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After 13 years, no end in sight for Caribbean sargassum invasion

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Tuesday, April 23, 2024

This is a republishing collaboration with Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, where this originally published. See the full series, Caribbean People at Risk from Sargassum Invasion. Schools evacuated due to toxic gas. Smelly tap water at home. Tourist operators and fishers struggling to stay in business. Job losses. Power outages affecting tens of thousands of people at a time. Dangerous health problems. Even lives lost. To read a version of this story in Spanish click here. Haz clic aquí para leer este reportaje en español. Such crises were some of the consequences of sargassum in the islands of the Caribbean in 2023, and they have become common in the region since 2011 when massive blooms began inundating the shorelines in the spring and summer months. On April 18, 2023 in Guadeloupe, the air-quality monitoring agency Gwad’Air advised vulnerable people to leave some areas because of toxic levels of gas produced by sargassum. Six weeks later, about 600 miles to the northwest, sargassum blocked an intake pipe at an electricity plant at Punta Catalina in the Dominican Republic. One of the facility’s units was forced to temporarily shut down, and a 20-year-old diver named Elías Poling later drowned while trying to fix the problem. In Jamaica, during the months of July and August, fishers found themselves struggling through one more season as floating sargassum blocked their small boats and diminished their catch. “Sometimes, the boats can’t even come into the creek,” said Jamaican fisherman Richard Osbourne. “It blocks the whole channel.” In the British Virgin Islands (BVI), most of Virgin Gorda’s 4,000 residents had to deal with sporadic water shutoffs and odorous tap water for weeks after sargassum was sucked into their main desalination plant last August. And in Puerto Rico, a highly unusual late-season influx inundated the beaches of the Aguadilla area for the first time, leaving residents like Christian Natal and many others out of work for a week when it shut down businesses including the jet ski rental company that employs him.These victims are among thousands of people hurt by sargassum blooms last year alone in the Caribbean, where about 70% of the population of around 44 million lives near the coast, according to the World Bank. Scientists blame the explosive growth of the seaweed on global pollution, climate change, and other international problems that Caribbean islands did little to cause and lack the political power to resolve. “Seaweed must be seen as an impact of global warming, with the opening up of the right to compensation on the grounds that we are small, vulnerable islands,” said Sylvie Gustave dit Duflo, the vice-president of the Guadeloupe Region in charge of environmental issues and president of the French Biodiversity Office. She added that the countries of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) — which include 15 member states and five associate members that are territories or colonies — recorded economic losses of about $102 million due to sargassum in 2022 alone. “These figures do not take into account the losses recorded in all the other Caribbean countries, including the French islands,” she said. Nor do they take into account yearly costs of beach cleaning estimated to be as high as an additional $210 million.Gustave dit Duflo and other experts say the global problem requires a global response. But so far, the Caribbean has failed to coordinate even a region-wide strategy, and the international community has largely turned a blind eye. National-level responses — which in most Caribbean countries include a draft management strategy that hasn’t been officially adopted or adequately funded — have done little to take up the slack. Most sargassum influxes are predictable, and the worst impacts are often preventable. But again and again, Caribbean governments have waited to react until the crisis stage. And even then, the responses have often focused on protecting the tourism industry while other groups, such as local communities or fishers, are left behind. As a result, residents’ health, livelihood and natural environment have been endangered, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on reactive emergency responses that experts say could have been better spent on prevention, planning and mitigation. At the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28) last December in Dubai, Gustave dit Duflo helped unveil a French proposal for the sort of international response she says is urgently needed. It includes forming a global coalition to better understand the problem, ensuring that sargassum is on the agenda of major international forums, and continuing previous work in partnership with the European Union, among other measures. But to implement the proposal, governments in the Caribbean and further abroad will have to overcome hurdles that have previously stymied cooperation, including political and legislative differences, funding shortages, and debate about whether to prioritize health, the environment, the economy, or other areas. In the meantime, sargassum has already started to arrive on the Caribbean’s shores once again. And once again, the region is not ready.The ‘Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt’Sargassum is not a bad thing in itself. Nor is it new to the Caribbean, where it has always washed ashore in modest quantities in the spring and summer, providing habitat for marine life and helping build beaches as it decays. But 2011 brought too much of a good thing. Way too much. Without warning that year, sargassum suddenly swamped shorelines. It piled several feet high on some beaches. It stank like rotten eggs as it decomposed. It shut down resorts, dealing a major blow to a tourism sector in some areas of the Caribbean still struggling to recover from the 2008-2009 global recession. It gave coastal residents headaches, nausea and respiratory problems. It disrupted turtle nesting sites and threatened reefs and mangroves. As sargassum continued to flood the Caribbean and the western coast of Africa 8,000 miles away, scientists made a surprising discovery. Historically, most of the seasonal influx in the Caribbean had come from a two-million-square-mile gyre in the northern Atlantic Ocean: the Sargasso Sea.“The Sargasso [Sea] has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s an ecosystem that was perfect, so to speak,” said Dominican Republic oceanographer Elena Martinez. “It was there surrounded by four oceans gyres, or currents, that kept it perfect.”But scientists soon learned that most of the new Caribbean influx wasn’t coming from the Sargasso Sea anymore: It was coming from a new sargassum ecosystem that had formed in the southern Atlantic Ocean. The area dubbed the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt in a 2019 article in Science is now visible from space, and its length often exceeds 5,000 miles, according to scientists who use satellites to track it. Its cause is still debated. Sargassum researcher Dr. Brian Lapointe sees the Atlantic belt as a global version of a smaller bloom he witnessed in 1991 that shut down a nuclear power plant and other electricity facilities along the Florida coast.Since the 1980s, the world population has nearly doubled, explained Lapointe, a professor at Florida Atlantic University. This, in turn, has led to a massive increase in the sargassum-boosting nutrients washing out of major rivers like the Mississippi in the US, the Amazon and Orinoco in South America, and the Congo in Africa.“To grow that world population, we’ve used these fertilizers; we’ve deforested along all the major rivers in the world,” he said. “The nitrogen has gone up faster than the phosphorus from all these human activities, including wastewater, sewage, from the increasing human population.” Another likely culprit is climate change. Martinez said warming waters may have disrupted the giant gyre that held the Sargasso Sea in place for thousands of years, releasing sargassum to float south and form the new belt.The new belt also receives additional nutrients from the Sahara dust that frequently blows across the Atlantic — which itself could be exacerbated by climate impacts such as the expansion of deserts as temperatures rise. Some scientists also argue that warming oceans provide a more sargassum-friendly growing environment.Experts tend to agree that the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt is here to stay — and that it is a global problem that needs a global response.‘A terrible scene for the people’That much was clear by 2018, when the belt grew to a record size that was estimated at 22 million tons and much of the Caribbean saw its worst-ever inundation. The season spurred increasing calls for a collaborative international response.The following year, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres visited St. Lucia for a July meeting of the Caribbean Community, and he took a side trip to the small fishing village of Praslin Bay.Surrounded by dignitaries, Guterres walked down a dock lined with small boats bobbing atop thick mats of sargassum, which for years had plagued fishers, sea moss farmers and other residents in the area.“So it’s a terrible scene for the people?” he asked a resident in a video posted on the United Nations website.“Yes,” the man responded. “It’s killing the fishes in the bay. The stench. It’s destroying our electronics because of the fumes.”After his visit, Guterres described his sadness on seeing a “landscape that resembled an algae desert for hundreds of meters.” Then he called for international action.“Oceans don’t know borders, nor does climate,” he said. “It is a global collective responsibility to take action now.”But that broad international action has not materialized as planned. Despite a growing patchwork of studies and projects across the region, various attempts by the UN and others to coordinate a Caribbean-wide response have been largely stalled by funding shortages, geopolitical issues, the Covid-19 pandemic and other factors.One of the most extensive efforts came about three months after Guterres’ visit to St. Lucia, when Guadeloupe hosted the First International Conference on Sargassum in October 2019. Partners at the event — where the three-year Sarg’Coop program financed by about $3.2 million in European Union funds was officially launched — included the French government, the Guadeloupe Region, UNESCO and other entities. In attendance were representatives from more than a dozen Caribbean countries and territories, as well as the US, Mexico, Brazil and France. Some progress followed. For instance, the Guadeloupe Region — in partnership with the French government, the French National Research Agency and two Brazilian agencies — launched a call for projects that enabled a dozen international studies to be carried out on the health, environmental and economic impact of the seaweed, as well as possible uses for it. Other regional meetings have been held since then as well. Last June, for instance, an European Union-Caribbean conference on “Turning Sargassum into Opportunity” was held in the Dominican Republic, and the topic was discussed the following month at a summit of the EU and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (EU-CELAC) in Brussels, Belgium. But almost five years after the 2019 Guadeloupe conference, the broader goals have not come to fruition on a regional level as envisioned, experts acknowledge. No Caribbean strategy is in place, and the region-wide warning and monitoring center envisioned at the conference has not been established.Instead, many of the actions that grew out of the Guadeloupe conference have centered mainly on the French Caribbean. Funded in part by about $66 million allocated for 2018 to 2026 by the government of France — which for decades has struggled with algae washing ashore on its European coasts — the French islands have launched some of the most extensive response efforts in the Caribbean in recent years.But even this has not been enough to protect residents.Describing Guterres’ visit to Praslin Bay as “nothing more than a photo op,” Martinique-based professor Dr. Dabor Resiere and seven other researchers claimed in a March 2023 article that the “local authorities failed to take advantage of such an important visitor to give international recognition to the sargassum phenomenon in the Caribbean.”Four years later, they added, the situation remained “unchanged.”