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Eight months ago, Category 5 Hurricane Maria destroyed
Dominica resident Simon Walsh’s roof and most of his walls.
It also took a big bite out of his scuba-guide business. “I had
no future to see,” he says. “We should never again be as des-
perate as we were on Sept. 18.”
The island, where Walsh has lived for two decades, was
among the hardest-hit. Nine out of 10 buildings lost a roof.
The World Bank estimated the total damage at $1.3 billion, or
224 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
Remarkably, though, less than a year later, there’s optimism
in the air. In one of the Caribbean’s most ambitious comeback
eforts, the tiny country (population: 73,543) is making a bid to
be the world’s irst climate-resilient nation.
“This is a survivability issue for us,” Dominica’s foreign min-
ister, Francine Baron, told Bloomberg. “We need to incorpo-
rate resilience in everything that we do moving forward, from
infrastructure to our economy to our social sectors.”
Enter the Climate Resilient Execution Agency for Dominica
(Cread), conceived shortly after the storm by government oi-
cials, including Baron, as a task force to hurricane-proof the
entire island. The government expects to appoint a chief exec-
utive and leadership team to the agency as soon as it gets par-
liamentary approval, likely in July. Cread’s irst mission will be
to determine best practices across every sector—roads, build-
ing codes, energy grids, water management—before enforc-
ing them islandwide.
The government has already been collaborating with inter-
national organizations to establish some parameters ahead of
Cread’s inauguration. Any roofs that are being rebuilt with
aid from the government or major nonproit groups are being
reengineered according to United Nations Development
Programme standards. The UNDP guidelines call for steeper
roof angles to better withstand wind, for example, and for the
use of screws rather than nails to strengthen frames. Building
TRAVEL
Bloomberg Pursuits
May 14, 2018
codes are being rewritten with the help of the Canadian
government and the U.K.’s Department for International
Development, as well. And the Dominica government is tak-
ing the irst steps of burying utility cables, elevating bridges,
and shifting to solar from generator power—all projects that
Cread will see through to completion. If Dominica is successful,
it will eventually be able to rebound from a Category 5 storm
in a matter of weeks, not months or years.
Climate resiliency is more urgent in the Caribbean than
almost anywhere else in the world. Situated in the middle of
the hurricane belt, it’s especially vulnerable to the rising sea
temperatures that have spurred an increase in major storms. A
white paper by the Nature Conservancy notes that the region
“often contributes the least to climate change yet sufers from
its impacts the most.” In their eforts to safeguard themselves,
Dominica and other nearby developing small island states face
three big hurdles: parliaments that move slowly, crippled
economies, and diiculty securing international lending. To
help with the last point, there’s the Caribbean Community
(Caricom), a pan-regional agency that’s lobbying global groups
for help with resilient rebuilding.
As these broader political initiatives lurch forward at their
own pace, grass-roots eforts have already begun on the local
level. (Hurricane season begins on June 1; many islands risk
getting socked again while they’re only halfway up from the
Dominica, ravaged by the storms
of 2017, wants to become
the first climate-resilient country in
the world. By Nikki Ekstein
H O W T O
H U R R I C A N E - P R O O F
A N I S L A N D