Barbados fishing industry still reeling from hurricane aftermath
BBCThere are few clearer signs of the destructive power that Hurricane Beryl unleashed on Barbados in July than the scene at the temporary boatyard in the pool, Bridgetown.
Scores of mangled and cracked vessels sit on stacks, gaping holes in their hulls, their rudders snapped off and cabin windows broken.
Yet these were the lucky ones.
At least they can be repaired and put back out to sea. Many others sank, taking entire household incomes with them.
When Beryl lashed Barbados, the island’s fishing fleet was devastated in a matter of hours. About 75% of the energetic fleet was damaged, with 88 boats totally destroyed.
Charles Carter, who owns a blue-and-black fishing vessel called Joyce, was among those affected.
“It’s been real impoverished, I can inform you. I had to transformation both sides of the hull, up to the waterline,” he says, pointing at the now pristine boat in front of us.
It has taken months of restoration and thousands of dollars to get it back to this point, during which period Charles has barely been able to fish.
“That’s my living, my livelihood, fishing is all I do,” he says.
“The fishing industry is mash up,” echoes his partner, Captain Euride. “We’re just trying to get back the pieces.”
Now, six months after the storm, there are signs of calmer waters. On a warm Saturday, several repaired vessels were put back into the ocean with the assist of a crane, a trailer and some government back.
Seeing Joyce back on the water is a welcome sight for all fishermen in Barbados.
But Barbadians are acutely aware that climate transformation means more energetic and powerful Atlantic hurricane seasons – and it may be just another year or two before the fishing industry is struck again. Beryl, for example, was the earliest-forming Category 5 storm on record.
Few comprehend the extent of the issue better than the island’s Chief Fisheries Officer, Dr Shelly Ann Cox.
“Our captains have been reporting that sea conditions have changed,” she explains. “Higher swells, sea surface temperatures are much warmer and they’re having hardship getting flying fish now at the beginning of our pelagic period.”
The flying fish is a national symbol in Barbados and a key part of the island’s cuisine. But climate transformation has been harming the stocks for years.
At the Oistins Fish trade in Bridgetown, flying fish are still available, along with marlin, mahi-mahi and tuna, though only a handful of stalls are open.
At one of them, Cornelius Carrington, from the liberty Fish House. fillets a kingfish with the speed and dexterity of a man who has spent many years with a fish knife in his hands.
“Beryl was like a shock attack, like an ambush,” says Cornelius, in a deep baritone voice, over the trade’s chatter, reggae and thwack of cleavers on chopping boards.
Cornelius lost one of his two boats in Hurricane Beryl. “It’s the first period a hurricane has arrive from the south like that, normally storms hit us from the north,” he said.
Although his second boat allowed him to remain afloat financially, Cornelius thinks the hand of climate transformation is increasingly now in the fishermen’s fate.
“correct now, everything has changed. The tides are changing, the weather is changing, the temperature of the sea, the whole pattern has changed.”
The effects are also being felt in the tourism industry, he says, with hotels and restaurants struggling to discover enough fish to meet demand each month.
For Dr Shelly Ann Cox, community education is key and, she says, the communication is getting through.
“Perhaps because we are an island and we’re so connected to the water, people in Barbados can talk well on the impact on climate transformation and what that means for our country,” she says.
“I ponder if you talk to children as well, they’re very knowledgeable about the topic.”
To view for myself, I visited a secondary school – Harrison College – as a member of a local NGO, the Caribbean Youth Environmental Network (CYEN), talked to members of the school’s Environmental Club about climate transformation.
The CYEN representative, Sheldon Marshall, is an vigor specialist who quizzed the pupils about greenhouse gases and the steps they could receive at home to assist reduce carbon emissions on the island.
“How can you, as youthful people in Barbados, assist make a difference on climate transformation?” he asked them.
Following an engaging and lively debate, I asked the pupils how they felt about Barbados being on the front line of global climate transformation, despite having only a tiny carbon footprint itself.
“Personally, I receive a very pessimistic view,” said 17-year-ancient Isabella Fredricks.
“We are a very tiny country. No matter how challenging we try to transformation, if the large countries – the main producers of pollution like America, India and China – don’t make a transformation, everything we do is going to be pointless.”
Her classmate, Tenusha Ramsham, is slightly more optimistic.
“I ponder that all great large leaps in history were made when people collaborated and innovated,” she argues. “I don’t ponder we should be completely disheartened because research, recent concept, creating technology and education will ultimately navigator to the upcoming that we desire.”
“I feel if we can communicate to the global superpowers the pain that we feel seeing this happen to our surroundings,” adds 16-year-ancient Adrielle Baird, “then it would assist them to comprehend and assist us collaborate to discover ways to fix the issues that we’re seeing.”
For the island’s youthful people, their very derivatives are at stake. Rising sea levels now pose an existential threat to the tiny islands of the Caribbean.
It is a point on which the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, has become a global advocate for transformation – urging greater action over an impending climate catastrophe in her talk at COP29 and calling for economic compensation from the globe’s industrialised nations.
On its shores and in its seas, it feels like Barbados is under siege – dealing with issues from coral bleaching to coastal erosion. While the impetus for action comes from the island’s youth, it is the older generations who have borne witness as the changes unfold.
Steven Bourne has fished the waters around Barbados his whole life and lost two boats in Hurricane Beryl. As we look out at the coastline from a dilapidated beach-hut bar, he says the island’s sands have shifted before his very eyes.
“It’s an attack from the elements. You view it taking the beaches away, but years ago you’d be sitting here, and you could view the water’s edge coming upon the sand. Now you can’t because the sand’s built up so much.”
By coincidence, in the same bar where I chatted to Steven was Home Affairs Minister Wilfred Abrahams, who has responsibility for national disaster management.
I put it to him that it must be a a challenging period for disaster management in the Caribbean.
“The whole landscape has changed entirely,” he replied. “Once upon a period, it was rare to get a Category Five hurricane in any year. Now we’re getting them every year. So the intensity and the frequency are factor for concern.”
Even the duration of the hurricane period has changed, he says.
“We used to have a rhyme that went: June, too soon; July, standby; October, all over,” he tells me. Extreme weather events like Beryl have rendered such an concept obsolete.
“What we can expect has changed, what we’ve prepared for our whole lives and what our population is built around has changed,” he adds.
Fisherman Steven Bourne had hoped to retire before Beryl. Now, he says, he and the rest of the islanders have no selection but to keep going.
“Being afraid or anything like that don’t make no sense. Because there’s nowhere for we to leave. We adore this rock. And we will always be on this rock.”
Sign up for our upcoming Earth newsletter to get exclusive insight on the latest climate and surroundings information from the BBC’s Climate Editor Justin Rowlatt, delivered to your inbox every week. Outside the UK? Sign up to our international newsletter here.
