(Trinidad Guardian) Prof Michelle Mycoo, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at The University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine says there are over 396 squatter sites located on state lands in T&T.
She was the keynote speaker on the first day of the three-day Water Efficiency Conference on Water Resources Resilience for Small Island Developing States (SIDS) at the Faculty of Engineering, The UWI, St Augustine Campus, yesterday.
She said, “Between 1980 and 1990, 22 per cent of new housing units were in full compliance with regulations and 65 per cent were built outside the formally sanctioned housing delivery system, (Parmuk and Dowall, 1998).
“If there are an estimated 85,000 squatter households, using a conservative average household size of six persons in these settlements, then it can be extrapolated that roughly 40 per cent or 510,000 of the country’s total population of 1.3 million persons is squatting.
“State tolerance toward squatting continues to send a perverse incentive toward land grabbing in watersheds, flood plains and coastal zones.
“Illegal land occupation in ecologically fragile zones is incentivised by the existing law of adverse possession and squatter regularisation policies (Toppin-Allahar, 2001).
“The Certificate of Comfort is another instrument used by the state to give squatters a sense of security on state lands despite their location in environmentally sensitive areas such as hillside and flood-prone areas.”
She said a hillside development policy which restricted built development above the 91-metre contour line and on slopes in excess of 10 degrees was inconsistently implemented since the 1980s resulting in housing encroaching on steep areas which should have been left under natural vegetation.
Mycoo revealed that although 60 per cent of Trinidad’s dense forest cover had survived urbanisation (United Nations Environmental Programme, 2015) built development in steep sloping areas once under forest cover had triggered rapid surface water run-off.
She replied that empirical evidence confirmed that weak land use plan implementation had significantly increased the country’s vulnerability to climate change impacts such as flooding.
Mycoo said a review of the National Physical Development Plan of 1984 undertaken in 2012 by consultants revealed that the proposed spatial strategy was unsuccessfully implemented.
She added that three main findings pointed to failed plan implementation which had intensified the vulnerability of the population to flooding.
Mycoo replied that one was the proliferation of squatter settlements throughout the country characterised by the landless poor settling in sensitive watersheds and coastal lands or on vulnerable sites already prone to flooding.
She said another finding was that nearly half, 46 per cent of the lands deemed suitable for agricultural purposes were converted to housing settlements thereby increasing the level of concretised surface area in the country which contributed to rapid surface run-off.
Mycoo continued that a third issue was the high vulnerability of approved private sector housing as well as state-subsidised housing settlements located within coastal plains composed of impermeable clay which had a natural propensity to flood.
Prof and Dean Faculty of Engineering Edwin Ekwue said that two of the university’s staff, Prof Mycoo and Dr Michael Sutherland were involved in international panels on climate change and everyone knew that water supply and its security were impacted by climate change, especially in the small island states of the Caribbean region.
She replied that just two weeks ago there were many water crises caused by flooding and its related problems in T&T because of heavy rainfall, improper drainage and other issues such as improper construction in flood areas.