“Despite the French government’s plans to tackle the sargassum problem, these toxic algae are continuing to inundate the coasts of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana in ever-greater volumes,” the researchers wrote in the Journal of Global Health, adding, “Today, there is no national and international consensus on facing this public health problem. There is no Caribbean network or a broad consensus to advance research at this level.”Even Praslin Bay saw scant relief in the years after it welcomed the UN secretary general. In 2022, St. Lucian sargassum researcher Dr. Bethia Thomas produced videos about the village and two other nearby communities as part of her doctoral thesis. In each video, several residents listed complaints ranging from breathing problems to fisheries destruction to corroding jewelry.“It affects how I breathe, and I also think it affects the children and the way that they function, because sometimes they’re so moody and they cannot sit and do the activities because it’s so awful,” a teacher says in the video of Praslin Bay. “And I think it’s affecting us mentally.”Concerns about sargassum’s effects on the mental health of coastal residents and workers were noted in a September 2023 report by the 34-member Western Central Atlantic Fishery Commission. “The unpleasant odor, the deterioration of their environment, lack of access to the beaches for relaxation, uncertainty about the future, increase in physical ailments such as respiratory illness and skin rashes, and concerns about other potential health risks, among other things, will naturally affect mental health,” stated the commission, a regional fisheries body established under the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. However, the report added that such mental health impacts are not currently being studied. In the absence of a regional strategy, national sargassum management plans have been developed in most countries and territories in the Caribbean, including eight through grant-funded projects affiliated with the University of the West Indies in St. Lucia, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, BVI, Anguilla and Montserrat. But few have been officially adopted at the government level, and even fewer are adequately funded or closely followed.“Sometimes the small communities get left behind,” Thomas said. “Maybe not intentionally, but in small island developing states with limited resources, you have to prioritize. And perhaps other things — like building a new hospital and constructing new roads, new schools — might take precedence over developing a sargassum management plan.”Partly as a result, sargassum responses can vary dramatically from island to island. But in probing major influxes in six Caribbean countries and territories last year, CPI found one constant: people are suffering.Negligible investment from polluting countries As residents experience health and economic consequences, Caribbean leaders often complain about a shortage of money to deal with the crisis. Local funds, they note, are tied up with many competing priorities, including handling climate-related impacts like hurricanes, droughts and flooding. They also say that the cost of the sargassum crisis should be shouldered in part by the larger countries mostly responsible for it, but that accessing international climate financing for the purpose is not easy. A CPI review of projects funded by the Global Environment Facility and by members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development between 2000 and 2021 found out that of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on climate change projects in the world, less than $7 million went to address sargassum-related issues. About 89% of those funds, or $6 million, were spent in the Caribbean. But for many non-independent islands, the problem is compounded by a political status that renders them ineligible for most climate financing.“We have no access to global funds: Resilience fund, the loss-and-damage fund,” said BVI Health and Social Development Minister Vincent Wheatley, whose home overlooks the Virgin Gorda desalination plant that was recently damaged by sargassum.At the annual UN Climate Change Conferences, he explained, overseas territories are not parties and don’t have their own seat at the negotiating table.“We fall under the [United Kingdom],” he said. “So whatever the UK negotiates, it will pass on to us.”Therefore, he said, the BVI and other overseas territories have been in separate negotiations with the UK.“We banded together to petition the UK to carve out a specific fund for [its] overseas territories,” he said, adding that these discussions are ongoing and include sargassum.A lack of funding and regional coordination has also stymied efforts to monetise the seaweed by finding a large-scale sustainable use for it.“Even though there are so many things you can make with sargassum, the actual amount of sargassum that is used for products is still very low,” said Dr. Franziska Elmer, a sargassum researcher based in Mexico.Sargassum plan proposed at COP28 in DubaiThe 2023 sargassum bloom in the Caribbean had mostly abated by Dec. 2, when Gustave dit Duflo, the French Biodiversity Office president, stood at a podium 8,000 miles away during a side event at the COP28 meeting in Dubai.As dignitaries looked on, she issued a stark warning about sargassum.“It is a very invasive and aggressive phenomenon, and through all the Caribbean it affects tourism, and all the economies of the region are based on biodiversity and tourism,” she told those gathered at the French pavilion on the sidelines of the conference. “The Caribbean has a lot of hot-spots of biodiversity. So if we don’t act, in 20 years this marine biology, including the reef, will disappear from our coast.”She then explained the French government’s proposal to address the issue. The program, she said, has four prongs: forming an international coalition to better understand the problem and its causes; addressing sargassum in international forums like the COP of Biodiversity; acting in the framework of the Cartagena Convention; and working with the EU to support the continuation of the regional Sarg’Coop project launched during the 2019 conference in Guadeloupe. The French government has presented the proposal as an unprecedented move at COP 28, with the aim of placing the sargassum issue on one of the high-level panels of the United Nations Conference on the Oceans to be held in Nice, France, in June 2025.Such collaboration is essential, according to Gustave dit Duflo.“We manage sargassum at a local level, but this is not a phenomenon of an island. It is the whole basin of the Caribbean and a part of the Atlantic,” she said. “This is why all the countries that are impacted, we need to create an international coalition to be able to find means and ways to act.”Since COP28, the Netherlands and its overseas countries and territories decided to join the international program proposed by France alongside Costa Rica, Mexico, Dominican Republic and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, Gustave dit Duflo told CPI.A meeting will be held soon with the European Commission to define the project’s legal guidelines and financing, she said. Also at COP 28, the EU and the government of the Dominican Republic co-organised a related panel at the Dominican Republic pavilion, where they launched an initiative to “turn sargassum into an economic opportunity” by tapping the EU-Latin America and the Caribbean Global Gateway Investment Agenda. To succeed, such projects will need to build on work that came out of efforts like the 2019 conference in Guadeloupe — and overcome the challenges that delayed them.Since early 2019, for instance, Météo France, the French weather service, has been operating a sargassum monitoring and detection service in the French West Indies and French Guiana. But so far, these efforts have not expanded into the regional center envisioned at the 2019 conference despite various monitoring systems launched in recent years, such as the Jamaica Early Advisory System, the regional CARICOOS tracker in Puerto Rico, and the Satellite-based Sargassum Watch System at the University of South Florida. The Sarg’Coop program launched at the 2019 conference also planned to replicate work done in Martinique, which in 2015 had set up a hydrogen sulfide and ammonia monitoring system that was later developed into a large-scale measurement network and extended into Guadeloupe in 2018. Under Sarg’Coop, the Martinique-based research institute Madininair was given responsibility for supporting St. Lucia, Dominica, Tobago, Cuba and Mexico in preparing similar networks. But the Covid-19 pandemic delayed progress, and only recently did the effort get back on track with work carried out in each of those countries.Asked about the past obstacles to implementing a common international strategy, Gustave dit Duflo, also a lecturer in neuroscience at the University of the West Indies, pointed to geopolitics. As one example, she cited the May 2023 summit of the Association of Caribbean States in Guatemala. The summit discussions, she said, were largely dominated by the conflict in Ukraine as countries in the region debated the issue of supporting Russia or the United States. Regional collaboration has also been hindered by legislative differences across borders, according to the scientist. Guadeloupe senator Dominique Théophile made a similar observation when he was commissioned to conduct a study on sargassum management strategies in the Caribbean ahead of the 2019 conference. After several trips to St. Lucia, the Dominican Republic and Mexico, he found that the most successful area management plans were carried out by major hotel groups on a local scale.But such strategies often could not be deployed throughout the entire Caribbean.For instance, health and environmental laws in French and other European territories precluded a practice that is common elsewhere in the region — spreading sargassum behind beaches — because of the possibility that the seaweed could contain arsenic and other heavy metals that could affect the ocean or groundwater.Because of such laws, Théophile explained, the French sargassum management strategy attaches heightened importance to health and environmental impacts. Often for financial reasons, other countries’ initiatives don’t address such environmental and health considerations in corresponding detail, he said.As countries work to rectify such issues and establish an international response, time is of the essence for residents of the coastal Caribbean.Shortly after the COP28 drew to a close, scientists at the University of South Florida estimated the sargassum floating in the tropical Atlantic Ocean at about five million metric tons, compared to a December average of about two million. By February, the mass had increased to some nine million tons — the second highest quantity ever recorded for the month.In other words, another record-setting sargassum season could have just started.Reporters Rafael René Díaz Torres (Centro de Periodismo Investigativo), Mariela Mejía (Diario Libre), and Hassel Fallas (La Data Cuenta) collaborated in this investigation. This investigation is the result of a fellowship awarded by the Center for Investigative Journalism’s Training Institute and was made possible in part with the support of Open Society Foundations.

