Getting ready for floods, landslides in Trinidad

Trinidad Express: June is here, and the dry season that wasn't will assuredly give way to a rainy season, or a more-rainy season, with full-blown episodes and disruptions resulting from heavier precipitation. This is life in the tropics, as ever familiar to Trinidad and Tobago, where it's always either a dry season or a wet one.

But life, to the extent that it's governed by environmental conditions, has not been the same. The year 2012 has conspicuously lacked a really dry season. The hillside vegetation has remained lush; the bush fires never caught; the skies never showed cloudlessly blue for long; and the word "drought" never entered conversation as a real and present danger.

Is that good news, or what, at a time when a hurricane season has already been declared open? For people who never got to put their umbrellas in storage, it has certainly been reassuring to hear from the T&T meteorological officials that the unseasonable rainfall since January has been good for something.

Some crops, they said, have benefited. About how this has affected other crops, T&T will be sure to find out, for food prices typically influence the rate of all inflation.

The officials were speaking at the start of the hurricane season, an annual meteorological turning point which Trinidad, if less so, Tobago, has traditionally been privileged to greet with a shrug. Once again, the national state of preparedness against storm events appears hardly improved over that of previous years....

Climate change is about behavior

LarA Pickford-Gordon in Newsday (Trinidad and Tobago): The Caribbean region’s climate has changed from cooling to warming in less than 50 years with temperature changing by ten degrees Celsius and more. “So climate change is a very real possibility. There has also been sustained mega droughts in this region which has lasted thousands of years and it seems to be associated with the shutdown of ocean currents,” said Dr Kenny Broad, Associate Professor, Division of Marine Affairs, University of Miami and director of the Abess Centre for Ecosystem Science and Policy.

Broad who was a speaker at the RBC and National Geographic’s “The Business of Water Innovation Breakfast Forum” at the Hilton Trinidad yesterday said, “The impacts of climate change on life and water in the region were “potentially significant.”

Speaking to media, he said while experts looking at reports on different international climate models tend to disagree on climate change impact on many parts of the world, there is “more robust agreement” regarding the Caribbean due to warming and reduced precipitation.

He said TT was fortunate to be blessed with more water than many other islands especially low lying ones. During his presentation, Broad said managing water was not only about the technical aspects of water systems but getting behaviour change. “Invisibility” of water was one challenge of behaviour change since most people did not know where water came from. “If you take away the water that is locked up in ice about 95 percent of the world’s fresh good drinking water is in aquifers,” Broad said.

…Jennie Ward Robinson, executive Director of the Institute for Water and Public Research spoke about the RBC-sponsored project in TT in which rural and peri-urban communities were being taught “how to determine their quality of water and think about water safety” particularly water extracted from a river or well....

Expecting droughts in Trinidad and Tobago

Juhel Browne in the Trinidad Express: Droughts can be experienced in Trinidad and Tobago due to climate change, says Prime Minister Patrick Manning as he noted his administration has already taken notice of the water shortages now facing several parts of the country.

Manning acknowledged the severity of the situation and revealed the Government’s planned response to it during a People’s National Movement (PNM) public meeting in Malabar on Tuesday night where residents there told the Express that water problems have been a regular feature in daily life there.

’As it now stands in 2010 the rainfall is already much lower than it is anticipated... and we believe it is El Nino, but it does not in any way negate our conclusion that as a result of climate change among other things we can experience droughts in Trinidad and Tobago,’ Manning said.

He reiterated the Government’s previous announcements that desalination plants are to be constructed in certain areas close to the sea at great expense to address the problem and provide more potable drinking water but added this would require new water distribution systems as some 50 per cent of the existing supply is now lost due to leaks….

Waterfall in Trinidad, shot by Manuel Dohman, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License