Category Archives: Caribbean

Sir Richard Bransons newest private-island destination is officially open, according to Virgin Limited Edition.

The-125 acre Moskito Island, set in the heart of the British Virgin Islands, is the newest jewel in the Caribbean, Virgin says.

The islands accommodations are set across three estates: The Oasis Estate, the Point Estate and the Branson Estate.

The Oasis Estate sleeps up to 18 guests; with The Point facilitating 14 guests and eight children and the 11-bedroom The Branson sleeping up to 22 guests (The Branson comes with its own private beach.).

The Point and The Oasis are both new developments.

The Oasis, set on the highest point of Moskito Island, has nine rooms, including a four-story main house with everything from a swim-up pool bar to a billiards and movie room.

The Point is a cliffside villa on Moskitos Manchioneel Beach, with a massive infinity pool and broad views of the water.

In keeping with the style of Bransons other British Virgin Islands private destination, Necker Island, the island is all about enjoying nature and the BVIs marine environment.

That means a broad selection of watersports and other activities, along with options like boat excursions, spa treatments and communal spaces to enjoy time with other guests on the island.

The island has been 14 years in the making, according to Virgin.

Moskito Island is the newest, and one of the most exclusive, private islands in the Caribbean, the company says.

Both the Point Estate and the Oasis will be available for exclusive buyouts beginning Oct. 10, the company said.

For more, visit Virgin Limited Edition.

CJ

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Richard Branson's Newest Caribbean Private Island Is Open - Caribbean Journal

Hello, Friday! We're kicking off this Friday with a new kind of daily newsletter. Patch USVI is rounding up the top stories from across the Territory and delivering them to your inbox every morning. So you can stay up-to-date on the latest news, the best upcoming events, and even what folks are saying on social media. So let's get caught up on what's happening across the Territory, shall we?

First, today's weather:

A stray afternoon t-storm. High: 87 Low: 80. Saturday is going to be rainy, which is a great excuse to leave work early on Friday.

Check out these stories from across the Territory:

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Ashleigh Baldwin

About me: Hi there! I'm the Patch Community News Editor for the U.S. Virgin Islands. I'm here to provide news you can use. Do you have a news tip, question or feedback? Please contact me at ashleigh.baldwin@patch.com or 215-534-1014.

Have a news tip or suggestion for an upcoming US Virgin Islands Daily? I'm all ears. You can email me at ashleigh.baldwin@patch.com.

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Royal Caribbean Is Doubling Down On The USVI - Patch.com

The worlds island nations are the most vulnerable to climate change but also the most dependent on tourism revenue.

Come visit the Maldives, its president entreated the world at this years United Nations General Assembly, moments before switching to an impassioned plea for help combating climate change. The adjacent appeals illustrated a central dilemma for many small island developing states: their livelihoods or their lives?

The United Nations recognizes 38 member states, scattered across the worlds waters, as small island developing states grouped together because they face unique social, economic and environmental challenges.

This bloc is particularly vulnerable to climate change. This bloc is also particularly dependent on tourisma significant driver of climate change, accountable for 8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions alone, according to sustainable tourism expert Stefan Gsslingand an industry devastated by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The predicament these islands find themselves in is essentially recursive: Attract tourism for economic survival, which in turn contributes to climate change, which in turn bleaches the colorful reefs and destroys the pristine beaches that attract tourists. As is, by the end of the century, these low-lying islands could drown entirely.

The difference between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees is a death sentence for the Maldives, President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih told the U.N. General Assembly last week.

The annual summit is an opportunity for each of the international bodys 193 members to step into the spotlight on the world stage. But the Maldivesperhaps best known globally as an Indian Ocean playground for moneyed honeymooners and Bollywood celebritieshad a particularly high-profile platform this year. Its foreign minister is serving as the General Assemblys president and Solih was speaking third overall, just after U.S. President Joe Biden.

But the climate change appeals are nothing new, made year after year as these islands are pummeled by storms and the seas rise like a slow-moving killer, as Colgate Universitys April Baptiste puts it.