This is a republishing collaboration with Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, where this originally published. See the full series, Caribbean People at Risk from Sargassum Invasion. Schools evacuated due to toxic gas. Smelly tap water at home. Tourist operators and fishers struggling to stay in business. Job losses. Power outages affecting tens of thousands of people at a time. Dangerous health problems. Even lives lost. To read a version of this story in Spanish click here. Haz clic aquí para leer este reportaje en español. Such crises were some of the consequences of sargassum in the islands of the Caribbean in 2023, and they have become common in the region since 2011 when massive blooms began inundating the shorelines in the spring and summer months. On April 18, 2023 in Guadeloupe, the air-quality monitoring agency Gwad’Air advised vulnerable people to leave some areas because of toxic levels of gas produced by sargassum. Six weeks later, about 600 miles to the northwest, sargassum blocked an intake pipe at an electricity plant at Punta Catalina in the Dominican Republic. One of the facility’s units was forced to temporarily shut down, and a 20-year-old diver named Elías Poling later drowned while trying to fix the problem. In Jamaica, during the months of July and August, fishers found themselves struggling through one more season as floating sargassum blocked their small boats and diminished their catch. “Sometimes, the boats can’t even come into the creek,” said Jamaican fisherman Richard Osbourne. “It blocks the whole channel.” In the British Virgin Islands (BVI), most of Virgin Gorda’s 4,000 residents had to deal with sporadic water shutoffs and odorous tap water for weeks after sargassum was sucked into their main desalination plant last August. And in Puerto Rico, a highly unusual late-season influx inundated the beaches of the Aguadilla area for the first time, leaving residents like Christian Natal and many others out of work for a week when it shut down businesses including the jet ski rental company that employs him.These victims are among thousands of people hurt by sargassum blooms last year alone in the Caribbean, where about 70% of the population of around 44 million lives near the coast, according to the World Bank. Scientists blame the explosive growth of the seaweed on global pollution, climate change, and other international problems that Caribbean islands did little to cause and lack the political power to resolve. “Seaweed must be seen as an impact of global warming, with the opening up of the right to compensation on the grounds that we are small, vulnerable islands,” said Sylvie Gustave dit Duflo, the vice-president of the Guadeloupe Region in charge of environmental issues and president of the French Biodiversity Office. She added that the countries of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) — which include 15 member states and five associate members that are territories or colonies — recorded economic losses of about $102 million due to sargassum in 2022 alone. “These figures do not take into account the losses recorded in all the other Caribbean countries, including the French islands,” she said. Nor do they take into account yearly costs of beach cleaning estimated to be as high as an additional $210 million.Gustave dit Duflo and other experts say the global problem requires a global response. But so far, the Caribbean has failed to coordinate even a region-wide strategy, and the international community has largely turned a blind eye. National-level responses — which in most Caribbean countries include a draft management strategy that hasn’t been officially adopted or adequately funded — have done little to take up the slack. Most sargassum influxes are predictable, and the worst impacts are often preventable. But again and again, Caribbean governments have waited to react until the crisis stage. And even then, the responses have often focused on protecting the tourism industry while other groups, such as local communities or fishers, are left behind. As a result, residents’ health, livelihood and natural environment have been endangered, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on reactive emergency responses that experts say could have been better spent on prevention, planning and mitigation. At the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28) last December in Dubai, Gustave dit Duflo helped unveil a French proposal for the sort of international response she says is urgently needed. It includes forming a global coalition to better understand the problem, ensuring that sargassum is on the agenda of major international forums, and continuing previous work in partnership with the European Union, among other measures. But to implement the proposal, governments in the Caribbean and further abroad will have to overcome hurdles that have previously stymied cooperation, including political and legislative differences, funding shortages, and debate about whether to prioritize health, the environment, the economy, or other areas. In the meantime, sargassum has already started to arrive on the Caribbean’s shores once again. And once again, the region is not ready.The ‘Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt’Sargassum is not a bad thing in itself. Nor is it new to the Caribbean, where it has always washed ashore in modest quantities in the spring and summer, providing habitat for marine life and helping build beaches as it decays. But 2011 brought too much of a good thing. Way too much. Without warning that year, sargassum suddenly swamped shorelines. It piled several feet high on some beaches. It stank like rotten eggs as it decomposed. It shut down resorts, dealing a major blow to a tourism sector in some areas of the Caribbean still struggling to recover from the 2008-2009 global recession. It gave coastal residents headaches, nausea and respiratory problems. It disrupted turtle nesting sites and threatened reefs and mangroves. As sargassum continued to flood the Caribbean and the western coast of Africa 8,000 miles away, scientists made a surprising discovery. Historically, most of the seasonal influx in the Caribbean had come from a two-million-square-mile gyre in the northern Atlantic Ocean: the Sargasso Sea.“The Sargasso [Sea] has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s an ecosystem that was perfect, so to speak,” said Dominican Republic oceanographer Elena Martinez. “It was there surrounded by four oceans gyres, or currents, that kept it perfect.”But scientists soon learned that most of the new Caribbean influx wasn’t coming from the Sargasso Sea anymore: It was coming from a new sargassum ecosystem that had formed in the southern Atlantic Ocean. The area dubbed the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt in a 2019 article in Science is now visible from space, and its length often exceeds 5,000 miles, according to scientists who use satellites to track it. Its cause is still debated. Sargassum researcher Dr. Brian Lapointe sees the Atlantic belt as a global version of a smaller bloom he witnessed in 1991 that shut down a nuclear power plant and other electricity facilities along the Florida coast.Since the 1980s, the world population has nearly doubled, explained Lapointe, a professor at Florida Atlantic University. This, in turn, has led to a massive increase in the sargassum-boosting nutrients washing out of major rivers like the Mississippi in the US, the Amazon and Orinoco in South America, and the Congo in Africa.“To grow that world population, we’ve used these fertilizers; we’ve deforested along all the major rivers in the world,” he said. “The nitrogen has gone up faster than the phosphorus from all these human activities, including wastewater, sewage, from the increasing human population.” Another likely culprit is climate change. Martinez said warming waters may have disrupted the giant gyre that held the Sargasso Sea in place for thousands of years, releasing sargassum to float south and form the new belt.The new belt also receives additional nutrients from the Sahara dust that frequently blows across the Atlantic — which itself could be exacerbated by climate impacts such as the expansion of deserts as temperatures rise. Some scientists also argue that warming oceans provide a more sargassum-friendly growing environment.Experts tend to agree that the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt is here to stay — and that it is a global problem that needs a global response.‘A terrible scene for the people’That much was clear by 2018, when the belt grew to a record size that was estimated at 22 million tons and much of the Caribbean saw its worst-ever inundation. The season spurred increasing calls for a collaborative international response.The following year, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres visited St. Lucia for a July meeting of the Caribbean Community, and he took a side trip to the small fishing village of Praslin Bay.Surrounded by dignitaries, Guterres walked down a dock lined with small boats bobbing atop thick mats of sargassum, which for years had plagued fishers, sea moss farmers and other residents in the area.“So it’s a terrible scene for the people?” he asked a resident in a video posted on the United Nations website.“Yes,” the man responded. “It’s killing the fishes in the bay. The stench. It’s destroying our electronics because of the fumes.”After his visit, Guterres described his sadness on seeing a “landscape that resembled an algae desert for hundreds of meters.” Then he called for international action.“Oceans don’t know borders, nor does climate,” he said. “It is a global collective responsibility to take action now.”But that broad international action has not materialized as planned. Despite a growing patchwork of studies and projects across the region, various attempts by the UN and others to coordinate a Caribbean-wide response have been largely stalled by funding shortages, geopolitical issues, the Covid-19 pandemic and other factors.One of the most extensive efforts came about three months after Guterres’ visit to St. Lucia, when Guadeloupe hosted the First International Conference on Sargassum in October 2019. Partners at the event — where the three-year Sarg’Coop program financed by about $3.2 million in European Union funds was officially launched — included the French government, the Guadeloupe Region, UNESCO and other entities. In attendance were representatives from more than a dozen Caribbean countries and territories, as well as the US, Mexico, Brazil and France. Some progress followed. For instance, the Guadeloupe Region — in partnership with the French government, the French National Research Agency and two Brazilian agencies — launched a call for projects that enabled a dozen international studies to be carried out on the health, environmental and economic impact of the seaweed, as well as possible uses for it. Other regional meetings have been held since then as well. Last June, for instance, an European Union-Caribbean conference on “Turning Sargassum into Opportunity” was held in the Dominican Republic, and the topic was discussed the following month at a summit of the EU and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (EU-CELAC) in Brussels, Belgium. But almost five years after the 2019 Guadeloupe conference, the broader goals have not come to fruition on a regional level as envisioned, experts acknowledge. No Caribbean strategy is in place, and the region-wide warning and monitoring center envisioned at the conference has not been established.Instead, many of the actions that grew out of the Guadeloupe conference have centered mainly on the French Caribbean. Funded in part by about $66 million allocated for 2018 to 2026 by the government of France — which for decades has struggled with algae washing ashore on its European coasts — the French islands have launched some of the most extensive response efforts in the Caribbean in recent years.But even this has not been enough to protect residents.Describing Guterres’ visit to Praslin Bay as “nothing more than a photo op,” Martinique-based professor Dr. Dabor Resiere and seven other researchers claimed in a March 2023 article that the “local authorities failed to take advantage of such an important visitor to give international recognition to the sargassum phenomenon in the Caribbean.”Four years later, they added, the situation remained “unchanged.”“Despite the French government’s plans to tackle the sargassum problem, these toxic algae are continuing to inundate the coasts of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana in ever-greater volumes,” the researchers wrote in the Journal of Global Health, adding, “Today, there is no national and international consensus on facing this public health problem. There is no Caribbean network or a broad consensus to advance research at this level.”Even Praslin Bay saw scant relief in the years after it welcomed the UN secretary general. In 2022, St. Lucian sargassum researcher Dr. Bethia Thomas produced videos about the village and two other nearby communities as part of her doctoral thesis. In each video, several residents listed complaints ranging from breathing problems to fisheries destruction to corroding jewelry.“It affects how I breathe, and I also think it affects the children and the way that they function, because sometimes they’re so moody and they cannot sit and do the activities because it’s so awful,” a teacher says in the video of Praslin Bay. “And I think it’s affecting us mentally.”Concerns about sargassum’s effects on the mental health of coastal residents and workers were noted in a September 2023 report by the 34-member Western Central Atlantic Fishery Commission. “The unpleasant odor, the deterioration of their environment, lack of access to the beaches for relaxation, uncertainty about the future, increase in physical ailments such as respiratory illness and skin rashes, and concerns about other potential health risks, among other things, will naturally affect mental health,” stated the commission, a regional fisheries body established under the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. However, the report added that such mental health impacts are not currently being studied. In the absence of a regional strategy, national sargassum management plans have been developed in most countries and territories in the Caribbean, including eight through grant-funded projects affiliated with the University of the West Indies in St. Lucia, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, BVI, Anguilla and Montserrat. But few have been officially adopted at the government level, and even fewer are adequately funded or closely followed.“Sometimes the small communities get left behind,” Thomas said. “Maybe not intentionally, but in small island developing states with limited resources, you have to prioritize. And perhaps other things — like building a new hospital and constructing new roads, new schools — might take precedence over developing a sargassum management plan.”Partly as a result, sargassum responses can vary dramatically from island to island. But in probing major influxes in six Caribbean countries and territories last year, CPI found one constant: people are suffering.Negligible investment from polluting countries As residents experience health and economic consequences, Caribbean leaders often complain about a shortage of money to deal with the crisis. Local funds, they note, are tied up with many competing priorities, including handling climate-related impacts like hurricanes, droughts and flooding. They also say that the cost of the sargassum crisis should be shouldered in part by the larger countries mostly responsible for it, but that accessing international climate financing for the purpose is not easy. A CPI review of projects funded by the Global Environment Facility and by members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development between 2000 and 2021 found out that of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on climate change projects in the world, less than $7 million went to address sargassum-related issues. About 89% of those funds, or $6 million, were spent in the Caribbean. But for many non-independent islands, the problem is compounded by a political status that renders them ineligible for most climate financing.“We have no access to global funds: Resilience fund, the loss-and-damage fund,” said BVI Health and Social Development Minister Vincent Wheatley, whose home overlooks the Virgin Gorda desalination plant that was recently damaged by sargassum.At the annual UN Climate Change Conferences, he explained, overseas territories are not parties and don’t have their own seat at the negotiating table.“We fall under the [United Kingdom],” he said. “So whatever the UK negotiates, it will pass on to us.”Therefore, he said, the BVI and other overseas territories have been in separate negotiations with the UK.“We banded together to petition the UK to carve out a specific fund for [its] overseas territories,” he said, adding that these discussions are ongoing and include sargassum.A lack of funding and regional coordination has also stymied efforts to monetise the seaweed by finding a large-scale sustainable use for it.“Even though there are so many things you can make with sargassum, the actual amount of sargassum that is used for products is still very low,” said Dr. Franziska Elmer, a sargassum researcher based in Mexico.Sargassum plan proposed at COP28 in DubaiThe 2023 sargassum bloom in the Caribbean had mostly abated by Dec. 2, when Gustave dit Duflo, the French Biodiversity Office president, stood at a podium 8,000 miles away during a side event at the COP28 meeting in Dubai.As dignitaries looked on, she issued a stark warning about sargassum.“It is a very invasive and aggressive phenomenon, and through all the Caribbean it affects tourism, and all the economies of the region are based on biodiversity and tourism,” she told those gathered at the French pavilion on the sidelines of the conference. “The Caribbean has a lot of hot-spots of biodiversity. So if we don’t act, in 20 years this marine biology, including the reef, will disappear from our coast.”She then explained the French government’s proposal to address the issue. The program, she said, has four prongs: forming an international coalition to better understand the problem and its causes; addressing sargassum in international forums like the COP of Biodiversity; acting in the framework of the Cartagena Convention; and working with the EU to support the continuation of the regional Sarg’Coop project launched during the 2019 conference in Guadeloupe. The French government has presented the proposal as an unprecedented move at COP 28, with the aim of placing the sargassum issue on one of the high-level panels of the United Nations Conference on the Oceans to be held in Nice, France, in June 2025.Such collaboration is essential, according to Gustave dit Duflo.“We manage sargassum at a local level, but this is not a phenomenon of an island. It is the whole basin of the Caribbean and a part of the Atlantic,” she said. “This is why all the countries that are impacted, we need to create an international coalition to be able to find means and ways to act.”Since COP28, the Netherlands and its overseas countries and territories decided to join the international program proposed by France alongside Costa Rica, Mexico, Dominican Republic and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, Gustave dit Duflo told CPI.A meeting will be held soon with the European Commission to define the project’s legal guidelines and financing, she said. Also at COP 28, the EU and the government of the Dominican Republic co-organised a related panel at the Dominican Republic pavilion, where they launched an initiative to “turn sargassum into an economic opportunity” by tapping the EU-Latin America and the Caribbean Global Gateway Investment Agenda. To succeed, such projects will need to build on work that came out of efforts like the 2019 conference in Guadeloupe — and overcome the challenges that delayed them.Since early 2019, for instance, Météo France, the French weather service, has been operating a sargassum monitoring and detection service in the French West Indies and French Guiana. But so far, these efforts have not expanded into the regional center envisioned at the 2019 conference despite various monitoring systems launched in recent years, such as the Jamaica Early Advisory System, the regional CARICOOS tracker in Puerto Rico, and the Satellite-based Sargassum Watch System at the University of South Florida. The Sarg’Coop program launched at the 2019 conference also planned to replicate work done in Martinique, which in 2015 had set up a hydrogen sulfide and ammonia monitoring system that was later developed into a large-scale measurement network and extended into Guadeloupe in 2018. Under Sarg’Coop, the Martinique-based research institute Madininair was given responsibility for supporting St. Lucia, Dominica, Tobago, Cuba and Mexico in preparing similar networks. But the Covid-19 pandemic delayed progress, and only recently did the effort get back on track with work carried out in each of those countries.Asked about the past obstacles to implementing a common international strategy, Gustave dit Duflo, also a lecturer in neuroscience at the University of the West Indies, pointed to geopolitics. As one example, she cited the May 2023 summit of the Association of Caribbean States in Guatemala. The summit discussions, she said, were largely dominated by the conflict in Ukraine as countries in the region debated the issue of supporting Russia or the United States. Regional collaboration has also been hindered by legislative differences across borders, according to the scientist. Guadeloupe senator Dominique Théophile made a similar observation when he was commissioned to conduct a study on sargassum management strategies in the Caribbean ahead of the 2019 conference. After several trips to St. Lucia, the Dominican Republic and Mexico, he found that the most successful area management plans were carried out by major hotel groups on a local scale.But such strategies often could not be deployed throughout the entire Caribbean.For instance, health and environmental laws in French and other European territories precluded a practice that is common elsewhere in the region — spreading sargassum behind beaches — because of the possibility that the seaweed could contain arsenic and other heavy metals that could affect the ocean or groundwater.Because of such laws, Théophile explained, the French sargassum management strategy attaches heightened importance to health and environmental impacts. Often for financial reasons, other countries’ initiatives don’t address such environmental and health considerations in corresponding detail, he said.As countries work to rectify such issues and establish an international response, time is of the essence for residents of the coastal Caribbean.Shortly after the COP28 drew to a close, scientists at the University of South Florida estimated the sargassum floating in the tropical Atlantic Ocean at about five million metric tons, compared to a December average of about two million. By February, the mass had increased to some nine million tons — the second highest quantity ever recorded for the month.In other words, another record-setting sargassum season could have just started.Reporters Rafael René Díaz Torres (Centro de Periodismo Investigativo), Mariela Mejía (Diario Libre), and Hassel Fallas (La Data Cuenta) collaborated in this investigation. This investigation is the result of a fellowship awarded by the Center for Investigative Journalism’s Training Institute and was made possible in part with the support of Open Society Foundations.



