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| Fri, 12th Aug 2022 11:21:00 |
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After the storm: what an environmental tragedy can teach us about climate resilience and ecosystem restoration |
A tiny Caribbean Island known as 'the flower of the ocean' was decimated by Hurricane Iota in 2020. Although the loss of human life was minimal, the impact on precious ecosystems deeply changed the perspective of its inhabitants. Two years later, they’re still working to restore their environmental treasures and preparing for whatever curveballs climate change might throw at them next.
The mountainous Colombian island of Providencia – which lies midway in the extension of the Caribbean Sea that separates Costa Rica and Jamaica – is home to stunning colours of the sea, lush underwater landscapes, extensive mangrove forests, and even tropical dry forests.
The diversity of marine ecosystems and surrounding natural wonders, including the yearly spectacle of thousands of rare black crabs descending from the mountains and heading to the sea to lay their eggs, and one of the world’s largest barrier reefs, which supports a stunning array of marine life, has led to its declaration as part of the Seaflower UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.
However, as with all islands in the world, Providencia’s unique natural treasures are highly threatened by climate change and sea level rise, threats that are not ‘theories’ looming on the horizon, but that are instead terrible facts already impacting every facet of life there.
Its 6,000 inhabitants will never forget the night of November 16th, when Iota, the last and strongest hurricane of the 2020 Atlantic storm season— deemed then a Category 5* — decimated their beloved land.
“The most shocking thing was the sound. Our people say that the hurricane came with the devil because the sound was so strange and scary,” recalls Marcela Cano, a biologist and long-time resident who has made it her life’s work to preserve Providencia’s environmental treasures.
But that night, she would spend hours fighting to survive the storm.
She was at her home sleeping when at around midnight, she started hearing strange noises. This turned out to be wind gusts of over 155 miles an hour tearing across the island.
Power and communication were shortly lost.
“I stood up and noticed that my ceiling lights looked as if they were higher than usual. That’s when I realized that part of my roof had flown away,” Ms. Cano recalls now, adding that minutes later she heard two loud bangs from her guestroom and saw water pouring down the walls.
Her immediate reaction was to get out of the house, a decision that looking back now was definitely the best one, she says, because not only the roof but most of the walls of her house collapsed in the darkness under the force of the pounding rains and the wind.
“It was raining very hard; I almost couldn’t make it out of my house because the wind wouldn’t let me open the door. I made it just where I had parked my Mula [her motorized golf cart]. I was completely soaked, and I just sat there.”
She spent over 10 hours sitting in her golf cart hoping that the wall next to it and a big pine tree would hold up.
“Every time I would hear loud bangs, I would point my flashlight towards the tree. If it had broken, that would’ve been it for me.”
It was the longest night Providencia had ever experienced. And even after sunrise, the hurricane let barely any light come through.
“Very strong wind gusts would come and go for hours and hours, and all I could think was ‘please God make it stop, it’s been too long, please stop’. It felt like the longest time of my life. At about 11 am it finally got a bit better, but it was still raining pretty hard.”
It was then that she saw her neighbours up the road calling her. She gathered the courage to walk up the debris-strewn little hill towards them and realised their house had also been lost.
But for Marcela, the loss was about to become even bigger and more painful.
A life protecting nature
Ms. Cano is the Director of Old Providence McBean Lagoon Natural National Park, a unique and highly important protected site on the island and the Seaflower UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. She has worked for over 30 years to protect it, and with her team, has been a pioneer in ecosystem restoration and ecotourism.
“I looked around and all the vegetation on the island was gone, everything was black, and all the trees no longer had leaves. It was as if everything had been burnt, and the sea was up high. I could see Santa Catalina Island from there; I couldn’t see it before. And I could see how destroyed it was,” she remembers, telling UN News that every time she tells this story she can barely hold back the tears.
That night, she took refuge with 10 families under a concrete ledge that hadn’t given an inch to the winds and the rain. It was actually the second floor of a house under construction.
“We made a common makeshift bed. It was also the middle of a COVID-19 peak in Colombia, but no one could care about that at that moment,” Ms. Cano says.
It was still raining, and the island had been without communication for over eight hours. The whole mainland of Colombia wondered for almost a day if Providencia had survived hurricane Iota or not.
In the following days, as help arrived, other locals described how people were walking around like “zombies” searching for food and shelter. Miraculously, only four people lost their lives that night, but over 98 per cent of the island’s infrastructure was destroyed and 6,000 people were left homeless.
“I went walking to ask about my team at the National Park. We were all fine, but we lost everything we had worked for. Our office, our library, the research data stored in our computers, everything was lost.”
Satellite images show how mangroves and vegetation at Manchineel Bay in Providencia were affected after hurricane Iota.
Invemar
Satellite images show how mangroves and vegetation at Manchineel Bay in Providencia were affected after hurricane Iota.
An environmental tragedy
Sometime later, Ms. Cano was able to return to Providencia after spending time with her family in Bogotá and working to gather household items and basic necessities for some families affected by the storm.
It was then that she was able to evaluate the environmental damage inside the National Park.
“I’ve spent most of my life here in Providencia and to see that all our efforts to maintain the National Park had vanished from one day to the next, was heartbreaking.”
According to Colombia’s National Natural Parks, around 90 per cent of the Park’s mangroves and forests were affected, as well as the coral reefs in shallow waters, many of which had been in nurseries as part of an ongoing restoration effort.
“We are working to restore vegetation and saline formations. We also carried out rescue and replanting of coral colonies that were uprooted by the hurricane,” Ms. Cano explains while standing in what’s left of the pier of Crab-Cay, once the most visited attraction in Providencia.
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