Cli­mate resi­li­ence and inclus­ive water access in Jamaica

Excerpt from pressreader.com

THROUGHOUT THE mid-20th cen­tury to the present, one of the fore­most global issues has been that of cli­mate change and its com­pound­ing impacts on the global pop­u­lus. Due to global warm­ing, modi­fic­a­tions in weather pat­terns have res­ul­ted in increased extreme weather events, unpre­dict­able water avail­ab­il­ity, and increased water scarcity (UNICEF, 2024). In Jamaica, an intens­i­fic­a­tion of hydro­cli­matic vari­ab­il­ity across sea­sons is being observed, mani­fes­ted as a shift in the island’s tra­di­tional rain­fall pat­terns. Over recent years, pre­cip­it­a­tion events have been char­ac­ter­ised by unpre­dict­able, short-dur­a­tion, high-intens­ity storms, which gen­er­ate rapid sur­face run­off rather than infilt­ra­tion and ground­wa­ter recharge. Sim­il­arly, the occur­rence of drought has become increas­ingly peri­odic. Unpre­dict­able rain­fall has also meant longer dry spells, plunging Jamaica into drought-like con­di­tions for months at a time. Dur­ing an inter­view with Dr Arpita Man­dal, senior lec­turer at the Uni­versity of the West Indies, Mona, she stressed that “increases in drought-like con­di­tions affect all sec­tors across the island”. The per­petual impacts of cli­mate change on Jamaica’s sub­stand­ard water dis­tri­bu­tion net­work spe­cific­ally, however, deep­ens island­wide water inequity. Water inequity is the unequal access to water resources and ser­vices shaped by social, eco­nomic, polit­ical, and envir­on­mental dis­par­it­ies, affect­ing vul­ner­able groups (Sus­tain­ab­il­ity Dir­ect­ory, 2025). As unpre­dict­able rain­fall and droughts occur more habitu­ally, impacts on water resources are inev­it­able, neces­sit­at­ing resi­li­ent and equit­able water-man­age­ment solu­tions for groups facing unique vul­ner­ab­il­it­ies.