This is a republishing collaboration with Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, where this originally published. See the full series, Caribbean People at Risk from Sargassum Invasion.


Schools evacuated due to toxic gas. Smelly tap water at home. Tourist operators and fishers struggling to stay in business. Job losses. Power outages affecting tens of thousands of people at a time. Dangerous health problems. Even lives lost.

To read a version of this story in Spanish click here. Haz clic aquí para leer este reportaje en español.

Such crises were some of the consequences of sargassum in the islands of the Caribbean in 2023, and they have become common in the region since 2011 when massive blooms began inundating the shorelines in the spring and summer months.

On April 18, 2023 in Guadeloupe, the air-quality monitoring agency Gwad’Air advised vulnerable people to leave some areas because of toxic levels of gas produced by sargassum. Six weeks later, about 600 miles to the northwest, sargassum blocked an intake pipe at an electricity plant at Punta Catalina in the Dominican Republic. One of the facility’s units was forced to temporarily shut down, and a 20-year-old diver named Elías Poling later drowned while trying to fix the problem.


sargassum

In Jamaica, during the months of July and August, fishers found themselves struggling through one more season as floating sargassum blocked their small boats and diminished their catch.

“Sometimes, the boats can’t even come into the creek,” said Jamaican fisherman Richard Osbourne. “It blocks the whole channel.”

In the British Virgin Islands (BVI), most of Virgin Gorda’s 4,000 residents had to deal with sporadic water shutoffs and odorous tap water for weeks after sargassum was sucked into their main desalination plant last August.

And in Puerto Rico, a highly unusual late-season influx inundated the beaches of the Aguadilla area for the first time, leaving residents like Christian Natal and many others out of work for a week when it shut down businesses including the jet ski rental company that employs him.


sargassum

These victims are among thousands of people hurt by sargassum blooms last year alone in the Caribbean, where about 70% of the population of around 44 million lives near the coast, according to the World Bank.

Scientists blame the explosive growth of the seaweed on global pollution, climate change, and other international problems that Caribbean islands did little to cause and lack the political power to resolve.

“Seaweed must be seen as an impact of global warming, with the opening up of the right to compensation on the grounds that we are small, vulnerable islands,” said Sylvie Gustave dit Duflo, the vice-president of the Guadeloupe Region in charge of environmental issues and president of the French Biodiversity Office.

She added that the countries of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) — which include 15 member states and five associate members that are territories or colonies — recorded economic losses of about $102 million due to sargassum in 2022 alone.

“These figures do not take into account the losses recorded in all the other Caribbean countries, including the French islands,” she said. Nor do they take into account yearly costs of beach cleaning estimated to be as high as an additional $210 million.


sargassum

Gustave dit Duflo and other experts say the global problem requires a global response. But so far, the Caribbean has failed to coordinate even a region-wide strategy, and the international community has largely turned a blind eye. National-level responses — which in most Caribbean countries include a draft management strategy that hasn’t been officially adopted or adequately funded — have done little to take up the slack.

Most sargassum influxes are predictable, and the worst impacts are often preventable. But again and again, Caribbean governments have waited to react until the crisis stage. And even then, the responses have often focused on protecting the tourism industry while other groups, such as local communities or fishers, are left behind.

As a result, residents’ health, livelihood and natural environment have been endangered, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on reactive emergency responses that experts say could have been better spent on prevention, planning and mitigation.

At the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28) last December in Dubai, Gustave dit Duflo helped unveil a French proposal for the sort of international response she says is urgently needed. It includes forming a global coalition to better understand the problem, ensuring that sargassum is on the agenda of major international forums, and continuing previous work in partnership with the European Union, among other measures.

But to implement the proposal, governments in the Caribbean and further abroad will have to overcome hurdles that have previously stymied cooperation, including political and legislative differences, funding shortages, and debate about whether to prioritize health, the environment, the economy, or other areas.

In the meantime, sargassum has already started to arrive on the Caribbean’s shores once again. And once again, the region is not ready.

The ‘Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt’


sargassum

Sargassum is not a bad thing in itself. Nor is it new to the Caribbean, where it has always washed ashore in modest quantities in the spring and summer, providing habitat for marine life and helping build beaches as it decays.

But 2011 brought too much of a good thing. Way too much.

Without warning that year, sargassum suddenly swamped shorelines. It piled several feet high on some beaches. It stank like rotten eggs as it decomposed. It shut down resorts, dealing a major blow to a tourism sector in some areas of the Caribbean still struggling to recover from the 2008-2009 global recession. It gave coastal residents headaches, nausea and respiratory problems. It disrupted turtle nesting sites and threatened reefs and mangroves.


sargassum

As sargassum continued to flood the Caribbean and the western coast of Africa 8,000 miles away, scientists made a surprising discovery. Historically, most of the seasonal influx in the Caribbean had come from a two-million-square-mile gyre in the northern Atlantic Ocean: the Sargasso Sea.

“The Sargasso [Sea] has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s an ecosystem that was perfect, so to speak,” said Dominican Republic oceanographer Elena Martinez. “It was there surrounded by four oceans gyres, or currents, that kept it perfect.”

But scientists soon learned that most of the new Caribbean influx wasn’t coming from the Sargasso Sea anymore: It was coming from a new sargassum ecosystem that had formed in the southern Atlantic Ocean.

The area dubbed the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt in a 2019 article in Science is now visible from space, and its length often exceeds 5,000 miles, according to scientists who use satellites to track it.

Its cause is still debated. Sargassum researcher Dr. Brian Lapointe sees the Atlantic belt as a global version of a smaller bloom he witnessed in 1991 that shut down a nuclear power plant and other electricity facilities along the Florida coast.

Since the 1980s, the world population has nearly doubled, explained Lapointe, a professor at Florida Atlantic University. This, in turn, has led to a massive increase in the sargassum-boosting nutrients washing out of major rivers like the Mississippi in the US, the Amazon and Orinoco in South America, and the Congo in Africa.

“To grow that world population, we’ve used these fertilizers; we’ve deforested along all the major rivers in the world,” he said. “The nitrogen has gone up faster than the phosphorus from all these human activities, including wastewater, sewage, from the increasing human population.”

