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Writer's pictureSarah Nappi

Not so “Natural” Disasters: The Historical Processes behind Caribbean Hurricane Vulnerability

As anthropogenic climate change leads to increasingly devastating storms, the Caribbean must contend with much more than the storms themselves. Centuries of exploitation and debt resulting from an unjust global economic system hinder the Caribbean islands’ ability to boost resilience



Infrastructure destroyed in Roseau, Dominica after Hurricane Maria in 2017, a sight all too common in the Caribbean as tropical storms increase in intensity, duration, and frequency without adequately increasing the resilience of the Caribbean islands. (Photograph from AFP/Getty Images)

How “Natural” are Natural Disasters?

It seems like every summer now as hurricane season engulfs North America, the words “natural disaster” dominate the news. This isn’t surprising. After all, the North Atlantic has observed increased hurricane activity, in terms of intensity, duration, and frequency. Since 1979, there has been an 8% increase in the likelihood each decade that a hurricane develops into a Category 3, or higher, storm. This increase is demonstrably linked to anthropogenic climate change; and the Caribbean islands are particularly vulnerable to these changes.

However, as often as we see news of more “natural disasters”, this is not what they are. “Natural disasters” is a fundamentally misleading term. It implies that we humans have nothing to do with the consequences, that—as the word “natural” is defined—the disaster is “not made or caused by humankind.”

Dr. Oscar Webber, Research Fellow at the London based Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, is writing his first book, Negotiating Relief and Freedom: Responses to disaster in the British Caribbean, 1812-1907 for the University of Manchester Press’s ‘“Studies in Imperialism” series. His expertise in the ecological destruction of the Caribbean islands allows him to explain the historical continuity between this era and the current issues facing the Caribbean.

As Dr. Webber told CYIS, in reality, “there’s no such thing as natural disasters.” It’s a bizarre sentence to hear, which he readily acknowledges. Instead, he goes on to explain, “we have natural phenomena and they only become a disaster when they impact on human society.” To what extent a natural phenomenon, like a hurricane, impacts humans is made or caused by humankind. The Caribbean has been subject to a variety of historical processes that today determine economic, political, and social factors which heighten its vulnerability to natural phenomena. This is where a phenomenon is transformed into a disaster.

It is unlikely that the use of “natural disaster” is a coincidence. The use of the word “natural” effectively nullifies the responsibility many in the Western world should have inherited for the disasters created by natural phenomena in regions like the Caribbean. Like many of the issues plaguing the non-Western world, the responsibility can be traced back to colonialism.

The Ecological Destruction of the Caribbean

Beginning in the 16th century with the arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean, and accelerating through the 19th century, the Caribbean islands experienced “large-scale clearance of land for agriculture, principally for sugarcane plantations.” Many of the smaller islands lost virtually the entirety of the forests previously blanketing the land, evidenced by the importation of timber during the height of the colonial era. Take Barbados as an example: “Barbados is settled between 1623 and 1625 and by about the 1670s, Barbados had done to an island that was effectively rainforest down to the shore to one where they needed to import timber, in the space of about fifty years,” Dr. Webber tells us. Timber was still necessary for both construction and fuel for sugar factories, however, there was none left on the islands because of the ecological devastation already inflicted by Europeans.

The shift in ecology on the Caribbean islands was initially pursued to facilitate monoculture agriculture, particularly sugar, but to this day, most of the deforestation the islands suffered has not been undone. The new mainstay of Caribbean island economies is tourism: colonial plantations owned and controlled by foreigners have been replaced by massive resort complexes, golf courses, and artificial docks (also often owned and controlled by foreigners).

Before considering the economic consequences of this, the ecological effects of colonialism are astronomical. Deforestation is a key example. Dr. Webber explains to CYIS how tree roots play a crucial role in ensuring soil cohesion. Without the blanket of trees that are native to the Caribbean island, Webber says there are historical sources that describe, “the ground literally giving way, swallowing houses whole, cattle, people just disappearing in the ground because the ground is so unstable from lack of trees.” To this day heavily deforested areas throughout the Caribbean and Latin American suffer from very poor slope stability which, in the face of hurricanes and heavy rains, can create deadly landslides.

Just as resorts and golf courses do nothing to grip soil during hurricane season, the construction of artificial docks built for both cruise ships and luxury maritime vessels have replaced what used to be mangrove swamps. These coastal wetlands, although no draw for international tourists, have long served as a natural protection of the people of Caribbean islands against storm surges, the surges of sea water on to the mainland during storms like hurricanes. Mangroves can protect those on the coasts in particular because they both slow the flow of water and reduce surface waves. Yet these mangroves have been destroyed both for tourism and agricultural purposes.

