Less than 100 metres from where Lalchan Bodie lives in Bamboo Village on the Cedros coastline, the remnants of what was once a hilly village overlooking Columbus Bay are a daily reminder of a once dark day in the community. As we drive deeper into the village, we quickly approach a dead end. The road comes to an abrupt end as you approach a cliff overlooking the sea. Bodie emerges from the bushes, having finished tending to his goats.
“Long ago, you could drive all the way around, but now you can’t,” is how he greets this lost crew.
On a February afternoon in 2018, residents started feeling their homes shaking. They were advised by the Cedros councillor to pack up and evacuate. Within two hours, half of a house had slipped away, and the road went with it. Five families had to be evacuated.
The quiet, rural Southern community had found itself on the front page of every daily newspaper the next morning.
Eight years later, the houses are abandoned, with cracks on the outer walls visible. Overgrown bushes have reached as high as the roof. Some residents locked their gates when they were leaving, and it has remained so ever since. DirectTV satellite dishes installed on the roofs remind us that people once built their lives here, but the cascading land next to their houses shows us what they ran from.
Bodie, joined by another inquisitive neighbour, tells us that in the eight years since that fateful day, coastal erosion has only gotten worse on the southwestern end of Trinidad, but it is by no means recent. His neighbour pointed towards the ocean and said the land used to be where the brown water meets the blue. It’s roughly 300 metres from the shoreline. “Coconut trees and sugar cane used to be planted there 60 years ago, and it used to thrive,” he said. The water has since reclaimed all of that land and has integrated into the ocean. If you’ve never seen it, it’s difficult to imagine it.
Speaking to us at the edge of the cliff where the road broke off in 2018, Bodie says, “The sea is coming in more, and it is taking more land. It has washed out almost all the points in Cedros. There were houses by the beach, and the people had to leave because the houses went down. The place is eroding fast, very fast.”
The global average rate of sea level rise is currently around 3.4 mm per year.
Rising tides, shifting lives
From Cedros to Scarborough in Tobago, it’s not just sea level rise but also temperature rise affecting lives and livelihoods on the twin island. Curtis Douglas is a familiar face in Tobago. He’s been a fisherman for over 35 years and has represented fishermen on the island for the past five years as president of the All Tobago Fisherfolk Association (AFTA).
In the last decade, he said, they have seen a decline in the redbelly flying fish, the normal flying fish, tuna, black-eyed kingfish, wahoo, and salmon. “One of the factors we would have seen in Tobago is the rising temperature in our waters. I think last year was one of the hottest years the world would have ever seen,” Douglas says.
According to the climate page on NASA’s website, 90 per cent of global warming is occurring in the ocean. The last ten years were the ocean’s warmest decade since at least the 1800s. Last year was the ocean’s warmest year on record.
The AFTA president went further in explaining, “Once it gets warmer, fish don’t reproduce as they should. That means we will have problems catching the number of fish we are used to. That also demonstrates that we have to go further out at sea. Long ago, we had to go two to three miles; now we have to go 20, 30, or 35 odd miles just to make a yield, so we have to spend more on petrol, we have to spend more time at sea, and there’s a high risk when you go out further, so you run a risk of your safety network not covered as it should.”
He warned that if something isn’t done to stave off the effects of climate change, warming waters will mean Tobagonians will have to look for their favourite meal elsewhere. Douglas said the island already has to import fish from places like England, and that import bill could soar even further as ocean temperatures rise.
Coral reefs in danger
On the seabed of Tobago’s waters, there is another crisis ensuing. On any given day, tour operators with glass-bottom boats take visitors out to sea to witness the explosion of colours of Tobago’s coral reefs, sitting at the bottom of the sea. Since 2010, those corals have been losing their radiant colour and turning white. As the sea temperature warms, the corals are bleaching.
Coral reefs provide food, shelter, and nurseries for marine life while offering coastal protection and are a major part of tourism. Dr Anjani Ganase recently published the second edition of Coral Reefs of Trinidad and Tobago, detailing all she has learnt about local coral reefs. She works for the Institute of Marine Affairs as a senior research officer and spends most of her year in Charlotteville monitoring the reefs.
There have been three bleaching events in the last 15 years. In a 2010 bleaching event, there was a 50 per cent decline in coral cover.
“What is alarming is that after these coral bleaching events, we’re seeing very little recovery before the coral reefs are hit with another disturbance, whether it is disease or another bleaching event.
Essentially, what climate change is doing is increasing the rate of disturbances so that corals don’t have a chance to recover,” Ganase told the Sunday Guardian from Charlotteville.
However, she said to reverse this trend, they need the help of both people and policies.
“Despite the fact that we’ve seen significant declines in our reefs, we still struggle with managing and protecting our marine areas and regulating local impacts such as land-based sources of pollution and regulation of our fisheries. These are basic management strategies to keep our corals healthy and to aid in recovery,” she explains.
Sargassum storms the Caribbean
From the seabed to the surface of the sea, the impacts of climate change could be seen everywhere in Tobago. Large mats of sargassum seaweed sit on the surface of the waters surrounding Tobago, and they settle on the shoreline, leaving an unpleasant scent and an obstruction to bathers and fishermen.
And the sargassum storm is not slowing down. In May, the Caribbean Sea experienced a record-breaking 39 million tonnes of sargassum, according to the University of South Florida’s Optical Oceanography Lab.
For T&T, climate change is infiltrating everyday life. Sometimes it’s visible. Sometimes it’s not.