Another likely culprit is climate change. Martinez said warming waters may have disrupted the giant gyre that held the Sargasso Sea in place for thousands of years, releasing sargassum to float south and form the new belt.


environmental justice sargassum

The new belt also receives additional nutrients from the Sahara dust that frequently blows across the Atlantic — which itself could be exacerbated by climate impacts such as the expansion of deserts as temperatures rise. Some scientists also argue that warming oceans provide a more sargassum-friendly growing environment.

Experts tend to agree that the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt is here to stay — and that it is a global problem that needs a global response.

‘A terrible scene for the people’


That much was clear by 2018, when the belt grew to a record size that was estimated at 22 million tons and much of the Caribbean saw its worst-ever inundation. The season spurred increasing calls for a collaborative international response.

The following year, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres visited St. Lucia for a July meeting of the Caribbean Community, and he took a side trip to the small fishing village of Praslin Bay.

Surrounded by dignitaries, Guterres walked down a dock lined with small boats bobbing atop thick mats of sargassum, which for years had plagued fishers, sea moss farmers and other residents in the area.

“So it’s a terrible scene for the people?” he asked a resident in a video posted on the United Nations website.

“Yes,” the man responded. “It’s killing the fishes in the bay. The stench. It’s destroying our electronics because of the fumes.”

After his visit, Guterres described his sadness on seeing a “landscape that resembled an algae desert for hundreds of meters.”

Then he called for international action.


United Nations sargassum

“Oceans don’t know borders, nor does climate,” he said. “It is a global collective responsibility to take action now.”

But that broad international action has not materialized as planned. Despite a growing patchwork of studies and projects across the region, various attempts by the UN and others to coordinate a Caribbean-wide response have been largely stalled by funding shortages, geopolitical issues, the Covid-19 pandemic and other factors.

One of the most extensive efforts came about three months after Guterres’ visit to St. Lucia, when Guadeloupe hosted the First International Conference on Sargassum in October 2019. Partners at the event — where the three-year Sarg’Coop program financed by about $3.2 million in European Union funds was officially launched — included the French government, the Guadeloupe Region, UNESCO and other entities. In attendance were representatives from more than a dozen Caribbean countries and territories, as well as the US, Mexico, Brazil and France.

Some progress followed. For instance, the Guadeloupe Region — in partnership with the French government, the French National Research Agency and two Brazilian agencies — launched a call for projects that enabled a dozen international studies to be carried out on the health, environmental and economic impact of the seaweed, as well as possible uses for it.

Other regional meetings have been held since then as well. Last June, for instance, an European Union-Caribbean conference on “Turning Sargassum into Opportunity” was held in the Dominican Republic, and the topic was discussed the following month at a summit of the EU and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (EU-CELAC) in Brussels, Belgium.

But almost five years after the 2019 Guadeloupe conference, the broader goals have not come to fruition on a regional level as envisioned, experts acknowledge. No Caribbean strategy is in place, and the region-wide warning and monitoring center envisioned at the conference has not been established.


sargassum

Instead, many of the actions that grew out of the Guadeloupe conference have centered mainly on the French Caribbean. Funded in part by about $66 million allocated for 2018 to 2026 by the government of France — which for decades has struggled with algae washing ashore on its European coasts — the French islands have launched some of the most extensive response efforts in the Caribbean in recent years.

But even this has not been enough to protect residents.

Describing Guterres’ visit to Praslin Bay as “nothing more than a photo op,” Martinique-based professor Dr. Dabor Resiere and seven other researchers claimed in a March 2023 article that the “local authorities failed to take advantage of such an important visitor to give international recognition to the sargassum phenomenon in the Caribbean.”

Four years later, they added, the situation remained “unchanged.”

“Despite the French government’s plans to tackle the sargassum problem, these toxic algae are continuing to inundate the coasts of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana in ever-greater volumes,” the researchers wrote in the Journal of Global Health, adding, “Today, there is no national and international consensus on facing this public health problem. There is no Caribbean network or a broad consensus to advance research at this level.”

Even Praslin Bay saw scant relief in the years after it welcomed the UN secretary general.

In 2022, St. Lucian sargassum researcher Dr. Bethia Thomas produced videos about the village and two other nearby communities as part of her doctoral thesis. In each video, several residents listed complaints ranging from breathing problems to fisheries destruction to corroding jewelry.

“It affects how I breathe, and I also think it affects the children and the way that they function, because sometimes they’re so moody and they cannot sit and do the activities because it’s so awful,” a teacher says in the video of Praslin Bay. “And I think it’s affecting us mentally.”

Concerns about sargassum’s effects on the mental health of coastal residents and workers were noted in a September 2023 report by the 34-member Western Central Atlantic Fishery Commission. “The unpleasant odor, the deterioration of their environment, lack of access to the beaches for relaxation, uncertainty about the future, increase in physical ailments such as respiratory illness and skin rashes, and concerns about other potential health risks, among other things, will naturally affect mental health,” stated the commission, a regional fisheries body established under the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.

However, the report added that such mental health impacts are not currently being studied.

In the absence of a regional strategy, national sargassum management plans have been developed in most countries and territories in the Caribbean, including eight through grant-funded projects affiliated with the University of the West Indies in St. Lucia, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, BVI, Anguilla and Montserrat.

But few have been officially adopted at the government level, and even fewer are adequately funded or closely followed.


sargassum

“Sometimes the small communities get left behind,” Thomas said. “Maybe not intentionally, but in small island developing states with limited resources, you have to prioritize. And perhaps other things — like building a new hospital and constructing new roads, new schools — might take precedence over developing a sargassum management plan.”

Partly as a result, sargassum responses can vary dramatically from island to island.

But in probing major influxes in six Caribbean countries and territories last year, CPI found one constant: people are suffering.

Negligible investment from polluting countries


As residents experience health and economic consequences, Caribbean leaders often complain about a shortage of money to deal with the crisis. Local funds, they note, are tied up with many competing priorities, including handling climate-related impacts like hurricanes, droughts and flooding.

They also say that the cost of the sargassum crisis should be shouldered in part by the larger countries mostly responsible for it, but that accessing international climate financing for the purpose is not easy.

A CPI review of projects funded by the Global Environment Facility and by members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development between 2000 and 2021 found out that of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on climate change projects in the world, less than $7 million went to address sargassum-related issues. About 89% of those funds, or $6 million, were spent in the Caribbean.


But for many non-independent islands, the problem is compounded by a political status that renders them ineligible for most climate financing.

“We have no access to global funds: Resilience fund, the loss-and-damage fund,” said BVI Health and Social Development Minister Vincent Wheatley, whose home overlooks the Virgin Gorda desalination plant that was recently damaged by sargassum.


sargassum

At the annual UN Climate Change Conferences, he explained, overseas territories are not parties and don’t have their own seat at the negotiating table.

“We fall under the [United Kingdom],” he said. “So whatever the UK negotiates, it will pass on to us.”

Therefore, he said, the BVI and other overseas territories have been in separate negotiations with the UK.

“We banded together to petition the UK to carve out a specific fund for [its] overseas territories,” he said, adding that these discussions are ongoing and include sargassum.

A lack of funding and regional coordination has also stymied efforts to monetise the seaweed by finding a large-scale sustainable use for it.

“Even though there are so many things you can make with sargassum, the actual amount of sargassum that is used for products is still very low,” said Dr. Franziska Elmer, a sargassum researcher based in Mexico.

Sargassum plan proposed at COP28 in Dubai


The 2023 sargassum bloom in the Caribbean had mostly abated by Dec. 2, when Gustave dit Duflo, the French Biodiversity Office president, stood at a podium 8,000 miles away during a side event at the COP28 meeting in Dubai.

As dignitaries looked on, she issued a stark warning about sargassum.

“It is a very invasive and aggressive phenomenon, and through all the Caribbean it affects tourism, and all the economies of the region are based on biodiversity and tourism,” she told those gathered at the French pavilion on the sidelines of the conference. “The Caribbean has a lot of hot-spots of biodiversity. So if we don’t act, in 20 years this marine biology, including the reef, will disappear from our coast.”


She then explained the French government’s proposal to address the issue. The program, she said, has four prongs: forming an international coalition to better understand the problem and its causes; addressing sargassum in international forums like the COP of Biodiversity; acting in the framework of the Cartagena Convention; and working with the EU to support the continuation of the regional Sarg’Coop project launched during the 2019 conference in Guadeloupe.

The French government has presented the proposal as an unprecedented move at COP 28, with the aim of placing the sargassum issue on one of the high-level panels of the United Nations Conference on the Oceans to be held in Nice, France, in June 2025.

Such collaboration is essential, according to Gustave dit Duflo.

“We manage sargassum at a local level, but this is not a phenomenon of an island. It is the whole basin of the Caribbean and a part of the Atlantic,” she said. “This is why all the countries that are impacted, we need to create an international coalition to be able to find means and ways to act.”

Since COP28, the Netherlands and its overseas countries and territories decided to join the international program proposed by France alongside Costa Rica, Mexico, Dominican Republic and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, Gustave dit Duflo told CPI.

A meeting will be held soon with the European Commission to define the project’s legal guidelines and financing, she said.

Also at COP 28, the EU and the government of the Dominican Republic co-organised a related panel at the Dominican Republic pavilion, where they launched an initiative to “turn sargassum into an economic opportunity” by tapping the EU-Latin America and the Caribbean Global Gateway Investment Agenda.

To succeed, such projects will need to build on work that came out of efforts like the 2019 conference in Guadeloupe — and overcome the challenges that delayed them.

Since early 2019, for instance, Météo France, the French weather service, has been operating a sargassum monitoring and detection service in the French West Indies and French Guiana. But so far, these efforts have not expanded into the regional center envisioned at the 2019 conference despite various monitoring systems launched in recent years, such as the Jamaica Early Advisory System, the regional CARICOOS tracker in Puerto Rico, and the Satellite-based Sargassum Watch System at the University of South Florida.

The Sarg’Coop program launched at the 2019 conference also planned to replicate work done in Martinique, which in 2015 had set up a hydrogen sulfide and ammonia monitoring system that was later developed into a large-scale measurement network and extended into Guadeloupe in 2018.

Under Sarg’Coop, the Martinique-based research institute Madininair was given responsibility for supporting St. Lucia, Dominica, Tobago, Cuba and Mexico in preparing similar networks. But the Covid-19 pandemic delayed progress, and only recently did the effort get back on track with work carried out in each of those countries.