Poverty and Disasters

The ecological repercussions of colonialism are far from the only consequences factoring into the Caribbean’s struggles to generate robust resilience against these storms, and other natural phenomena that plague the Caribbean. Take Haiti as an example. Having never fully recovered from the 7.0 magnitude earthquake in 2010 that killed nearly a quarter of a million people, Haiti this summer again suffered an earthquake of 7.2 magnitude, killing at least another 2,248 people. Although quakes near densely populated urban centres, like that of the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, contribute to astronomical death tolls, so too does the infrastructure. Concrete and cinder block structures used to withstand the threat of hurricanes make Haiti more susceptible to disastrous earthquakes.

Should we assume that the devastation of earthquakes in Haiti then should be attributed to the surprise of the 2010 earthquake? And the need to prepare for the other pressing threat of hurricanes? Only if one is to ignore death tolls of devastating hurricanes, as well. In 2016, Hurricane Matthew killed an estimated 900 people. So, it seems fair to say as much as infrastructure and geography kill, so too does poverty, and in a country where 60% of the population earns less than $2 a day, it is a dear price to pay with human lives.

Focusing Solutions on Nature

A complete solution to the issue of climate change and how it threatens the Caribbean region requires an overhaul of the system that created the issue, that is both capitalism and neo-colonialism. However, the feasibility of this seems lacking, to say the least. That certainly does not mean that there are no viable solutions to immediately increase the resilience of the Caribbean to the pressing threat of natural phenomena translating into disasters.

The first solution concerns the ecology of the islands. It is time to begin repairing the damage done to the Caribbean environment by colonialism, doing our best to return the island to its pre-colonial ecology. I have touched on two key elements here, forests and mangrove swamps, that need to be regenerated for a number of Caribbean islands. Both are sustainable, low cost and low carbon solutions to the destruction that the hurricanes are currently inflicting.

After Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. sunk over $14 billion into constructing a levee system around New Orleans, clearly a costly investment. Despite the new system holding up this summer for example against Hurricane Ida, Andy Horowitz, professor at Tulane, explains that, “there’s nothing about the fact that the levees held in this storm that changes the reality that metropolitan New Orleans is sinking into the Gulf of Mexico, that the Gulf of Mexico is rising, that the warming water and climate are making storms more severe.” Horowitz adds, “All of those things make it inevitable that, at some point, the Gulf will come back into the city.” What Horowitz is saying is that the levee system can only work for so long, and despite the $14 billion spent to protect New Orleans after 2005, it is not currently equipped to withstand a Category 5 storm. The same storm that tested the limits of the new levee system around New Orleans did far surpass the capabilities of other levee systems (for example, Lafitte) that had a lot less money to spend on protecting its residents, an issue that Caribbean countries will encounter.

Regardless of the method used to increase the resilience of the Caribbean islands to hurricanes, and other natural phenomena, there will be costs that Caribbean islands simply cannot absorb due to poor economic capacity and lack of funding for infrastructural projects. A traditional model of post-disaster relief is not working, but it is costing international aid organizations and foreign countries heavily. Rather than continually coming to the aid of Caribbean islands too late—i.e., after the disaster hits—it is time to consider how to pre-emptively prepare for disasters in the Caribbean.

Unfortunately, many Caribbean islands would need an overhaul in the system to properly restructure their economies to be viable in this international state system. However, there is one solution that is immediately accessible: debt cancellation. The Caribbean is one of the most indebted regions considering the size and limited diversification of the Caribbean islands’ economies and the high debt to GDP ratios many countries have. Barbados ranks highest among the Caribbean countries, with a ration of 117.27%. Consequently, politicians are constantly pushing austerity packages that can begin to address the debt crises.

These austerity packages have done little to radically change the economic position of Caribbean countries, though.

Similar austerity measures used in the 1980s and 1990s are today limiting the capacity of Caribbean states to consider the future, one greatly imperiled by the threat of climate change. Restructuring the debt of the Caribbean countries requires a great amount of political will. Nevertheless, it seems far from radical when considering the reparations the Caribbean countries should be owed after centuries of environmental exploitation—not to mention the enslavement of millions of people that funded the industrialization of Western countries, which has in turn has increased the destruction the islands are enduring.

This cycle which exclusively benefits wealthy, Western countries needs to be broken. The financial flexibility of debt cancellation would allow Caribbean countries to fund the sustainable, effective projects of partially regenerating a precolonial ecology.


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