Kalain Ho­sein

Cli­mate Change Con­sul­tant

kalain.ho­sein@guardian.co.tt

As tem­per­a­tures rise world­wide, T&T’s farm­ers and wa­ter of­fi­cials are feel­ing the heat–crops and live­stock are be­ing af­fect­ed and there is a sig­nif­i­cant re­duc­tion in wa­ter sup­ply.

Last year, T&T was placed un­der its longest-ever Hot Spell Warn­ing and Alert, span­ning sev­er­al days dur­ing mid-Sep­tem­ber and mid-Oc­to­ber. Tem­per­a­tures soared above 35˚C in Trinidad and 34˚C in To­ba­go. While the heat ul­ti­mate­ly re­lent­ed, the dam­age was done.

Ac­cord­ing to pres­i­dent of the Agri­cul­ture So­ci­ety of T&T Dar­ryl Ram­per­sad, more than 35 per cent of crops were lost by farm­ers due to the lengthy heat spell.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia last Oc­to­ber he lament­ed he had lost crops. “Right now, I am stand­ing in a field of pi­men­to that has been burnt,” Ram­per­sad had said.

Gas­par­il­lo farmer Rakesh Ghooralal said he had lost fields of sweet pep­pers and pi­men­tos be­cause of the heat. Af­ter spend­ing $35,000 to cul­ti­vate a crop, Ghooralal said he re­couped just $10,000 from the har­vest.

Then, in 2024, with no of­fi­cial alerts from the Trinidad and To­ba­go Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal Ser­vice (TTMS), from mid-March through late May, Trinidad’s max­i­mum tem­per­a­tures reg­u­lar­ly soared above 34˚C. Cou­pled with a lack of rain­fall, the heat stress and lack of wa­ter con­tin­ued to take a toll on the na­tion’s bread bas­kets and our wa­ter sup­ply.

Guardian Me­dia vis­it­ed Chatham Vil­lage sev­er­al times this year, on­ly to see dried fields, cracked grounds and dis­tressed farm­ers.

Wa­ter­mel­on farmer Azad Baksh ex­plained he has stopped wa­ter­ing his sev­en-acre wa­ter­mel­on fields due to the ex­pense, “It’s too ex­pen­sive, so right now I am de­pend­ing on the dew, the Most High, and the cold­ness of the night to keep the plants alive,” he said. He said that it usu­al­ly takes 300 bar­rels of wa­ter to ir­ri­gate his en­tire crop, and sev­en men were hired to do the wa­ter­ing twice week­ly.

Like farm­ers in Pe­nal, he dug ponds for ir­ri­ga­tion, but they were al­so dry­ing up as be­low-av­er­age rain­fall per­sist­ed through much of 2024.

The Agri­cul­ture So­ci­ety pres­i­dent ex­plained it led to prices of some goods, like toma­toes, re­main­ing near­ly dou­ble the sea­son­al price per pound dur­ing the ear­li­er por­tion of the year.

Cli­mate change’s role in T&T’s heat and wa­ter scarci­ty

While the TTMS did in­di­cate dri­er-than-usu­al con­di­tions in their 2024 Dry Sea­son Out­look, is­sued at the start of 2024, this dry­ing trend for T&T is part of a larg­er-scale is­sue.

Ac­cord­ing to the In­ter­gov­ern­men­tal Pan­el on Cli­mate Change (IPCC), a con­sor­tium of the world’s top cli­mate sci­en­tists, sev­er­al pro­jec­tions made near­ly four decades ago are now un­fold­ing across the Caribbean re­gion.

Due to the con­tin­ued burn­ing of fos­sil fu­els, the IPCC said there was high con­fi­dence that ob­served warm­ing in small is­lands, like T&T, has been at­trib­uted to hu­man in­flu­ence.

They add, “Warm­ing will con­tin­ue in the 21st cen­tu­ry for all glob­al warm­ing lev­els and fu­ture emis­sion sce­nar­ios, fur­ther in­creas­ing heat ex­tremes and heat stress (high con­fi­dence).”

With­in the Caribbean Re­gion, their 6th As­sess­ment Re­port, which is the gold stan­dard for the lat­est knowl­edge in cli­mate sci­ence, in­di­cates two dire find­ings.

The first is that dur­ing the tra­di­tion­al­ly wettest months of the Wet Sea­son in T&T, June through Au­gust, the de­clin­ing trend in rain­fall will like­ly con­tin­ue in the com­ing decades. This dry­ing lev­el will be more in­tense in a warmer world where glob­al tem­per­a­tures ex­ceed 2.0˚C.

In the lat­est up­date of cli­mate nor­mals in 2020 from the Trinidad and To­ba­go Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal Ser­vice, this trend was clear: every month of the year now has a low­er av­er­age rain­fall ac­cu­mu­la­tion when the av­er­ages are com­pared from 1981-2010 and 1991-2020.

Ac­cord­ing to pro­jec­tions from the IPCC, the trop­ics are ex­pect­ed to be­come pro­gres­sive­ly dri­er in a warmer world. Still, when show­ers, thun­der­storms, and trop­i­cal cy­clones form in our re­gion, they are like­ly to be more in­tense, caus­ing lo­cal ex­treme rain­fall to­tals.

