THE Deputy Executive Director of the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (5Cs) Dr Ultric Trotz, is urging governments in the Caribbean, including Guyana, to support the hydrometeorological departments in the respective countries.

“Our governments basically need to realise that meteorology is critical for national development,” said
Dr Trotz, a Guyanese, as he made the point during a presentation at a symposium held at the Marriott Hotel, Kingston, on the occasion of Word Water Day, observed on March 22, last.

He likened the event as “rather fortuitous”, in that 21 automatic weather stations were handed over for use by the meteorology office on World Water Day, adding that information from the hydromet offices is intimately connected with the data needed to manage water resources.

Noting that traditionally, in the Caribbean, meteorology was connected with aviation, he said; “It is not by any chance that all of the met offices in the Caribbean are situated at the airports.”

“These days we need climate information to decide how we farm; we need climate information to decide how we basically deal with the succession of floods and droughts that we see in the region, and this is a new reality. We get changing weather patterns, a rather insidious change, where rainfall does not come when we expect it, and when it comes, we get six weeks of rainfall in two days, resulting in flooding. And then, there is no more rainfall then there is a period of drought, so we get this succession of flood and drought.”

Continuing, the 5Cs deputy executive director recalled the words of our own Guyanese poet Martin Carter, who in the poem `University of Hunger’, wasn’t writing about the university, he wasn’t writing about climate change at that time, he was writing about the political situation in Guyana when he wrote: “Twin bars of hunger mark their metal brows twin seasons mock them parching drought and flood”.

“Now that’s the reality that we are seeing today, and for countries that basically have a lot of development in hilly terrain, we find this succession leading to another hazard. You get the extended period of drought, vegetation grows and sometimes you get fires that would clear the heavy vegetation and then the heavy rainfall moves all the soil, so you get landslides resulting in the loss of soil, loss of lives sometimes in some areas,” he added.

To this end, Dr Trotz made mention of the Caribbean Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology, which partners with the 5Cs, and pointed out that the facility is in a position to provide short term forecast. The facility has developed an aggressive programme to teach farmers to use those forecasts, so that it will instruct them when to plant and how to plant.
That information, however, depends on the functioning of the automatic weather systems that are installed across the region, noting that information coming from the Guyana system redounds to the benefit of the wider Caribbean, because the more recent the information gathered, the more accurate the forecasts are, he added .

Touching on the USAID–funded Caribbean Climate Adapation Project (CCAP), where he is second in charge, Dr Trotz said it allows the people in the Caribbean to start to build resilience to the risk arising from weather events, and from the changing climate being observed not only in the Caribbean, but globally. Climate change and climate variability has led to increased intensity in the form of hurricanes, floods, extended periods of drought, heavy rainfall, the warming of our oceans and several other signals, all of which basically are starting to wreak havoc on our development goals.

They have threatened the survival of the most vulnerable population and communities, he added.
Climate change and climate variability are also compromising the ecological services provided by some of these fragile ecosystems, such as coral reefs and wetlands that are vital to sustaining lives, livelihoods and improved human development.

The Small Island Developing and Low-lying Coastal States (SIDS) in the Eastern and Southern Caribbean (ESC), have considerable concerns about the severe threats to their development prospects posed by a changing climate. They have concluded that both mitigation and adaptation approaches will require a significant and sustained investment of resources, which they are unable to fully fund.

The CCAP project consists of three components, the first addresses the paucity of data in the Caribbean that will allow for the provision of information that will inform actions to build climate resilience across all of the sectors that are affected – the water sector, the tourism sector, the agricultural sector, the health sector, the coastal infrastructure and coastal ecosystems – all of which are vulnerable and exposed to climate risks.

The second supports innovative adaptation approaches which demonstrates proof of concept necessary to secure additional financing, while the last component fosters climate financing to support scale up and replication of sustainable initiatives. Along with Guyana, the CCAP, which was implemented by the 5Cs in nine other countries – Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, the Commonwealth of Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago, is slated to end on September 30, 2019.