Many natural disasters plague the Caribbean and its countries have a difficult time recovering from these disasters. Hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods happen too often throughout these countries and people and property are always at risk. Cost effectiveness must be taken into account because currently the Caribbean spends millions of dollars on disaster clean up and these disasters happen frequently throughout the Caribbean. The Caribbean needs a cost effective way to manage disasters in places that are very vulnerable as well as where people and properties are present.
The entirety of the Caribbean is made up of several small island nations located within the Caribbean Sea and therefore the Atlantic Ocean. Many of the islands depend on the benefits the ocean brings them so a vast majority of the Caribbean population has settled near or next to the coast. Even though there are several upsides from living so close to the water, this also brings about several problems since the populace is living in a flood plain. Tropical storms such as hurricanes deposit large amounts of rainfall that floods much of the inhabited areas. Caribbean nations end up spending lots of money and time on flood clean up efforts. However, there is a more cost effective alternative in designing control methods. Using past data from floods can allow countries to build prevention measures that are more cost efficient in the long run.
In places like Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica, poor choices of land use and an increase in urbanization has led to infrastructure being constructed in areas located within flood plains. Important cities and pieces of infrastructure like schools, businesses, and agricultural sites are at risk of being flooded during heavy storms and repair efforts would cost these countries. To minimize the flooding risk in these crucial places, Caribbean nations are using data from past floods to better improve their flood control methods. Using land cover maps to see the topography of certain regions along with their adjacency to rivers or other bodies of water prone to flooding can help map out the possible extent of future floods. With this knowledge, better drainage systems can be designed that can help clear water away quickly while also being more cost effective than clean up efforts.
Part of Sustainable Development Goal number 11 calls for an increase in measures to protect against disasters by increasing and improving upon infrastructure as well as making better plans for disasters. This article shows how some of the Caribbean nations are implementing this goal by using data to improve their flood measures. Throughout this article, population density maps, land cover maps, as well as maps on flood risk are used to help provide information on where floods would be likely to occur and how many people would be at risk. The authors of this article are seeking to find out how flooding can impact the economies of these countries and if being able to detect and plan for future floods through data can be beneficial to the Caribbean countries economies.
Throughout its many islands, Caribbean nations are prone to natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes. Compared to other areas throughout the world, the Caribbean suffers more disasters per a million people than anywhere else. The severity and frequency of these natural disasters ends up costing countries in the Caribbean millions of dollars in damage repairs. This coupled with the fact that many of these countries are not as financially developed as places like the US means that these natural disasters set back the growth of these Caribbean countries. The Caribbean region is very susceptible to natural disasters and many of the countries do not have fully functional systems intact to help deal with the disaster management process.
When companies look at the Caribbean to see if they want to financially support development efforts there, they take into account the risk of placing assets in a place where disasters are very prevalent. Because of the current state of the Caribbean’s disaster management, investors are hesitant in placing money into Caribbean nations. The countries of the Caribbean need to be able to design and integrate protection measures against disasters to be able to gain more money to develop further. These preventative methods entail monitoring storms as well as regulating and improving upon construction on and around disaster prone areas. Protecting the wellbeing of the population from these disasters is another factor that must be taken into account when things like policies are being created.
This article relates to Amartya Sen’s idea of human development in the fact that Sen states that people must be given social and economic freedoms in order to develop further. This article shows that people can obtain these freedoms when fear and destruction from disasters are reduced. Sustainable Development Goals numbers 11 and 8 are related to this article because cities and infrastructure must be developed as well as improving upon the financial sectors in these countries. Throughout this article, graphs and tables of disasters and their amount of deaths, damages, and population affected are shown. The authors use this to compare the Caribbean to the rest of the world to better show how much this area is affected by disasters. With all of this data, the authors are trying to show that, even though it is plagued by disasters, there are steps that can be done to better support and invest in the Caribbean to help it grow to support itself financially and post disaster.
Many of the small island nations in the Caribbean are not as financially developed as the US or Western Europe and their geographic location puts them even more at risk. The Caribbean is located near several active fault lines. This coupled with the fact that their location is prone to hurricanes means they are plagued by natural disasters that damage or displace much of the population. The earthquake in Haiti, and the subsequent tsunami that followed, caused billions of dollars in damages to homes and other parts of the country’s infrastructure. Along with the damage, much of the populace was relocated to camps or went to live with other families.
