Just saw this on the NYT.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/busi ... hange.htmlClimate Change Brings Warmer, Wetter Weather to Trinidad
Even as the leaders of Trinidad and Tobago double down on fossil fuels, climate change is bringing more extreme weather to the island nation.
Four fishermen in a boat. The man in the foreground is holding two buckets.
Local fishermen say that heavy rains, flooding and other climate-related extreme weather have reduced the fishing catch in Trinidad and Tobago.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
By Clifford Krauss
Clifford Krauss, who has covered energy for more than a decade, recently spent 10 days reporting in Trinidad and Tobago.
May 15, 2023
Imtiaz Khan remembers the rains of his childhood as being light and providing welcome relief from the summer heat. A heavy shower, he said, would arrive only about once a month during the rainy season.
Now 48, and president of the Carli Bay Fishing Association, Mr. Khan said the rains were something to dread. Storms are so regular, he said, there is serious flooding every year. The heavy downpours carry sediment into the bay, turning the sea cloudy and brown. Mangrove nurseries have been washed away. Clams, oysters, mussels and many species of fish are in decline.
“The fish go where there is more food and where they can reproduce,” Mr. Khan said. “That’s not here anymore.”
Trinidad and Tobago is facing a familiar challenge. Its leaders believe that oil and gas production are vital to the economy, but exploitation of those resources is causing climate change, which is taking an especially hard toll on the people and environment.
Like other Trinidadians, Mr. Khan takes a middle-of-the-road approach to climate change and fossil fuels, which he doesn’t want to eliminate because they have helped lift the living standards in his country. “You can’t stop the oil and gas, but we need a better balance,” he said.
Predicting record heat. Global temperatures are likely to soar to record highs over the next five years, driven by human-caused warming and a climate pattern known as El Niño, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Scientists say even small increases in warming can exacerbate the dangers from heat waves, wildfires, drought and other calamities.
Doubling down on fossil fuels. While Trinidad and Tobago explores greener alternatives, the island nation remains committed to its long embrace of oil and gas. At the same time, the country is feeling the effects of a changing climate, with wetter rainy seasons and dryer dry seasons.
He noted that the fishermen need to sail out farther and farther beyond the bay to get their catch, and they were in ever fiercer competition with fishermen from neighboring Venezuela, as a result.
To the south, on the beach at the L’Anse Mitan fishing village, the beach erosion is so severe that a large statue of St. Peter is on the verge of collapse. Storms and currents are coming to shore so strongly that the fishermen have started to beach their boats in the high grass.
A tilting large statute of St. Peter on the beach, a sign of the erosion and climate change. Seaweed nourished from farm runoff and warmer seas are increasingly clogging fishermen nets.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
“Everyone’s pulling in their boats and staying home,” said Bernard Hospedales, a local fisherman.
The Trinidadian government highlighted the country’s climate challenges in a 2021 report to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
“Trinidad and Tobago is already experiencing the adverse impacts of climate change, such as sea level rise, increased ambient temperature and extreme weather systems,” Camille Robinson-Regis, then the minister of planning and now minister of social development, wrote in a foreword to the report. She noted that climate change could undermine efforts to ease poverty and improve health care.
The island nation’s climate has historically been highly variable. Climate change has made it more so. And Trinidad’s average temperature has risen two and half times above the global average from 1946 to 2019, according to the government report to the U.N. Over the past four decades, heavy rain that last multiple days has also been more frequent.
Watermelon farmers complain that dry seasons are drier, forcing them to water more frequently. Then, when the rainy season comes, fierce rains damage plants and lower watermelon yields.
“Watermelons can’t compete with oil and gas,” said Teeluckram Khemrag, who was selling his produce on a roadside on the southern end of Trinidad island.
Other businesses are also hurting. Bally’s by the Sea Hotel and Resort, a 17-room beachside motel in Mayaro, was empty of guests on a recent April afternoon. Nisha Churai, the hotel supervisor, blamed the gobs of rotting seaweed — known as sargassum — coating the beach, along with the country’s weak economy.
“It smells funny,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to be around that either.”
Tons of sargassum that thrive in warming waters and on agricultural runoff are gathering on beaches across the Caribbean. The seaweed tangles in fishing nets, and it interferes with the nesting of turtles.
Dave Ali, an oil and gas platform worker who lives down the street, said the amount of the heavy brown seaweed amassing on the beach had grown every year since about 2014.
“I love the idea of solar and wind, but we won’t leave oil and gas in our lifetime,” he said, sipping a beer on his porch. “We’re a small country. There is only so much we can do.”
Clifford Krauss is a national business correspondent based in Houston, covering energy. He has spent much of his career covering foreign affairs and was a winner of the Overseas Press Club Award for international environmental reporting in 2021. @ckrausss
A version of this article appears in print on May 15, 2023, Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Trinidad Faces Warmer, Wetter Weather, Spurring Debate Over Its Fossil Fuel Use. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
