Warnings last week from the Barbados-based Caribbean Institute for Meteorology & Hydrology (CIMH) of “heavy rains and possible flooding…for December” in the region could not have come at a more inopportune time.
While it is true that the vicissitudes of climate change instruct that, going forward, the Caribbean is likely to encounter increasingly more hostile weather patterns, the pre-existing challenges that link the weather with the social and economic fortunes of the region makes the CMC’s warning much more serious than it otherwise would have been. The warnings that the Caribbean may well have to confront incrementally more hostile climate change-related weather patterns ahead have come on the heels of earlier reports that some CARICOM member countries, particularly Trinidad and Tobago, have already begun to face levels of flooding that have forced farmers to walk away from their farms until the weather changes.
