(BBC) A United Nations report has warned that the Caribbean’s tourism industry is facing a potentially disastrous threat.
The report presented at the just-ended annual international climate change conference which, ironically took in the Mexican resort Cancun, warned that climate change could devastate the region’s vital tourism industry.
It claims that a sea-level rise of one metre could result in the destruction or at least severe damage to many of the multi-million dollar tourist resorts that dot Caribbean coastlines.
Furthermore the document says, coastal erosion could result in the loss of over 20 of the region’s airports – several of which straddle beaches.
Additional land loss is projected around the seaports thereby affecting cruise ship berthing facilities and container cargo storage operations at most of the region’s ports.
The report was commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme, the UK’s Department for International Development and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States.
It was produced by the Barbados-based Caribsave, a partnership between the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre and the University of Oxford.
According to the report, airports, power plants, roads and agricultural land in low-lying areas, as well as prime tourist destinations throughout the area will be all be lost or severely damaged, with dire implications for national economies and for the welfare of the islands’ populations.
Changing times – and tides
Sea levels rise in association with global warming because warming water expands in volume, and melting ice from land-based ice sheets and glaciers adds to the rise.
The UN document’s calculations indicate that with a two-metre sea-level rise, there would be “at least 233 multi-million dollar tourism resorts lost” plus damage or loss of nine power plants, 31 airports, and 710km of roads”.
However, it notes that when a more sophisticated analysis was done on the impacts of erosion caused by rising seas, it was found that the damage leapt upwards, as one metre of sea level rise on low-lying coasts gives between 50 and 100 metres of erosion.
A one-metre rise with erosion factored in would result in “at least 307 multi-million dollar tourism resorts damaged or lost,” the report says.
The report suggests that, just for the 15 mainly English-speaking Caribbean nations which make up the Caricom (Caribbean Community) regional grouping, the cost of the damage and necessary rebuilding caused by sea-level rise could by 2080 have reached a staggering $187bn (£120bn).
Detailed study
The study led by Dr Murray Simpson, a senior research associate at Oxford University’s Centre for the Environment, is thought to be the most detailed study every made of the potential impacts across a whole region from rising seas.
Its findings have already been presented at an Oxford conference to representatives of the Association of Small Island States (Aosis), the grouping of 43 island nations who feel themselves to be acutely at risk from climate change.
The UK’s Independent newspaper, in an article on the report writes: “The findings cause alarm, and have helped to prompt a demand at the Cancun conference from the Aosis nations for a giant new insurance scheme, funded by developed countries, which would pay compensation for catastrophic loss to small states caused by sea-level rise and extreme climate-related events.”
