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By Jewel Fraser
Noreen Nunez lives in a middle-class neighborhood that rises up a hillside in Trinidad's Tunapuna-Piarco region.
Accessed by a long, winding road bordered by trees, the houses, built in the 1970s and 1980s, are mainly painted in pastel shades. Dotted among fruit trees in their sizeable backyards are huge water tanks, mounted on concrete slabs.
The tanks are evidence that even this affluent community is not insulated from the water stress experienced across the Caribbean.
Residents fill the tanks from the main pipes to use during scheduled outages by the water authority. But the supply is often unreliable and further impacted by low pressure for those living further up the hill.
Nunez says outages have become a regular occurrence, with water often shut off for all but a few hours during the night.
"Most of the time you have to buy food from outside or have food catered and buy bottles of water to drink," she said. "You use disposable dishes."
Patchy Infrastructure and Leaky Pipes
Antigua and Barbuda, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and St. Kitts and Nevis are all classed as water scarce, which the UN defines as countries with less than 1000 cubic meters per capita of renewable water resources a year.
Barbados' situation, with only 350 cubic meters per capita, is especially grave, according to Keithroy Halliday, general manager of the Barbados Water Authority.
While most people outside of rural mountainous areas in the Caribbean are connected to the public water supply, they frequently face outdated infrastructure in need of repair, resulting in major losses of drinking water.
Alan Poon King, head of Trinidad and Tobago's Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA), says the utility loses as much as 60 million gallons of water each day from leaking infrastructure — and that much again is wasted by problems like leaking taps on private properties.
The picture is similar in Jamaica, which Peter Clarke, managing director of the country's Water Resources Authority, says suffers from "a serious loss of water that has been produced and is supposed to be delivered, but it is not reaching the end user because of the aging infrastructure — it's leaky, it's perforated."
Climate Change Increases Pressure
If these structural problems are left unaddressed, things are only likely to deteriorate as the planet heats up.
"There are many other problems that are facing the water sector in the Caribbean and climate change is exacerbating those existing, underlying conditions," said Adrian Cashman, who sits on the global technical advisory committee for the Global Water Partnership.
Officials say drought conditions across the region over the past couple of years mean there just hasn't been enough rain to replenish aquifers at the usual rate.
"This past summer [in Jamaica] we went through a significant drought," said Clarke. "It really was challenging for the water supply providers."
In Trinidad and Tobago, Poon King said it was difficult to quantify the impacts of climate change, but that it was an ongoing challenge: "We've seen reduced precipitation that could be anywhere in the range of 10-20% in the dry season."
Halliday said climate change has already "significantly impacted" Barbados' water supply, too. All of Barbados' internal renewable water resources come from rainfall, he explained, and in 2019 the country saw its lowest recorded levels since 1947.
Climate Finance and Water-Wise Living
The Caribbean region enjoys relatively high standards of living, with most countries defined by the UN as "upper-middle income." This excludes them from much international development funding. At the same time, high levels of public debt combined with their vulnerability to climate change makes it difficult to secure investment in infrastructure.
However, one of the region's first major water projects financed by the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which was set up to help developing countries cope with the changing climate, is currently underway in Grenada.
Project head Hans-Werner Theisen says about half of the €45 million the GCF has allocated to the project will be spent improving infrastructure like water tanks, reservoirs and pipes. There will also be financial incentives to cut water waste from sectors like agriculture and tourism, which are among the biggest consumers of water.
Encouraging the public to use water more carefully is key to the project in Grenada, too. "What I think is very important is that everyone, every citizen, can contribute to water-saving measures, so we have to be water-wise in day-to-day living," Theisen said.
Elsewhere, Barbados has passed laws prohibiting the use of potable water for washing cars, gardening, filling swimming pools and similar activities. As in Jamaica, people are encouraged to use wastewater for such activities.
Water, Water Everywhere…
Despite day-to-day water outages, a 2017 UN Water report showed most people in the Caribbean have access to a safe — if irregular — water supply.
But in Trinidad, Nunez is infuriated living on an island with 360-views of the turquoise waters and nothing coming out of the tap.
"Water and air are things that humans need to live," she added. "I can't understand how on an island surrounded by water, they can't find some way of using — desalinating — the water."
According to 2019 figures, the region gets some 12% of its water supply from desalination. Poon King said in Trinidad and Tobago that figure is 20% but expanding this is problematic due to high energy costs.
For Nunez, water shortages are out of step with her country's development status. Trinidad and Tobago have profited from its oil reserves. Yet despite its high income, it struggles to adequately supply this most basic of necessities.
"There are glass buildings and universities and huge international airports and everything like this, but there is no water," she said. "We've got the latest architectural structures and homes and houses, but it seems like indoor sanitary ware and kitchens are just for show."
