh related that Barbuda and Dominica had been badly hit by hurricanes last year. “Beware of the ides of climate change. You don’t have to wait 100 years. This can happen at any time.”

A man walks along the coast after Hurricane Irma hit Dominican Republic last year.

He said Hurricane Ivan had once decimated the GDPs of entire countries, which had woken up the next day to have absolutely no economy left.

“Ocean warming feeds storms. I have friends in Dominica who still don’t have electricity in their houses.” The hurricane had a bad psychological impact on the people of Barbuda and had ruined their GDP, bio-diversity and fisheries.

Kumarsingh said a steady increase in temperature since the 1840s has led the world’s oceans to now be close to their heat-bearing capacity. While the Gulf Stream, made of warms waters flowing from the Americas to Europe, had traditionally tempered Europe’s winters, from the mid-20th century a 15 per cent drop in this conveyor belt has had implications to ocean temperature.

A man surveys a flooded mini mart in Sangre Grande in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Bret last year. FILE PHOTOS

“Fish have started to migrate,” he warned, alluding to ocean-warming in some areas.

“The Parrotfish is disappearing from Japan’s eco-system. Fish are very likely to migrate out of areas near the equator. Fishermen will have to extend their ranges. One man’s loss is another man’s gain, and the country’s of the north may gain from this.”

Kumarsingh said sea-warming and acidification act to destroy coral whose loss in turn exposes coastal-lines to erosion by waves and washes away beach sand.

A 29 per cent rise in acidification had been caused by the dissolution of carbon dioxide in the seawater, he explained.

In the question session, Kumarsingh said overall the world’s nations have given a “woefully inadequate” response to the goals of the Paris Climate Change Agreement.

Environmentalist Gary Aboud asked about an alleged lack of action on curbing plastic waste (via implementation of a long-languishing Beverage Container Bill) and styrotex waste. Kumarsingh said Planning Minister Camille Robinson-Regis had recently promised to bring back that bill. He invited Aboud to write to the committee considering styrotex for an update on that.

Regarding the United States’ (US) withdrawal from the Paris deal, he said this pullout will take three years (until 2019 or 2020), China and European Union have vowed to re-double their efforts meanwhile, and that much environmental action in the US is happening not at federal level but at sub-State level.

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"Hurricanes can hit TT"

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