Asked about the past obstacles to implementing a common international strategy, Gustave dit Duflo, also a lecturer in neuroscience at the University of the West Indies, pointed to geopolitics. As one example, she cited the May 2023 summit of the Association of Caribbean States in Guatemala. The summit discussions, she said, were largely dominated by the conflict in Ukraine as countries in the region debated the issue of supporting Russia or the United States.

Regional collaboration has also been hindered by legislative differences across borders, according to the scientist.


Guadeloupe senator Dominique Théophile made a similar observation when he was commissioned to conduct a study on sargassum management strategies in the Caribbean ahead of the 2019 conference. After several trips to St. Lucia, the Dominican Republic and Mexico, he found that the most successful area management plans were carried out by major hotel groups on a local scale.

But such strategies often could not be deployed throughout the entire Caribbean.

For instance, health and environmental laws in French and other European territories precluded a practice that is common elsewhere in the region — spreading sargassum behind beaches — because of the possibility that the seaweed could contain arsenic and other heavy metals that could affect the ocean or groundwater.

Because of such laws, Théophile explained, the French sargassum management strategy attaches heightened importance to health and environmental impacts. Often for financial reasons, other countries’ initiatives don’t address such environmental and health considerations in corresponding detail, he said.

As countries work to rectify such issues and establish an international response, time is of the essence for residents of the coastal Caribbean.

Shortly after the COP28 drew to a close, scientists at the University of South Florida estimated the sargassum floating in the tropical Atlantic Ocean at about five million metric tons, compared to a December average of about two million. By February, the mass had increased to some nine million tons — the second highest quantity ever recorded for the month.

In other words, another record-setting sargassum season could have just started.


Reporters Rafael René Díaz Torres (Centro de Periodismo Investigativo), Mariela Mejía (Diario Libre), and Hassel Fallas (La Data Cuenta) collaborated in this investigation.

This investigation is the result of a fellowship awarded by the Center for Investigative Journalism’s Training Institute and was made possible in part with the support of Open Society Foundations.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

Chesapeake Bay’s oysters make a steady comeback

The Maryland mollusks have survived decades of overharvesting, disease and drought.

For the fifth year in a row, the oyster population in the Chesapeake Bay is doing well after decades of combating drought, disease, loss of habitat and overharvesting.The Maryland Department of Natural Resources said in March that its annual fall oyster survey showed that the “spatfall intensity index” — a measure of how well oysters reproduced and their potential population growth — again hit above a 40-year median.“We seem to be making some headway,” said Lynn Waller Fegley, director of fishing and boating services for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. “With the work we’ve done to help restore oysters, and combined with the fact that we’ve been gifted with some really favorable environmental conditions, we’ve seen the oyster population trend upward.”Oyster-processing companies, oystermen, conservation groups and local fish and wildlife departments in the region have spent years trying to boost the population of oysters, which serve an important role as “filter feeders,” sifting sediment and pollutants such as nitrogen out of the water.The cleaner water in turn spurs underwater grasses to grow, while oyster reefs create habitats for fish, crabs and dozens of other species. Adult oysters can filter up to two gallons of water per hour, making them the bay’s “most effective water filtration system,” according to experts at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the health of the bay.Oysters thrive in brackish water — a mix of saltwater and freshwater. They attach and grow on hard surfaces such as rocks, piers or old shells. Too much rain lowers the salinity, while drought makes water too salty. Both situations can create conditions in which oysters can become vulnerable to disease or unable to reproduce as well.Before the 1880s, the oyster population was so healthy it could filter in a week a volume of water equal to that of the entire bay — about 19 trillion gallons — according to the bay foundation. But now it would take the vastly smaller oyster population more than a year to do the same amount.This fall, biologists in Maryland collected more than 300 oyster samples from the bay and tributaries, including the Potomac River, for their annual survey. The results were promising, experts said, given that 2023 was an unusual year for oysters because drought conditions raised the salinity in the bay.There are several other encouraging signs, experts said. The mortality rate of oysters has stabilized, their “biomass index,” which shows how oyster populations are doing over time, has been increasing for the past 14 years, and an analysis of their habitat showed continued improvements.“They’ve been hit by a pretty severe drought, then got pretty decimated by disease,” Fegley said. “They’ve been cycling back, and we’re now in a state of grace.”Another sign oysters are doing better is their “spat sets” — the process of the tiny larvae (spat) attaching to a hard surface so they can grow into mature oysters. A high number of spat equals successful reproduction. A low number means there are fewer young oysters that will grow into adults.Fegley said last year, the bay’s oysters had “epic, generational spat sets.”“Not only were there a lot of young oysters, which is a good sign of health, but they were distributed through the bay in a way that we had not seen in many years where they were farther up tributaries,” Fegley said. “We’ve had years where the conditions in the bay were just right — with a good balance of salinity levels, no disease and good reproduction.”The success of oysters is also due in part to Maryland and Virginia working over the past few years to build more oyster reefs along the bottom of the bay so oysters could grow successfully, according to Allison Colden, executive director of Maryland for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. In recent years, she said, more than 1,300 acres of oyster reefs have been replenished in both states.In the past decade, Virginia has also tried to boost its oyster population with aquaculture farms that raise oysters in cages and return their spat to natural waters. The commonwealth increased its number of oyster farms to more than 130 in 2018, up from 60 in 2013, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.Last season, Virginia harvested 700,000 bushels of oysters, one of the highest annual harvests since the late 1980s, according to Adam Kenyon, chief of the shellfish management division at the Virginia Marine Resources Commission.Those efforts, plus Mother Nature, have helped create the delicate combination oysters need to survive.“In the last five years, we’ve seen a rebound,” Colden said. “Reproduction has been higher than the long-term average, and we’re seeing more consistency in how they’re doing year-to-year, and that’s a positive sign.”For Jeff Harrison, a fifth-generation waterman who serves as president of the Talbot County Watermen Association, the changes have been like a roller coaster over the 47 years he has made a living off the bay. He’s seen diseases hit, oyster-harvesting seasons shortened, prices fluctuate and many other watermen leave the business because they couldn’t turn a profit.“I’ve seen some of the worst seasons in oystering,” he said. “We’d always have ups and downs. Now we’re seeing a steady up, and we’re hoping we have turned the corner.”

These communities are unaware they’ve lived near toxic gas for decades. Why has no action been taken?

Five facilities near schools and houses in LA County fumigate produce shipped from overseas with methyl bromide. But the air agency doesn’t plan to monitor the air or take any immediate steps to protect people from the gas, which can damage lungs and cause neurological effects.