Reposted with permission from Deutsche Welle.
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Comparing rime ice and glaze ice shows how each changes the texture of the blade. Gao, Liu and Hu, 2021, CC BY-ND
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Trending
While traditional investment in the ocean technology sector has been tentative, growth in Israeli maritime innovations has been exponential in the last few years, and environmental concern has come to the forefront.
theDOCK aims to innovate the Israeli maritime sector. Pexels
<p>The UN hopes that new investments in ocean science and technology will help turn the tide for the oceans. As such, this year kicked off the <a href="https://www.oceandecade.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030)</a> to galvanize massive support for the blue economy.</p><p>According to the World Bank, the blue economy is the "sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods, and jobs while preserving the health of ocean ecosystem," <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412019338255#b0245" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Science Direct</a> reported. It represents this new sector for investments and innovations that work in tandem with the oceans rather than in exploitation of them.</p><p>As recently as Aug. 2020, <a href="https://www.reutersevents.com/sustainability/esg-investors-slow-make-waves-25tn-ocean-economy" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Reuters</a> noted that ESG Investors, those looking to invest in opportunities that have a positive impact in environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, have been interested in "blue finance" but slow to invest.</p><p>"It is a hugely under-invested economic opportunity that is crucial to the way we have to address living on one planet," Simon Dent, director of blue investments at Mirova Natural Capital, told Reuters.</p><p>Even with slow investment, the blue economy is still expected to expand at twice the rate of the mainstream economy by 2030, Reuters reported. It already contributes $2.5tn a year in economic output, the report noted.</p><p>Current, upward <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/-innovation-blue-economy-2646147405.html" target="_self">shifts in blue economy investments are being driven by innovation</a>, a trend the UN hopes will continue globally for the benefit of all oceans and people.</p><p>In Israel, this push has successfully translated into investment in and innovation of global ports, shipping, logistics and offshore sectors. The "Startup Nation," as Israel is often called, has seen its maritime tech ecosystem grow "significantly" in recent years and expects that growth to "accelerate dramatically," <a href="https://itrade.gov.il/belgium-english/how-israel-is-becoming-a-port-of-call-for-maritime-innovation/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">iTrade</a> reported.</p><p>Driving this wave of momentum has been rising Israeli venture capital hub <a href="https://www.thedockinnovation.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">theDOCK</a>. Founded by Israeli Navy veterans in 2017, theDOCK works with early-stage companies in the maritime space to bring their solutions to market. The hub's pioneering efforts ignited Israel's maritime technology sector, and now, with their new fund, theDOCK is motivating these high-tech solutions to also address ESG criteria.</p><p>"While ESG has always been on theDOCK's agenda, this theme has become even more of a priority," Nir Gartzman, theDOCK's managing partner, told EcoWatch. "80 percent of the startups in our portfolio (for theDOCK's Navigator II fund) will have a primary or secondary contribution to environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria."</p><p>In a company presentation, theDOCK called contribution to the ESG agenda a "hot discussion topic" for traditional players in the space and their boards, many of whom are looking to adopt new technologies with a positive impact on the planet. The focus is on reducing carbon emissions and protecting the environment, the presentation outlines. As such, theDOCK also explicitly screens candidate investments by ESG criteria as well.</p><p>Within the maritime space, environmental innovations could include measures like increased fuel and energy efficiency, better monitoring of potential pollution sources, improved waste and air emissions management and processing of marine debris/trash into reusable materials, theDOCK's presentation noted.</p>theDOCK team includes (left to right) Michal Hendel-Sufa, Head of Alliances, Noa Schuman, CMO, Nir Gartzman, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, and Hannan Carmeli, Co-Founder & Managing Partner. Dudu Koren
<p>theDOCK's own portfolio includes companies like Orca AI, which uses an intelligent collision avoidance system to reduce the probability of oil or fuel spills, AiDock, which eliminates the use of paper by automating the customs clearance process, and DockTech, which uses depth "crowdsourcing" data to map riverbeds in real-time and optimize cargo loading, thereby reducing trips and fuel usage while also avoiding groundings.</p><p>"Oceans are a big opportunity primarily because they are just that – big!" theDOCK's Chief Marketing Officer Noa Schuman summarized. "As such, the magnitude of their criticality to the global ecosystem, the magnitude of pollution risk and the steps needed to overcome those challenges – are all huge."</p><p>There is hope that this wave of interest and investment in environmentally-positive maritime technologies will accelerate the blue economy and ESG investing even further, in Israel and beyond.</p>- 14 Countries Commit to Ocean Sustainability Initiative - EcoWatch ›
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