CARIBBEAN RESILIENCE After Hurricane Melissa, Jamaica’s Climate Resilience Plan Faces Its Biggest Test Yet
A $150 million “catastrophe bond” will help with hurricane recovery, but experts hope financial markets will invest more in adaptation.
Trelawney Parish sits in a rural, agricultural region of Western Jamaica that borders the country’s largest contiguous rainforest. Under normal circumstances, the parish is relentlessly green — covered in lush vegetation and long rows of orange trees — but the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa has “almost completely annihilated” the area, according to firefighter Ronell Hamilton. “Everything here is brown right now. It looks like California.”
The strongest storm to strike Jamaica in recorded history, Melissa arrived on the island last week as a Category 5 storm with wind speeds of 185 miles per hour. As of press time, at least 67 people had been killed — 32 in Jamaica, 34 from flooding in Haiti, and one in the Dominican Republic — and thousands of homes have been flattened. In Black River, a coastal community south of Trelawney that is being called the storm’s epicenter, an estimated 90 percent of structures were destroyed. Thirty miles north, in Wakefield, Hamilton said that even buildings built to serve as hurricane shelters, such as the school and the fire station, were severely damaged.
Climate change is making monster storms like Melissa more powerful by supercharging the meteorological elements in which they thrive: Warming ocean waters feed hurricanes, as does warming air. Studies have shown that the atmosphere can hold 7 percent more moisture for every 1 degree Celsius of warming. Elevated wind speeds allow storms to carry more moisture as well, leaving devastating flooding in their wake. A rapid analysis from Imperial College London found that climate change made a massive storm like Melissa 4 times more likely. Another report from the research group World Weather Attribution found that it increased wind speeds by 11 percent and rainfall by 16 percent relative to a world without global warming.
Early estimates indicate the storm may have caused up to $4 billion in insured losses and about $7 billion total in Jamaica alone. Much of the country is still without electricity or cell phone service and many roads remain impassable, so the full extent of the destruction has yet to be evaluated.