The sec­ond is high­er tem­per­a­tures, which re­sult in high­er evap­o­tran­spi­ra­tion, in­creas­ing arid­i­ty, and more se­vere agri­cul­tur­al and eco­log­i­cal droughts in the Caribbean.

Based on da­ta from the TTMS since 1946, T&T has been warm­ing at a rate of 0.24˚C per decade since 1946, with the last two decades be­ing the hottest on record. In T&T, every sin­gle year since 1986, the tem­per­a­ture has been warmer than the 1961-1991 cli­ma­to­log­i­cal av­er­age. T&T has been warm­ing 2.5 times faster than the rest of the world.

At the be­gin­ning of this year’s un­warned hot spell from mid-March, the Mariv­ista In­sti­tute for Agri­cul­ture, Train­ing and De­vel­op­ment (MI­ATD) host­ed sev­er­al farm­ers from the hills of Paramin in a sem­i­nar called “Cli­mate Change and Paramin Agri­cul­ture.”

Its chair­man, Mar­cus My­coo, ex­plained that our chang­ing cli­mate has ram­i­fi­ca­tions on our agri­cul­ture sec­tor that we’re on­ly be­gin­ning to un­der­stand.

Ref­er­enc­ing pa­paya growth in Be­lize, “Pa­paya (now) com­ing in­to pro­duc­tion in six to six-and-a-half months. The norm is eight- to nine-and-a-half months. I’ve known that for al­most 25 years in my per­son­al ex­pe­ri­ence.”

My­coo al­so high­light­ed Guyana, which ex­pe­ri­enced se­vere floods in 2021 and a se­vere drought ear­ly this year. It lost sev­er­al crops of rice, which was sig­nif­i­cant giv­en the South Amer­i­can coun­try’s typ­i­cal­ly vast wa­ter sources.

“We just came from Guyana, and we saw rice; we went to see rice. The pre­vi­ous month, I was in Suri­name, and they didn’t have wa­ter in time to plant some of the fields. I want you to think about that.”

The MI­ATD chair­man con­tin­ued, ex­press­ing his sur­prise at the lack of wa­ter, “If the wa­ter came late, then they would have to plant late and at the time when the crop is what three and a half to four months, when the crop is com­ing in­to the har­vest, the rains come. The har­vesters can’t go in there so easy (sic). The rice might fall, so it be­comes con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed.”

In T&T, the wa­ter short­ages of last year con­tin­ued in­to 2024. This was con­firmed by Nigel Grimes, a tech­ni­cal ad­vis­er at the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture, Land and Fish­eries.

He said, “Some farm­ers that I have been in­ter­act­ing with over the last year have been ex­press­ing to me and shar­ing the chal­lenges they have been hav­ing with re­spect to wa­ter.”

In T&T, the coun­try may ex­pe­ri­ence an un­usu­al­ly warm and dry pe­ri­od any­time from late Au­gust through ear­ly Oc­to­ber, called Pe­tit Careme. How­ev­er, Grimes said, “This year (2023), the Pe­tit Careme wasn’t pe­tite. It could be con­sid­ered the Grande Careme be­cause it last­ed for a while.”

Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies Pro­fes­sor Michelle My­coo, who is al­so a mem­ber of the IPCC, ex­plained to farm­ers that the changes be­ing ob­served to­day were decades in the mak­ing as coun­tries did not re­duce car­bon emis­sions when warned of the out­come.

Prof My­coo ex­plained to farm­ers, who were al­ready aware of the heat’s im­pact on crops, the heat’s im­pact on them, “It will al­so mean farm­ers will face very, very hot tem­per­a­tures, and they will not be able to work very long hours in the ex­treme heat. So, pro­duc­tiv­i­ty loss among work­ers in the sec­tor will oc­cur. So it is across the board; the crop suf­fer­ing; you suf­fer­ing; the coun­try is go­ing to suf­fer be­cause then we can’t get food, and the crops that we de­pend on for our sur­vival will be af­fect­ed.”

To com­bat the im­pacts of heat on hu­man health, she ad­vised, “You may have to con­sid­er com­ing out ear­li­er in the morn­ing and do­ing some night work to re­duce the ef­fects of heat on you. We may some­times look at how to re­duce di­rect so­lar ra­di­a­tion on farm­ers by, in fact, hav­ing this shift, bring­ing on ex­tra work­ers so that the same peo­ple are not tak­ing on ex­treme heat and, of course, re­duc­ing crop sizes.”

Prof My­coo is now urg­ing com­mu­ni­ties to adapt and be­come re­silient in the face of a lack of glob­al ac­tion to re­duce car­bon emis­sions, “You have new tech­nolo­gies to adapt, em­brace the tech­nol­o­gy. They are be­com­ing avail­able. We need to piv­ot, to shift our think­ing away from the old way of do­ing things. Our im­me­di­ate fu­ture rests up­on our mak­ing our changes in re­duc­tion in cli­mate, we at the lo­cal lev­el adapt­ing be­cause what we are fac­ing is go­ing to be worse in the next decades.”

This sto­ry was pro­duced as part of In­ternews’ Earth Jour­nal­ism Net­work’s Re­port­ing Fel­low­ship.