“A monster”… “wreaking havoc”… “ripped through” the Caribbean and part of Florida: I heard these words as Hurricane Irma, the strongest Category 5 Atlantic hurricane on record, decimated the entire island of Barbuda and destroyed the four “most solid” buildings on St. Martin. And as I write this from the relative safety of Barbados, Hurricane Maria is on a similar path, leaving similar destruction in its wake. With winds of more than 160 miles per hour, Maria was the strongest storm to make landfall in Dominica. In a matter of hours, it devastated the country, regained its strength, and continued its onslaught on Puerto Rico and beyond.

Caribbean Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and territories have always struggled to adapt to variations in climate and to extreme weather. Trough systems—extended regions of relatively low atmospheric pressure—can dump large amounts of rainfall, causing massive flooding, landslides, and loss of life in some countries.

However, Hurricanes Irma and Maria have made it clear that our goal posts—what we must adapt to—have shifted dramatically. Together with Harvey, these super storms are likely to be the most expensive on record. Also a dubious first: every single resident of an entire Caribbean island—Barbuda—has been evacuated due to a single climate-related event, and some say they will not return. Like some experts have warned, people have been forced to abandon their homes and their lands to escape the effects of climate change. 

“Preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion,” warned the National Hurricane Center as Maria approached Puerto Rico. “You have to evacuate — otherwise, you are going to die,” said  Héctor Pesquera, Puerto Rico’s commissioner of public safety.

Lack of Political Will and Delayed Funding for Adaptation

What does the future hold? While there are no credible projections of how cyclone activity will be affected by climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said that “the frequency of the most intense storms will more likely than not increase substantially in some basins.”  But what we know for sure is that human-driven climate change helps drive extreme weather and the conditions that help create super storms like Irma and Maria. Can we adapt, and how?

Caribbean governments, too, have long been aware of the potential disastrous effects of climate change but have focused instead on funding social services and health care–and even tourism marketing.  They have thus taken a laid-back approach to even the “low-hanging fruit” of climate change adaptation, such as mainstreaming climate change into their sustainable development agendas and revising and implementing the Caribbean Uniform Building Code (CUBiC). Specific recommendations for these interventions have been available for some time, but have not been heeded. While we will never know if factoring extreme events into the Building Code would have reduced the damage from these hurricanes, I believe we can safely say that it would have helped. Retrofitting structures and building more resilient infrastructure would ultimately be more cost effective than repeatedly rebuilding vulnerable structures destroyed by extreme events.

Beyond Adaptation: Paying for Loss and Damage and Reducing Financial Risk

Now, we must look beyond adaptation and instead to how we measure and pay for loss and damage from extreme events like hurricanes.  “Loss” refers to permanent loss (the negative impacts that cannot be repaired or restored, like loss of freshwater sources) and ”damage” refers to negative impacts than can be repaired or restored, such as collapsed bridges and other critical infrastructure. For countries devastated by hurricanes, the potential costs include not only the direct costs of replacing infrastructure, but other, equally real costs such as lost productivity, the cost of relocating people living near coastlines, the costs of dealing with frequent flooding, and the loss of ecosystem services.

Credible estimates of the total damage to the Caribbean islands are not yet available. But when more than 50 percent of a country’s infrastructure is damaged or destroyed—particularly in a region that is considered the most tourism-reliant in the world–GDP will take a hit. Only time will tell what the future holds for these fragile economies.

I fear that some Caribbean states may have little time before it is too late to adapt. They are already so severely affected with little or no time to recover from the repeated onslaught of extreme events. So should we still focus on adaptation? Yes, especially to adapt to slow onset events like sea-level rise and increases in sea surface and atmospheric temperatures; and especially because many adaptation measures can fit into existing disaster risk reduction and other programs.  But we need more initiatives that support preventive measures, like risk avoidance or risk reduction, as well as risk transfer measures.

For example, the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility is a sovereign risk transfer instrument that provides liquidity to 17 member states (governments in the Caribbean and Central America) within 14 days of the occurrence of the extreme event. The facility offers parametric insurance that limits the financial impact of catastrophic tropical cyclones, earthquakes, and excess rainfall events by quickly providing short-term liquidity when a policy is triggered. It represents a cost-effective way to pre-finance short-term liquidity to begin recovery efforts for an individual government after a catastrophic event, thereby filling the gap between immediate response aid and long-term redevelopment.

Efforts to reduce or transfer risks should be based on projections of future climate and societal trends and impacts. These projections are uncertain, posing a challenge for policymakers and the private sector: how do we formulate anticipatory adaptation planning under such uncertainties?

But it is folly to assume we need science to be perfect before we act. According to the IPCC:

• Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.
• Many observed changes (warming of the atmosphere and ocean, sea level rise and melting ice) are “unprecedented over decades to millennia.”
• We can expect more severe extreme weather events.

Hurricanes have always been a part of life here in the Caribbean, and there is no known way to prevent them. But they are getting more severe. Can we really adapt to a Category 5 hurricane with 185 mile per hour winds and torrential rain? We must try, or like officials in Antigua and Barbuda in the face of Irma, be left to say “May God protect us all.”