In summary Five facilities near schools and houses in LA County fumigate produce shipped from overseas with methyl bromide. But the air agency doesn’t plan to monitor the air or take any immediate steps to protect people from the gas, which can damage lungs and cause neurological effects. In a quiet Compton neighborhood near the 710 freeway, children on a recent afternoon chased each other at Kelly Park after school. Parents watched their kids play, unaware of a potential threat to their health.  On the other side of the freeway, just blocks from the park and Kelly Elementary School, a fumigation company uses a highly toxic pesticide to spray fruits and vegetables.  The facility, Global Pest Management, has been emitting methyl bromide, which can cause lung damage and neurological health effects, into the air near the neighborhood for several decades.  Earlier this year, the South Coast Air Quality Management District asked the company — along with four other fumigation facilities in San Pedro and Long Beach — to provide data on their methyl bromide usage. But the air quality agency does not plan to install monitors in the communities that would tell residents exactly what is in their air, or hold community meetings to notify them of potential risks. Instead, the South Coast district has launched a preliminary screening of the five facilities to determine if a full assessment of health risks in the neighborhoods is necessary. But even if that analysis is conducted, the agency won’t require the companies to reduce emissions unless they reach concentrations three times higher than the amounts deemed a health risk under state guidelines, said Scott Epstein, the district’s planning and rules manager. Piedad Delgado, a mother picking up her daughter from the Compton school, said she “didn’t even know” that the hazardous chemical was being used nearby. When a CalMatters reporter told her about the fumigation plant, Delgado wondered if it was causing her daughter’s recent, mysterious bouts of headaches and nausea. “It’s concerning. We may be getting sick but we don’t know why,” she said. For about the past 30 years, the companies have sprayed methyl bromide on imported produce arriving at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to kill harmful pests. Adults and children are shown after school at Kelly Elementary School in Compton, which is near a facility that uses a highly toxic fumigant, methyl bromide. Photo by Joel Angel Juarez for CalMatters Methyl bromide, which was widely used to treat soil on farm fields, has been banned worldwide for most uses since 2005 under a United Nations treaty that protects the Earth’s ozone layer. Exemptions are granted for fumigation of produce shipped from overseas. While little to no residue remains on the food, the gas is vented into the air where it is sprayed. State health officials have classified methyl bromide as a reproductive toxicant, which means it can harm babies exposed in the womb. With acute exposure, high levels can cause headaches, dizziness, nausea and difficulty breathing, while chronic exposure over a year or longer could cause more serious neurological effects, such as learning and memory problems, according to the California Air Resources Board. “It’s concerning. We may be getting sick but we don’t know why.”Piedad Delgado, Compton Resident State and local air quality officials are responsible for enforcing laws and regulations that protect communities from toxic air contaminants such as methyl bromide, while the Los Angeles County Agricultural Commissioner issues the permits to the fumigation companies. After CalMatters reported about the facilities last month, members of Congress representing the communities demanded “greater monitoring, transparency and oversight surrounding these fumigation facilities and their toxic emissions.” “We have serious concerns about the prevalent use of methyl bromide, a toxic pesticide, by container fumigation facilities in Los Angeles County,” U.S. Reps. Nanette Barragán, Maxine Waters and Robert Garcia wrote in an April 11 letter to state and local air regulators and county and federal agricultural officials.  “Several of these fumigation facilities are located close to homes, schools, parks, and other public spaces. Our communities deserve a greater understanding of the levels of toxic emissions from these facilities, the health risks from exposure to such emissions, and the oversight processes in place to ensure all protocols are maintained at these sites,” they wrote. “Our communities deserve a greater understanding of the levels of toxic emissions from these facilities, the health risks from exposure to such emissions, and the oversight processes in place.”U.S. Reps. Nanette Barragán, Maxine Waters and Robert Garcia Even though the San Pedro facility at the Port of Los Angeles and the Compton plant use the largest volumes of methyl bromide — a combined 52,000 pounds a year — the air in nearby communities has never been tested.  The two Long Beach facilities use much less, yet state tests in 2023 and 2024 detected potentially dangerous levels in a neighborhood near an elementary school. South Coast district officials said although certain levels of methyl bromide in the air could cause health effects, it doesn’t necessarily mean immediate action is necessary.  “We don’t want to go out and unnecessarily concern folks if there isn’t (a health concern), but we are actively investigating this right now,” said Sarah Rees, the South Coast district’s deputy executive office for planning, rule development and implementation.   Global Pest Management, which fumigates in Compton and Terminal Island, did not return calls from CalMatters. An employee at the facility declined to comment. A general manager at SPF Terminals in Long Beach also declined to comment.  Greg Augustine, owner of Harbor Fumigation in San Pedro, said his company has been permitted for more than 30 years and complies with all requirements. “To protect the health of our community, the air district establishes permit conditions and we comply with all of those permit conditions,” he said. “Those are vetted by the air district…and they’re all designed to protect the health of our community.”  “To protect the health of our community, the air district establishes permit conditions and we comply with all of those permit conditions.” Greg Augustine, owner of Harbor Fumigation in San Pedro Daniel McCarrel, an attorney representing AG-Fume Services, which fumigates at facilities in Long Beach and San Pedro, did not respond to questions but previously told CalMatters last month that the company is adhering to all of its permit conditions.  High levels found in Long Beach  Back in 2019, during regionwide testing, South Coast district officials detected methyl bromide in the air near the two West Long Beach facilities close to concentrations that could cause long-term health effects. The South Coast district took no action at the time — other than to publish a large study online of all toxic air contaminants throughout the four-county LA basin. Then, several years later, the state Air Resources Board found that the two facilities — SPF Terminals and AG-Fume Services — spewed high concentrations of methyl bromide at various times throughout the year. The state’s air monitor near Hudson Elementary School in West Long Beach — which is just about 1,000 feet from the two facilities — detected an average of 2.1 parts per billion in 2023 through part of 2024. Exposure to as little as 1 ppb for a year or more can cause serious nervous system effects as well as developmental effects on fetuses, according to state health guidelines. Spikes of methyl bromide were as high as 983 and 966 ppb in February and March of 2024. Short-term exposure to 1,000 ppb can cause acute health effects such as nausea, headaches and dizziness.  But state and district air-quality officials didn’t inform nearby residents about any of the monitoring data for longer than a year — not until three months ago, in a community meeting held in Long Beach.  First: Edvin Hernandez, right, waits to pick up his son at Kelly Elementary School in Compton, which is near a fumigation plant. Last: SPF Terminals in Long Beach uses methyl bromide. High levels of the gas were found near an elementary school in West Long Beach. Photos by Joel Angel Juarez and J.W. Hendricks for CalMatters Upon learning of the test results, the Los Angeles County Agricultural Commissioner a few months ago added new permit conditions for SPF Terminals and AG-Fume Services, including shutting doors, installing taller smokestacks and prohibiting fumigation during school hours, according to permits obtained by CalMatters. But the county permits for the three San Pedro and Compton facilities, which use much larger volumes of methyl bromide, remain unchanged, with none of the protections added to the Long Beach permits. And officials still have not held any community meetings there. The agricultural commissioner’s office declined to comment on the facilities. A complex web of ‘hot spots’ rules for methyl bromide About 38% of the methyl bromide used in California for commodity fumigation is in LA County, according to Department of Pesticide Regulation data for 2022. After many Long Beach residents expressed concerns, the South Coast district assessed all nine facilities permitted to use the chemical in the region and determined that five could pose a risk to residents.  Now the agency is going through a complex process outlined under the state’s Air Toxics “Hot Spots” law, enacted in 1987. Usage data, weather patterns and proximity to neighborhoods will be used to calculate a “priority score” for each of the five facilities. If a facility’s score is high enough, then the company will be required to conduct a full health risk assessment to examine the dangers to the community. None of the scores have been released yet. Risk assessments under the air district’s rules are a complicated, multi-step process likely to take many months. Smokestacks are shown at a facility that fumigates imported produce at the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro. AG-Fume Services and Harbor Fumigation operate at this facility. Photo by Joel Angel Juarez for CalMatters And these health assessments may not trigger any changes at the facilities. It all depends on whether certain thresholds for hazards are crossed. The state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment has set guidelines, called reference exposure levels, for concentrations of methyl bromide that could cause the long-term or short-term health effects, such as respiratory and neurological damage, nausea and fetal effects, based on human and animal studies. But South Coast district officials said action isn’t triggered if methyl bromide exceeds these reference levels. Instead, the district uses a state-created “hazard index” based on them. If a facility’s hazard index reaches one — which means concentrations outside the facility have reached the reference dose and could cause harm — the company must notify the public, under a South Coast district regulation. However, the facilities will only be required to take steps to reduce emissions if the hazard index reaches three — three times the reference level that indicates potential harm, according to that regulation. Expedited action is required under the rule if the index is five times higher.   “Just because it’s above the (reference level), it doesn’t mean it’s going to cause health impacts,” said Ian MacMillan, assistant deputy executive officer at the South Coast air district. He said the reference level indicates “there’s a possibility that there could be health impacts.”  The series of escalating thresholds is designed as a balancing act between regulating facilities and protecting the public, officials said. MacMillan also said methyl bromide emissions must be considered in the context of overall air quality in the region — the entire LA basin has an average hazard index of 5.5 when considering all sources of toxic air pollutants from industries and vehicles, he said. When told about the fumigation plants and lack of air testing and risk assessments, residents contacted by CalMatters were outraged. “There’s no interest from the government to protect our health,” said Edvin Hernandez, a father picking up his 9-year-old son from Kelly Elementary School in Compton. “We’re surviving by the hand of God.” The members of Congress — Barragán, Waters and Garcia — asked air regulators to install monitors near all Los Angeles County fumigation facilities, compile inspection records, conduct health assessments in the communities and provide all of the results on a public website.  “It is egregious that communities in California are still being impacted by this harmful and unnecessary chemical,” said Alison Hahm, a staff attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is working with community members. “In addition to stopping this ongoing public health threat in West Long Beach and Los Angeles, residents are demanding accountability and remedies for the harm endured.” The methyl bromide facilities in L.A. County are subjected to a different permitting process than elsewhere in California.  That’s because in 1996, the South Coast air district and the Los Angeles County Agricultural Commissioner agreed to share responsibility for regulating fumigating facilities. The agricultural office is tasked with issuing permits and the air agency is in charge of setting emissions limits and enforcing them.   In the Bay Area, the local air district has a similar agreement with agricultural departments that originated in 1997. However, the district decided that agreement is out of date so it is now issuing permits, too. One facility in the Bay Area uses the pesticide, Impact Transportation of Oakland. In 2019, the air district assessed the health risks of that facility and modeled how the fumes spread.   In the San Joaquin Valley, new facilities or those changing their methyl bromide use are subject to a health risk evaluation before a permit is issued. Facilities permitted before the air district was established in 1992 are subject to a review like the one that the South Coast district is now launching in San Pedro and Compton. The Los Angeles Agriculture Commissioner’s office, when asked whether it conducts a risk assessment before issuing permits, declined to answer any questions. CalMatters filed a public records request seeking risk assessments, but they said they had no records matching the request.   South Coast air regulators said they and the commissioner are now considering if any changes to their agreement should be made.  Allowed to use up to a half-ton of methyl bromide a day  Fumigation of produce using methyl bromide occurs within an enclosed facility, and the produce is covered by a tarp when sprayed. The fumes are then released into the atmosphere through tall smokestacks, a process called aeration. CalMatters filed a public records request with the county agricultural office and received the five facilities’ permits for 2023 through 2025. The permits show that the two Long Beach companies are now required to take an array of new precautions to limit fumes emitted into communities that the three Compton and San Pedro families are not — even though the Long Beach ones use much smaller volumes of methyl bromide. The San Pedro and Compton plants are allowed to use up to 1,000 pounds of methyl bromide in a 24-hour period. In contrast, the Long Beach plants can use up to 200 pounds in 24 hours, and in Oakland, Impact Transportation’s permit allows only 108 pounds.  First: Pallets of produce are piled up at the outer berths at the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro. Last: A tarped area holds a tank that contains a hazardous gas, most likely methyl bromide. A fan and roof vents ventilated the area while garage doors were left open on April 8, 2025. AG-Fume Services and Harbor Fumigation operate at this location. Photos by Joel Angel Juarez for CalMatters The San Pedro and Compton facilities release fumes into the atmosphere during the daytime, except when they use an exhaust stack meeting certain height requirements, according to their permits. The two Long Beach facilities, SPF Terminals and AG Fume Services, have new, additional requirements this year: Fumigation can’t occur between 8:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. when a school is within 1,000 feet. And by the end of this month, they must replace their smokestacks with taller ones that are at least 55 feet tall, which disperse the fumes better. All doors must be closed during fumigation and aeration and fans must be used in the aeration process.  ‘We don’t have a choice’ At a ballpark on a recent day in San Pedro, Eastview Little League players took the field.  When a 13-year-old boy on the Pirates team was up to bat, his mom, Amy Shannon, cheered him on.  “Let’s go D! Deep breath boy, you got it!” she shouted.  Then she paused. Maybe she shouldn’t be encouraging her son to take a deep breath, she said. Shannon had just learned from CalMatters about the fumigation facility across the street from the baseball field. Amy Shannon, left, and Roxanne Gasparo, right, attend their children’s Little League game at Bloch Field near the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro on April 8, 2025. Both women were unaware that a fumigation facility nearby has been using a toxic gas for about 30 years. Photo by Joel Angel Juarez for CalMatters At the facility where AG Fume and Harbor Fumigation operate, located at 2200 Miner Street, it was business as usual that day. A ship was docked on one side of the Los Angeles Port berth. On the other side, hundreds of stacks of fruits and vegetables were visible through several large garage doors.  Some of the stacks were covered with plastic. A tank containing a fumigant — labeled with a hazard sign depicting a skull — was hooked up outside. Yellow smokestacks protruded from the facility.  An AG-Fume Services truck was parked near one of the garage doors. Workers wearing yellow vests and sun-protective hats closed the garage doors, but left them slightly open at the bottom.  At the baseball field, Shannon watched the game with a friend, Roxanne Gasparo. Both women grew up in San Pedro. Gasparo said she wasn’t at all surprised to learn that a dangerous gas could be in their air.   “Because it’s a port town, unfortunately, we’re used to pollution. We have the port, obviously, and all the refineries next to us,” Gasparo said. “There’s really no way to get out of it unless you leave the city, and because most of the families here are blue collar families that rely on the unions, we kind of don’t have a choice,” she added. “We just deal with it and raise our kids the best we can.” More about air pollution in port communities ‘We should be in crisis mode’: Toxic fumigant could be seeping into these communities March 21, 2025March 26, 2025 Polluted communities hold their breath as companies struggle with California’s diesel truck ban December 10, 2024December 10, 2024

Costa Rica Ghost Net Cleanup Saves Marine Life in Puntarenas

For the Oceans Foundation successfully completed the first stage of its ghost net rescue campaign in Costa de Pájaros, Puntarenas, removing approximately 15 tons of abandoned fishing nets from the seabed, enough to nearly fill a 20-ton truck, according to social media reports and foundation statements. The initiative aims to eliminate these silent killers that […] The post Costa Rica Ghost Net Cleanup Saves Marine Life in Puntarenas appeared first on The Tico Times | Costa Rica News | Travel | Real Estate.

