Hurricanes and rising sea levels are threatening Caribbean tourism. So how will the region’s most important industry safeguard its future? Kory South has spent the last 15 years building his dream resort in St Elizabeth, Jamaica. But his dream is in peril from rising sea levels and stronger hurricanes. South has incurred millions of dollars in losses from hurricanes affecting the island over the last three years.
Hurricanes and rising sea levels are threatening Caribbean tourism.
So how will the region’s most important industry safeguard its future?
Kory
South has spent the last 15 years building his dream resort in St
Elizabeth, Jamaica. But his dream is in peril from rising sea levels
and stronger hurricanes. South has incurred millions of dollars in
losses from hurricanes affecting the island over the last three years.
The passage of Hurricane Dean in 2007 left his Sunset Resort in Treasure Beach with damage to several rooms. Overall damage to the five and a half acre property from the storm - which packed winds of up to 230 km per hour - was estimated at around US$50,000.
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South said the
damage and attendant loss of income from having no guests was hard to
take. It was equally hard, he said, to make a comeback from such
disasters. “It is heart wrenching. Even though you have insurance, your
natural instinct is to try to save everything,†said the hotelier, who
had nine guests at his 14-room property at the time of the hurricane.
“We really try to protect the place. We have business coming in and we
don’t want to lose it.â€
South is not the only one whose tourism
business is under threat from climate change. Tour operator Conroy
Walker is in the same boat. According to Walker, tourism has given him
the freedom to be his own boss and the hope that his children will have
something to inherit from him. “I don’t know my father. So part of my
plan is that I really want something to pass down to my son, who is 17
right now,†he says.
In six years, he is hoping to pay off the
cost of the tour bus he recently purchased while expanding his service.
“If I can create employment for my son that would be good because I
didn’t get that start. Without a father to help me, life has really
been struggle,†says Walker.
He has, however, acknowledged that
climate change and its effects on the Caribbean’s tourism industry
could derail his plans. So he has added his voice to the call for
regional governments to put pressure on rich, industrialised countries
to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases.
“It will take a
collective effort from not Jamaica alone but all the Caribbean states.
All the Caribbean countries have to come together, have a conference
and talk about the issues,†says the 42-year-old, who is also general
secretary for the Montego Bay-based Maxi Tours.
He notes that
the effects of climate change will be due in large part not to
Jamaica’s own actions but to those of countries that emit high levels
of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. “Most of what is going to
happen, Jamaica is not going to be a contributor to that. It is
countries like America and so on who are contributing to [global
warming],†Walker says.
The Fourth Assessment Report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made clear that
the region - as is the case with other developing countries - is in
peril from the changing climate. It is an ongoing change, the IPCC
said, that will herald not only higher sea levels and fiercer storms
but also warmer temperatures.
Despite this, Jamaica and the
Caribbean appear slow off the mark in dealing with the devastation that
the changes will bring to tourism livelihoods. To date, only limited
measures have been put in place. And even then, the measures have not
been geared to addressing climate change and its implications.
President
of the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association (JHTA), Wayne Cummings,
admits that a policy strategy on how climate change will affect the
sector has not been forthcoming.
“[Climate change] has not
actually formed a part of our immediate agenda, but it has been
recognised as an important issue from the point of view of energy
conservation. And we have been on top of that,†Cummings says. “Climate
change is being spoken of with respect to things like carbon trading.
That as a concept is relatively new for us and we have not yet been
able to assimilate how we will be impacted."
What his members
have been doing, he says, is implementing measures that will help to
cut their energy consumption. “We recognise the things we have
immediate control over like energy conservation, which many of us have
long taken seriously from a basic principle of renewables like bulbs,
replacing equipment and so on in favour of more efficient ones,â€
Cummings says.
But even here there are problems as smaller
properties are not in a position to afford renewable energy sources.
“Economies of scale have everything to do with size so the smaller you
are the less you are likely to, for example, retrofit your property,
particularly in the face of competition,†Cummings says.
The
government has sought to take stock of the island’s status concerning
adaptation to climate change. This has been made possible through the
preparation of the second national communication on climate change,
which has a budget of US$405,000. That report, due to be completed this
year, is being prepared for submission to the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Beyond Jamaica, there are
entities like the Trinidad-based Caribbean Natural Resources Institute
(CANARI), which has been working to promote regional research into how
climate change will affect biodiversity and, by extension, tourism.
CANARI
recently held a workshop in Jamaica that identified some of the gaps in
the research on impacts to the region and suggested some ways forward.
“The objective of the project is to develop a regional research agenda
to strategically address our knowledge gaps. The findings of the report
have implications for human health, food security, tourism, and
disaster vulnerability,†says Leslie Walling, the senior technical
officer at CANARI.
If the predictions of the IPCC are
realised, the economies of Jamaica and other islands will suffer a
decline in the tourism sector. Jamaica’s earnings amounted to an
estimated US$1.9 billion last year, with 1.3 million stopover tourists
and 1.6 million cruise passengers visiting the island.
At the
same time, several hundred thousand people directly employed by the
industry across the English-speaking Caribbean, which has a population
of some six million, will be out of work. In Jamaica about 40,000
people are directly employed, according to the JHTA.
Meanwhile,
Wayne Cummings warns against being overly alarmist about climate
change. “We are not a bad news kind of organisation or industry. We
thrive on good news,†he says. “For the moment the relevance of
tourism… is how we fuel the success of Jamaica. We just have to be
careful. We need to make note of [climate change], but we need to be
careful not to further the demise of an industry that is our bread and
butter.â€
Petre Williams wrote this article as a result of
a fellowship awarded by the Climate Change Media Partnership – a
collaboration of Panos, Internews and IIED which supports journalists
to investigate climate change issues.