By Anastasia Moloney From Thomson Reuters Foundation

Beaches disappearing, coastlines eroding, tides and waves encroaching on hotels, ports and airports facing flooding, and salty water contaminating freshwater sources.

These are just some of the ways rising sea levels, linked to climate change, are impacting on the Caribbean and the region’s poorest and most vulnerable inhabitants, experts say.

Seventy percent of people in the Caribbean live on the coast, and many of the region’s capitals, like Port-au-Prince and Havana, lie less than a mile away from the water. Tackling rising sea levels has become a priority for Caribbean governments.

“The big challenge facing the Caribbean is that the region is highly vulnerable to climate change and rising sea levels,” Niels Holm-Nielsen, lead disaster risk management specialist at the World Bank, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview.

“It’s already facing regular disaster events, often caused by hurricanes, and increased concentration of rainfall that lead to flooding and landslides, which have a huge impact on the economy. We’re going to see worse disaster events in the future in the Caribbean and probably with higher frequency, perhaps one additional named hurricane a year.”

Rising sea levels and recurring storms mean many Caribbean nations are seeing stretches of their beaches disappear, in a region that hosted 25 million tourists last year and one that relies heavily on tourism to drive local economies.

“There’s a real risk beaches will disappear in parts of the Caribbean. Some beaches in the Grenadines are already disappearing, in some cases with waves coming up to the hotel pool,” Holm-Nielsen said.

One of the worst hit islands is St. Lucia, where tourism accounts for over 60 percent of the country’s GDP.

Back in the late 1990s, coastal erosion and disappearing beaches were threatening a fishing village on the east coast of the island.

To address the problem, the government of St. Lucia, together with World Bank experts and engineers, used scientific research and computer simulations to counter coastal erosion and recover the island’s beaches.

A coastal defence system was built with two submerged offshore structures, designed to break up incoming waves and capture sand. Today, 15 metres of beach have been restored.

The initiative is being billed as a possible model to tackle coastal erosion in other parts of the Caribbean struggling to cope with rising sea levels.

“It could be replicated and it could be a model for other Caribbean countries. But it requires governments, like St. Lucia did, taking a long-term view. Building the coastal protection system in St. Lucia took 10 years,” Holm-Nielsen said.

NO EASY CHOICE

Building such coastal defense systems, better construction practices, land use planning and watershed management, can all help against coastal erosion, regenerate beaches and mitigate the risk of landslides brought on by flooding, the World Bank says.

“The issue is who fits the bill to pay for putting sand back in place and regenerating beaches. How much should the government pay in subsidies, should the hoteliers bear the cost or should countries who have contributed most to climate change. It’s not an easy choice,” said Holm-Nielsen.

Many Caribbean countries, particularly low lying islands like the Bahamas, Tortugas and Antigua, also face the problem of salty water infiltrating freshwater sources as sea levels rise.

Rising sea levels are not only affecting small island nations and coral reefs but big cities where millions of people live.

According to a study by the World Bank, if sea levels continue to rise at the current rate, Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, “will be one on the five cities most affected at a global level by climate change in 2050” after Alexandria in Egypt, the Colombian city of Barranquilla, Naples in Italy and Sapporo in Japan.

“We’re recommending that countries take a long-term view to reduce their risk to disasters over time. You can’t get out of this problem with one project approach. We’re talking about decades,” said Holm-Nielsen.

IMAGE: A boat passes in the waters in this view of the beach with palm trees in Sainte-Anne, in the French Caribbean island of Martinique March 15, 2013. REUTERS/Charles Platiau

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