On its shores and in its seas, it feels like Barbados is under siege – dealing with issues from coral bleaching to coastal erosion. While the impetus for action comes from the island’s youth, it is the older generations who have borne witness as the changes unfold.
Steven Bourne has fished the waters around Barbados his whole life and lost two boats in Hurricane Beryl. As we look out at the coastline from a dilapidated beach-hut bar, he says the island’s sands have shifted before his very eyes.
“It’s an attack from the elements. You see it taking the beaches away, but years ago you’d be sitting here, and you could see the water’s edge coming upon the sand. Now you can’t because the sand’s built up so much.”
By coincidence, in the same bar where I chatted to Steven was Home Affairs Minister Wilfred Abrahams, who has responsibility for national disaster management.
I put it to him that it must be a a difficult time for disaster management in the Caribbean.
“The whole landscape has changed entirely,” he replied. “Once upon a time, it was rare to get a Category Five hurricane in any year. Now we’re getting them every year. So the intensity and the frequency are cause for concern.”
Even the duration of the hurricane season has changed, he says.
“We used to have a rhyme that went: June, too soon; July, standby; October, all over,” he tells me. Extreme weather events like Beryl have rendered such an idea obsolete.
“What we can expect has changed, what we’ve prepared for our whole lives and what our culture is built around has changed,” he adds.
Fisherman Steven Bourne had hoped to retire before Beryl. Now, he says, he and the rest of the islanders have no choice but to keep going.
“Being afraid or anything like that don’t make no sense. Because there’s nowhere for we to go. We love this rock. And we will always be on this rock.”
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