As the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has announced it will support an investment financing program intended to begin addressing the effects of climate change on this country, an internationally-active coastal engineering expert has urged the government to be proactive but careful in how it selects any interventions.
Dr. Kevin Bodge, a Florida-based coastal and oceanographic engineer with over 25 years of experience consulting on coastal projects in Florida and the Caribbean, said that it may be all too easy to spend fruitlessly on climate change mitigation efforts, and the first step in addressing the challenge will be an extensive study to identify in what ways and where The Bahamas is likely to be hardest hit by sea level rise.
The IDB will support the development of an investment program to finance coastal engineering works; the establishment of data baselines which can be used to measure the extent of future impacts, and institutional strengthening in order to heighten The Bahamas' resilience to climate change.
The investment program set to be established by the Washington, D.C.-based development financing institution will build on best practices learned in the Caribbean region in the area of integrated coastal zone management, and aims to ensure that The Bahamas is able to meet a development target of 20 percent conservation of the nearshore environment by 2020.
This comes as the IDB has emphasized that the coastal zone is a "critical asset for the national economy" of The Bahamas, "harboring much of the islands' critical infrastructure in the tourism and fisheries sectors, including industrial complexes, ports, fish processing plants and tourism resorts and associated services; as well as 80 percent of the island's residential population".
The IDB, in documents issued to support the new program, said the government recognizes that future growth and diversification of the economy depends on maintaining the ecosystem and growing the resilience of economic activities that take place to coastal risks such as erosion, flooding, climate change and to biodiversity loss resulting from threats to coral reefs.
Bodge said that prioritizing which risks are greatest and can in fact be successfully managed will be critical to a meaningful program to address the threats to the Bahamian economy from climate change and sea level rise.
"I think an important part of any kind of IDB study would be to really identify what are we talking about: How severe is the problem, what is it likely to affect, in terms of your society and infrastructure, and of those what really matters?
"Sea level has been rising for centuries, and so the question is what are those (effects) that really need some attention and can be successfully mitigated through engineering measures?
"So often you get these internationally-funded programs and they want to do something important or good, so they put out relatively large pockets of money and it gets consumed by some international engineering consulting company that does something that doesn't turn out to have a lot of value," said Bodge.
The IDB's country strategy for The Bahamas for 2013 to 2017, which outlines which areas it intends to prioritize in terms of its engagement with The Bahamas in order to help advance development goals, points to climate change as a focal point.
It notes that the Bahamian government has made "several steps" towards establishing an integrated coastal zone management system and the project it will now fund and contribute technical expertise towards is intended to allow for a "timely initiative in its shift towards a sustainable economy".
Bodge suggested that knowing to what extent The Bahamas will be impacted by sea level rise in the coming decades is an extremely complicated question, as sea level rise has been found to be uneven across the globe. Traditionally, sea level rise in The Bahamas has in fact been below global averages, he added.
However, given the general trend towards sea level rise, rather than stability or depreciation, planning is certainly necessary if negative impacts are to be anticipated or offset at all.
"It's been equivalent to about eight inches over the last 100 years, or about three millimeters per year at most. There's no indication in the most recent data that in the last 10 to 20 years there has been any acceleration of that rate in the Florida/Bahamas area, although some of the data suggests there's a deceleration, though I think that is cyclical.
"Am I worried we will see The Bahamas go under water in the next 20 years? No, I'm not, but we've been watching the sea level rise in the last 100 years, it will at least continue at that rate and there's a chance it will accelerate. It could even double.
"Is it something to be worried about? Yes, we should do some planning for it; sea level has been happening for a long time."
Bodge noted that any interventions could have other knock-on side effects or ultimately be redundant and as such must be carefully planned.
"What can we do about it? There are so many things it can affect from the view point of a coastal engineer. First are the beaches and shorelines, and the beaches especially along New Providence have not been managed very much and there has been a depreciation of sand.
"To the extent that sand is disrupted by sea level rise it hurts the ability of a beach to protect itself, even without an increase in sea level they need to be protected with structures to keep sand in place.
"But if the fear is increased flooding of roads and low lying areas, if you protect those roads by sea walls, then you'll displace the beach.
"There's that aspect to look at and then as or more important is how does it affect stuff like storm water-run off, and infrastructure, flooding up through your storm drains? How does one mitigate that? That's tough; The Bahamas, like very few places, can't hold the sea back."

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