U.N. wants better disaster protection. Here’s why the Caribbean offers a lesson

When the University of the West Indies Seismic Research Center in Trinidad and Tobago first received word that the La Soufrière volcano in nearby St. Vincent and the Grenadines was showing increased activity, director Erouscilla Joseph wasted no time getting to work.

Joseph, a volcanologist, immediately assembled a team. While working to get them into the eastern Caribbean nation amid COVID-19 restrictions and no commercial flights, she also was trying to forecast the eruption while advising the island government and National Emergency Management Organization when to begin evacuations.

“We had to mobilize very, very quickly; pool as many resources as we could to get additional equipment to deploy and strengthen the network rapidly in St. Vincent,” Joseph said, recalling the uncertainty and logistical challenges in late December 2020. That’s when she had received an alert in an email from one of her observers on another island that a NASA fire information system had detected a hot spot in the vicinity of the volcano located on the northern end of St. Vincent.

“We had to prepare for the eventuality that it would transition to explosive,” Joseph said. “So we had to then start getting that message out and that preparedness down to the community level so that they would know how to respond in the event this thing went explosive very quickly.”

La Soufrière eventually erupted on April 9, 2021, sending six miles of ash into the sky. It was the first eruption in 40 years, and was followed by more eruptions. Several severe tropical storms and rains slowed down the recovery.

The response to La Soufriere, which was recognized internationally, stands as a textbook example of how early warning and community engagement minimized loss of property and lives — no one died in the aftermath of the eruption. But it is also a cautionary tale about the challenges disaster specialists everywhere face in the race to save lives as natural disasters become more frequent and more powerful.

“Nothing has changed” for the Seismic Research Center, a regional agency charged with monitoring volcano and seismic activities in the eastern Caribbean, Joseph said. Nearly two years later, and as concerns remain that another eruption could be imminent, the center is still struggling to get the funding it needs from regional governments, which profess their concerns for reducing disasters but have failed to make funding such initiatives a priority.

Last year, recognizing that vulnerable communities are increasingly being displaced by cascading climate-related events without prior alert, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for everyone in the world to be covered by a life-saving early warning system by 2027. The call was made at the COP27 climate change conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, during a meeting of government and U.N. leaders, financing agencies, Big Tech companies and business leaders.

Inhabitants of small island states, along with South and Central America, are among those who are 15 times more likely to die from climate disasters even though they’ve barely contributed to the climate crisis, Guterres declared..

“These disasters displace three times more people than war. And the situation is getting worse,” he said.

This week during a United Nations Disaster Risk Reduction conference in Uruguay, those on the front lines of both climate change and other disasters gathered to discuss Guterres’ ambitious plan — and the challenges. Only 1 in 3 people in the world are covered by an early warning system and only 90 countries have reported its use.

While the initial focus on reducing disaster risks was on climate change, the plan has also extended to geological hazards, which have had devastating consequences in Latin America and the Caribbean. The region is not just vulnerable to a frequency in droughts, flooding and intense hurricanes because of climate change, but to earthquakes and volcano eruptions.

Throughout the three-day event speakers touted the benefits of the system, and gave examples of countries — Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador — that are putting systems in place to meet the U.N.’s goal. But the experience of the Seismic Research Center shows that achieving the goal will require more than simply installing a monitor or sending out danger-pending text alerts.

“I think that there really is a lack of commitment,” Joseph said, speaking about the Caribbean, which her regional monitoring center focuses on. “I’m not saying a lack of interest. But I’m just seeing a lack of commitment by regional governments to fund.”

The start of any early warning system, said the trained geochemist, starts with investments in monitoring and expertise.

“How else are you going to have early warning systems, if you do not invest in, any monitoring... how else are you going to warn people? Joseph noted. “They’re talking about policies and adopting policies, but implementing the policies as a whole, it’s very different than agreeing.”

Joseph said the Seismic Research Center, which is supported by regional governments, continues to struggle with a budget of just over $1 million a year. That leaves little money for new technologies and investments into best practices.

“It’s nine territories, 11 islands and 17 volcanoes,” Joseph said, explaining the center’s monitoring responsibilities. One of those islands, Dominica, has nine volcanoes and no observatory station. Yet, in recent years it has been showing increased activity, raising concerns about a potential eruption.

Mami Mizutori, special representative of the U.N. Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction, said about 90% of disasters are related to extreme climate events. Specifically, early warning systems have been proven to save lives. Where they exist, there are eight times fewer deaths when populations are given 24 hours advance warning, and 30% less economic loss, she said.

“These are big numbers,” Mizutori said, acknowledging during the final day of the regional United Nations Disaster Risk Reduction gathering that leaders are not putting enough funding into domestic budgets. “What we need now is for the governments to prioritize this agenda.”

Elizabeth Riley, who heads the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency, a regional intergovernmental agency based in Barbados, said she welcomes the global focus on early warning systems because the Caribbean region, since 2017, has been putting emphasis on the need for multi-hazard early warning systems in countries.

The emergency management agency, she said, started an early warning system consortium that works collaboratively with a range of Caribbean institutions to address the lack of capacity in individual countries, helping them build a road map on how to develop early warning systems and offering guidance on needed legislation and regulations.

“We’re getting some support in terms of finances from our partners,” Riley said. “But I think the Early Warning for All initiative, because it gives now a stronger focus on the importance of multi-hazard early warning systems, it should increase for us the opportunity for financial flows.”

In St. Vincent and the Grenadines there are monitoring stations that allow seismologists to know if the volcano is going to move to an explosive stage.

“I think one of the untold success stories in the Caribbean is the excellent work that was done by the full suite of actors who supported St. Vincent and the Grenadines around the La Soufrière eruption,” she said. “And there was no loss of life. This is very unusual. When you look at volcanic eruptions around the globe, that is not the usual story. This was a real success story on application of multi-hazard early warning system in the region.”

And while the same equipment used to monitor volcanoes is also used for earthquakes, Riley said that earthquake readiness remains “an area where we need to do additional work.”

Joseph said she hopes that the focus on helping communities to be better prepared before a hazard becomes a disaster, is taken seriously. And not just by governments.

She recalls that after getting her team into St. Vincent and the Grenadines there were battles with international aid agencies, which weren’t willing to disburse assistance before the actual explosion.

“It was very difficult for the international aid and funding community to understand that, although it wasn’t an effusive eruption, it was a hazard,” Joseph said. “We couldn’t get assistance; we couldn’t get assistance to buy equipment, we couldn’t get assistance for the aid relief to prepare in advance, because everybody was like, ‘Well, nothing’s happening.’

”There was a real lack of understanding that this thing is erupting and the likelihood of it transitioning to an explosive eruption at any time was high. I really have no idea why they did not understand that message. It wasn’t heard and there was very little action,” she said. “It is just too late once it’s erupting because …there’s going to be ash, people are going to have to evacuate. And if there are no shelters ready with cots. Where will they go?”