And, as we told you on Wednesday, Vulcan Mining isn't the only thing that Gales Point villagers have to worry about. There's also the coastal eroding eating away at their precious peninsula. This village is only one of those coastal communities in the south that have been battling erosion.
Others include Monkey River, Hopkins Village, and Dangriga Town, and it may all be connected to global warming and climate change.
Those unusually hot days you've been experiencing, the extended drought of 2019 and early 2020, last year's burning of the Vaca Forest in the Cayo District, and the more intense hurricane seasons every year are believed to be the effects of climate change playing out in real-time.
2 weeks ago, Dr. Colin Young, the Executive Director of the 5Cs made the point that all these climate change effects are connected to the excess carbon and greenhouse gas emissions being pumped into the earth's atmosphere:
Dr. Colin Young - Executive Director, CCCCC
"We would like to highlight 6 key findings from the report and discuss during the question-and-answer session the implications for the Caribbean. 6 keys are as follows: 1) the world is on track to reach the 1.5-degree Celsius temperature threshold by 2040 and this will have devastating implications for Caribbean states and for the 1.5 to stay alive in the Caribbean. 2) Climate change impacts are global, but some regions including the Caribbean will experience and increasing and occurring number of extreme weather-related events. This means that we will experience multiple disasters happening at the same time that will threaten our fiscal space and threaten our ability to cope and to respond. 3) is that our oceans are also getting very warm. They are rising, they are becoming very hotter and more acidic with devastating impacts in key sectors such as tourism, fishing and indeed livelihoods. This has massive implications for tourism, for coral reefs, for coaster erosion, salt water intrusion and considering the contributions of these sectors to GDP, it's going to have a devastating impact on the region and of course warmer oceans also bring with it much stronger hurricanes. The 5 Cs in the regional framework concluded that "without resilience building through effective adaptation, damages from hurricanes, losses from decline in tourism and damages to infrastructure will due to sea level rise are projected to total 22 billion US dollars per year by 2050 and 46 billion annually by 2100."