This dispersion of people ends up being problematic to humanitarian or relief efforts because with so much of the population being forced to move to find more substantial housing, it becomes difficult for aid efforts to appropriately distribute supplies because they do not know where the majority of aid is needed. In places like Haiti and the rest of the small Caribbean islands, it is difficult to locate people once they move away from big cities following a disaster. Something is needed to track citizens following disasters so that they can be located and receive aid. That something is using cell phone data to track movement patterns of individuals to see where they went prior to the earthquake and the areas they went post earthquake. The data shows that dispersion post earthquake was similar to travel before the earthquake.
Amartya Sen’s definition of human development feeds into this article and how safety is a form of freedom. People need safety to feel free and disasters minimize this safety and freedoms. This article relates to the sustainable development goal number 11 which is to build stronger cities, make them more secure, and help to keep them sustainable over time. This SDG corresponds to the article because cities in Haiti and throughout the Caribbean need to become more resilient to these types of natural disasters to improve safety and overall quality of life following disasters there. The article covers how cell phone data was used to determine where people were located or where they relocated to following the disaster. Through this article the authors look to see how cell phones can better help calculate how citizens move post disaster so that the data can be better implemented to provide support to more people.
Following a natural disaster such as Hurricane Maria, some of the population of Puerto Rico was displaced due to the hurricane and forced to leave while others came back to the country post disaster. Using Twitter data shows how residents of Puerto Rico moved around before and after the disaster. Residents were determined to be people who tweeted from in Puerto Rico for more than a year before the hurricane. Factors such as the Twitter user’s age, sex, and what area of Puerto Rico they lived in were also taken into account. Along with the residents, visitor tweets were also taken into consideration. Visitor tweets were used to see how the tourist industry was influenced by the hurricane. All the tweets were compiled to see movement of the citizens, which areas of Puerto Rico had more displacement, and where most people went after the hurricane. This article seeks to address if Twitter data alone can be used to track population movement.
Hurricane Maria had a path that went over the northern and eastern sections of Puerto Rico which are more inhabited and have a higher population density. With it, Hurricane Maria also brought higher rainfall and wind speeds through these populated areas. Because of this, the number of tweets throughout these two regions decreased as more people left the island. Twitter users who were residents of Puerto Rico were discovered to migrate more towards Florida, New York, and Texas where they were shown to have more cultural ties to. However, with this displacement, it was found that the Twitter data is more skewed towards younger people which makes sense because younger people are more likely to be using technology and therefore Twitter. Visitor tweets after the hurricane also decreased in the areas of Puerto Rico most severely affected by the hurricane while the areas not as affected remained similar to before. This data shows that the most movement came from the affected areas and not necessarily the country as a whole.
This research is helping to address the question of how people migrate before and after disasters. This allows for being able to predict where someone will go once a disaster occurs. The authors use Twitter data to describe the movement of Puerto Rican citizens as well as other graphs to show displacement and the duration of it. The authors are seeking to find out whether Twitter data alone can be used to track movement and they concluded that other datasets are needed to gain a full understanding of migration.
Disasters throughout the Caribbean region impede the progress of development in those countries by causing millions of dollars in damages as well as affecting the population of the countries. Having to rebuild following a major disaster causes Caribbean countries to put their development goals on the back burner while they reconstruct. These almost constant disasters force Caribbean nations to keep delaying development plans that will be needed going forward. In order to discover where the majority of disasters will happen and how much of the population will be affected, maps of past disaster occurrences have been created to help predict where the next disaster will most likely occur and what kind of aid will be needed post disaster.
The mapping techniques that are used divide the countries on the map into several regions that are color coded to show how many disasters have occured in the specific region from 1900 to 2007. There are also several characteristics an event must meet to be called a disaster such as a certain death toll, a certain number of affected people, as well as a state of emergency being made. The maps show that out of all the types of disasters, most of them are flooding. However, in the Caribbean, disasters from windstorms, like hurricanes, are incredibly prevalent. The maps show paths from hurricanes with a majority of them passing directly over many of the island nations of the Caribbean. Earthquakes and landslides also have their own maps with both of them having some kind of effect on the Caribbean. The final map shows the total number of natural disasters in each region of a country. Many of the Caribbean countries have colors corresponding to moderate to very high levels of disasters per area. With this data we can see that the Caribbean is vulnerable to all kinds of disasters.
This article relates to Sustainable Development Goal number 11 because of the connection of trying to reduce deaths due to natural disasters. By seeing where disasters were prevalent in the past, we can use this knowledge to build better disaster management tools there for future events as well as know where to send aid. The authors of this article use divided maps to show the number of disasters in an area to help concentrate the data and not just show the figures by country. Through this article the authors are seeking to find out, if by knowing past disasters, can future disasters be prepared for better.