For the Oceans Foundation successfully completed the first stage of its ghost net rescue campaign in Costa de Pájaros, Puntarenas, removing approximately 15 tons of abandoned fishing nets from the seabed, enough to nearly fill a 20-ton truck, according to social media reports and foundation statements. The initiative aims to eliminate these silent killers that harm marine life and promote sustainable fishing practices in Costa Rica’s coastal communities, a critical step toward preserving ourcountry’s rich biodiversity. Ghost nets are abandoned, lost, or discarded fishing gear that continue to trap marine life, such as fish, sea turtles, dolphins, and sharks, while damaging coral reefs and seagrass beds. Globally, an estimated 640,000 tons of ghost gear pollute the oceans, contributing to 10% of oceanic litter, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. In Costa Rica, these nets threaten iconic species like the hawksbill turtle and disrupt artisanal fishing livelihoods, exacerbating ocean pollution and habitat loss. The cleanup effort united 20 artisanal fishing families, professional rescue divers, and more than 60 volunteers, showcasing community-driven conservation. The operation was led by Captain Gabriel Ramírez of UDIVE 506, with eight fishing boats navigating the Gulf of Nicoya’s challenging currents. Reportedly, organizations including the Parlamento Cívico Ambiental, ACEPESA, Coast Guard, Red Cross, IPSA, REX Cargo, and Cervecería y Bebidas San Roque provided logistical support, transportation, hydration, and assistance with sorting and processing the recovered nets. Marine Biology students from the National University (UNA) played a key role by preparing the nets for recycling, ensuring minimal environmental impact. “Each of us can contribute to the environment. This is not for me or for you—it’s for Costa Rica, for the planet, and for marine life,” said Jorge Serendero, Director of Fundación For the Oceans. This cleanup builds on Costa Rica’s leadership in marine conservation, with over 30% of its territorial waters protected as of 2021, a global benchmark. The foundation reported a tense moment when a diver became entangled in a drifting net due to strong currents. Thanks to the quick action of his colleagues, he was freed unharmed, underscoring the risks of such operations. This campaign highlights the power of collective action in protecting marine ecosystems, a priority for Costa Rica as it expands marine protected areas like Cocos Island. Fundación For the Oceans plans additional cleanups in 2025 to address ghost nets across Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. Interested individuals can contact For the Oceans Foundation at info@fortheoceansfoundation.org or +506 8875-9393 to volunteer, donate, or learn about upcoming initiatives to safeguard the oceans. The post Costa Rica Ghost Net Cleanup Saves Marine Life in Puntarenas appeared first on The Tico Times | Costa Rica News | Travel | Real Estate.

Commercial salmon season is shut down — again. Will California’s iconic fish ever recover?

While it’s an unprecedented third year in a row for no commercially caught salmon, brief windows will be allowed for sportsfishing in California.

In summary While it’s an unprecedented third year in a row for no commercially caught salmon, brief windows will be allowed for sportsfishing in California. Facing the continued collapse of Chinook salmon, officials today shut down California’s commercial salmon fishing season for an unprecedented third year in a row.  Under the decision by an interstate fisheries agency, recreational salmon fishing will be allowed in California for only brief windows of time this spring. This will be the first year that any sportfishing of Chinook has been allowed since 2022. Today’s decision by the Pacific Fishery Management Council means that no salmon caught off California can be sold to retail consumers and restaurants for at least another year. In Oregon and Washington, commercial salmon fishing will remain open, although limited. “From a salmon standpoint, it’s an environmental disaster. For the fishing industry, it’s a human tragedy, and it’s also an economic disaster,” said Scott Artis, executive director of the Golden State Salmon Association, an industry organization that has lobbied for river restoration and improved hatchery programs.  The decline of California’s salmon follows decades of deteriorating conditions in the waterways where the fish spawn each year, including the Sacramento and Klamath rivers. California’s salmon are an ecological icon and a valued source of food for Native American tribes. The shutdown also has an economic toll: It has already put hundreds of commercial fishers and sportfishing boat operators out of work and affected thousands of people in communities and industries reliant on processing, selling and serving locally caught salmon.  California’s commercial fishery has never been closed for three years in a row before.  Some experts fear the conditions in California have been so poor for so long that Chinook may never rebound to fishable levels. Others remain hopeful for major recovery if the amounts of water diverted to farms and cities are reduced and wetlands kept dry by flood-control levees are restored.  This year’s recreational season includes several brief windows for fishing, including a weekend in June and another in July, or a quota of 7,000 fish.   Jared Davis, owner and operator of the Salty Lady in Sausalito, one of dozens of party boats that take paying customers fishing, thinks it’s likely that this quota will be met on the first open weekend for recreational fishing, scheduled for June 7-8.   “Obviously, the pressure is going to be intense, so everybody and their mother is going to be out on the water on those days,” he said. “When they hit that quota, it’s done.” One member of the fishery council, Corey Ridings, voted against the proposed regulations after saying she was concerned that the first weekend would overshoot the 7,000-fish quota. Davis said such a miniscule recreational season won’t help boat owners like him recover from past closures, though it will carry symbolic meaning. “It might give California anglers a glimmer of hope and keep them from selling all their rods and buying golf clubs,” he said.  “It continues to be devastating. Salmon has been the cornerstone of many of our ports for a long time.”Sarah Bates, commercial fisher based in San Francisco Sarah Bates, a commercial fisher based at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, said the ongoing closure has stripped many boat owners of most of their income.  “It continues to be devastating,” she said. “Salmon has been the cornerstone of many of our ports for a long time.” She said the shutdown also has trickle-down effects on a range of businesses that support the salmon fishery, such as fuel services, grocery stores and dockside ice machines. “We’re also seeing a sort of a third wave … the general seafood market for local products has tanked,” such as rockfish and halibut. She said that many buyers are turning to farmed and wild salmon delivered from other regions instead. Davis noted that federal emergency relief funds promised for the 2023 closure still have not arrived. “Nobody has seen a dime,” he said.  Fewer returning salmon Before the Gold Rush, several million Chinook spawned annually in the river systems of the Central Valley and the state’s northern coast. Through much of the 20th century, California’s salmon fishery formed the economic backbone of coastal fishing ports, with fishers using hook and line pulling in millions of pounds in good years.  But in 2024, just 99,274 fall-run Chinook — the most commercially viable of the Central Valley’s four subpopulations — returned to the Sacramento River and its tributaries, substantially lower than the numbers in 2023. In 2022, fewer than 70,000 returned, one of the lowest estimates ever. About 40,000 returned to the San Joaquin River. Fewer than 30,000 Chinook reached their spawning grounds in the Klamath River system, where the Hoopa, Yurok and Karuk tribes rely on the fish in years of abundance.  The decline of California’s salmon stems from nearly two centuries of damage inflicted on the rivers where salmon spend the first and final stages of their lives. Gold mining, logging and dam construction devastated watersheds. Levees constrained rivers, turning them into relatively sterile channels of fast-moving water while converting floodplains and wetlands into irrigated farmland.  Today, many of these impacts persist, along with water diversions, reduced flows and elevated river temperatures that frequently spell death for fertilized eggs and juvenile fish. The future of California salmon is murky Peter Moyle, a UC Davis fish biologist and professor emeritus, said recovery of self-sustaining populations may be possible in some tributaries of the Sacramento River.  “There are some opportunities for at least keeping runs going in parts of the Central Valley, but getting naturally spawning fish back in large numbers, I just can’t see it happening,” he said. Jacob Katz, a biologist with the group California Trout, holds out hope for a future of flourishing Sacramento River Chinook. “We could have vibrant fall-run populations in a decade,” he said.  That will require major habitat restoration involving dam removals, reconstruction of levee systems to revive wetlands and floodplains, and reduced water diversions for agriculture — all measures fraught with cost, regulatory constraints, and controversy.  “There are some opportunities for at least keeping (salmon) runs going in parts of the Central Valley, but getting naturally spawning fish back in large numbers, I just can’t see it happening.”Peter moyle, uc davis fish biologist State officials, recognizing the risk of extinction, have promoted salmon recovery as a policy goal for years. In early 2024, the Newsom administration released its California Salmon Strategy for a Hotter, Drier Future, a 37-page catalogue of proposed actions to mitigate environmental impacts and restore flows and habitat, all in the face of a warming environment.  Artis of Golden State Salmon Association said the state’s salmon strategy includes some important items but leaves out equally critical ones, like protecting minimum required flows for fish — what Artis said are threatened by proposed water projects endorsed by the Newsom administration. “It fails to include some of the upcoming salmon-killing projects that the governor is pushing like Sites Reservoir and the Delta tunnel, and it ignores the fact that the Voluntary Agreements are designed to allow massive diversions of water,” he said. Experts agree that an important key to rebuilding salmon runs is increasing the frequency and duration of shallow flooding in riverside riparian areas, or even fallow rice paddies — a program Katz has helped develop through his career.  On such seasonal floodplains, a shallow layer of water can help trigger an explosion of photosynthesis and food production, ultimately providing nutrition for juvenile salmon as they migrate out of the river system each spring.  Through meetings with farmers, urban water agencies and government officials, Rene Henery, California science director with Trout Unlimited, has helped draft an ambitious salmon recovery plan dubbed “Reorienting to Recovery.” Featuring habitat restoration, carefully managed harvests and generously enhanced river flows — especially in dry years — this framework, Henery said, could rebuild diminished Central Valley Chinook runs to more than 1.6 million adult fish per year over a 20-year period.  He said adversaries — often farmers and environmentalists — must shift from traditional feuds over water to more collaborative programs of restoring productive watersheds while maintaining productive agriculture. As the recovery needle for Chinook moves in the wrong direction, Katz said deliberate action is urgent.  “We’re balanced on the edge of losing these populations,” he said. “We have to go big now. We have no other option.” more about salmon ‘No way, not possible’: California has a plan for new water rules. Will it save salmon from extinction? by Alastair Bland December 16, 2024December 16, 2024 A third straight year with no California salmon fishing?  Early fish counts suggest it could happen by Alastair Bland October 30, 2024October 30, 2024

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