Preparing for Atlantic hurricane season is always a priority in the Caribbean, especially when forecasts project high numbers of storms, as they do for 2024. The region’s most devastating storm in recent years, Hurricane Maria, struck in September 2017 and inflicted unprecedented destruction on Puerto Rico, Dominica, St. Croix and other islands.
Maria killed more than 3,000 people and caused about US$96 billion in damage. It devastated Puerto Rico’s electric power system, leaving 1.5 million customers in the dark for up to 328 days – the longest blackout in U.S. history. These outages had cascading impacts on other infrastructure, such as water and communications systems.
Today, the Caribbean region is experiencing new climate-related challenges. Prolonged extreme heat and humid days are increasing because of the accelerated warming of ocean waters.
In response to these increasingly frequent and extreme weather events, I teamed up with a dozen other researchers in 2023 to form the Caribbean Climate Adaptation Network. Our goal is to connect scientists with communities and government agencies in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico and to provide scientific information that can help them prepare for and respond to these emerging climate extremes.
I am a coastal-urban climatologist and a Puerto Rico native. Launching this network has been extremely important personally for me. I hope it will solidify our current partnerships for longer-term collaboration among leading academic researchers, vulnerable communities, government agencies and utility companies in the islands and serve as a platform to reach the entire Caribbean.
Our mission is to develop new ways of representing the coastal-urban environment as a unified system – one that places people at the center and integrates human-made systems, such as buildings and infrastructure, with natural systems, such as the atmosphere, ecosystems and oceans. All of these elements face the challenge of a changing climate. We want to support vulnerable communities by providing research that can make them more resilient against climate change and to bring them to the table so that we can create better solutions together.
Preparing for Atlantic hurricane season is always a priority in the Caribbean, especially when forecasts project high numbers of storms, as they do for 2024. The region’s most devastating storm in recent years, Hurricane Maria, struck in September 2017 and inflicted unprecedented destruction on Puerto Rico, Dominica, St. Croix and other islands.
Maria killed more than 3,000 people and caused about US$96 billion in damage. It devastated Puerto Rico’s electric power system, leaving 1.5 million customers in the dark for up to 328 days – the longest blackout in U.S. history. These outages had cascading impacts on other infrastructure, such as water and communications systems.
Today, the Caribbean region is experiencing new climate-related challenges. Prolonged extreme heat and humid days are increasing because of the accelerated warming of ocean waters.
In response to these increasingly frequent and extreme weather events, I teamed up with a dozen other researchers in 2023 to form the Caribbean Climate Adaptation Network. Our goal is to connect scientists with communities and government agencies in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico and to provide scientific information that can help them prepare for and respond to these emerging climate extremes.
The rhino population across the world has increased slightly but so have the killings, mostly in South Africa, as poaching fed by huge demand for rhino horns remains a top threat
Four Greenpeace activists who were arrested for scaling the country estate of former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last year to protest his oil and gas drilling expansion plans have been cleared of criminal charges