Baptiste, a professor of environmental studies as well as Africana and Latin American studies, researches environmental justice in the Caribbean region. She says the island states appeals had gone ignored for years because they were essentially seen as dispensable. With little land, political power, and financial capital, it was easy to overlook their plight. These are also islands with a history of exploitation that dates back centuries and states whose full-time residentsnot touristsare primarily Black and brown.

You have that layer of race, racism, marginality to take into consideration, she said. I absolutely believe thats at the heart of the conversation as to why small island developing states are not taken seriously.

People and governments have taken matters into their own hands over recent years.

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One man from the island nation of Kiribati sought refugee status in New Zealand on the basis that climate change posed an existential threat to his homeland, though he was eventually deported. This past week, Vanuatu announced it would seek to bring climate change before the International Court of Justice. Although largely symbolicany ruling would not be legally bindingthe move, as intended by the government, seeks to clarify international law.

Last month, a group of Pacific island nations, contending with encroaching saltwater that destroys crops and pollutes freshwater supplies, took the step of declaring their traditional sea boundaries would remain intact, even if their coastlines shrank beneath the waves.

Gssling, a professor at Swedens Linnaeus University School of Business and Economics, and Daniel Scott, a geography and environmental management professor at Canadas University of Waterloo, are two creators of the Climate Change Vulnerability Index for Tourism. With the aim of bringing the issue to policymakers attention, they identified the countries with tourism economies most at risk from climate change. The small island developing states made up a substantial portion of the list.

The Maldives identified this years ago and they pointed out: Were going to continue our tourism development, because thats the only way we can make money in the next couple decades before our islands are lost, Scott said.

For the small island developing states, this central climate change tension between lives and livelihood is mirrored in their response to the coronavirus pandemic. To prevent the viruss spread and save lives, they closed their borders, and their tourism-focused economies were accordingly ravaged over the past 18 months.

Mauritius isnt wholly dependent on tourism, but that sector does make up a significant amount of its foreign revenue, says the permanent representative to the United Nations for the tiny Indian Ocean island east of Madagascar. Its borders fully reopen in October, and Jagdish Koonjul said Mauritius hopes to attract 650,000 tourists between then and next summer.

Mauritius, Koonjul said, is very lucky compared to others in the bloc because of its economic diversification, relatively high land, and coral reef that prevents erosion.

But its not safe from climate change. Mauritius and other small island developing states are looking to the bigger, more industrialized countries to buy into an ambitious commitment at the upcoming United Nations climate conference in Glasgow.

We miss this train now, and we are doomed, Koonjul said.

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The scores of speeches at this years U.N. General Assembly tended to follow a rubric. They opened with pleasantries directed at the General Assemblys president and then touched on a laundry list of topics: perhaps a pet issue, but definitely conflict, coronavirus, and climate change. The rhetoric often blended together but the speeches from the leaders of the small island developing stateswith the most to lose in the near futurestood out with stark eloquence echoing Koonjul.

Will Tuvalu remain a member state of the U.N. if it is finally submerged? Who will help us? asked Kausea Natano, the prime minister of the Pacific Ocean country, on Saturday.

The states had specific asks, including immediate and significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, debt restructuring, and financial assistance, especially given the impact of the coronavirus on their tourism-dependent economies.

Industrialized countries have an obligation to assist the states most affected by climate change because they created a problem in the first instance, Gaston Browne, prime minister of the Caribbean Seas Antigua and Barbuda, said Saturday.

The same day, St. Vincent and the Grenadines prime minister Ralph Gonsalves cast the major powers actions thus far as little more than pious mouthings and marginal tinkering.

On this, humanity is at the midnight hour. Can we meet the challenge? We may not live to find out the answer if the usual continues, the Caribbean nations premier said.

Salvaging the economic fate of these countries is complex. Baptiste says theres no overarching policy aimed at retraining people whose livelihoods are vulnerable in new trades.

And Gssling argues that, while theyre not the culprits behind global warming, the small island developing states arent directly confronting the friction between climate change prevention measures and their tourism reliance.

I also think theres never been serious efforts by the [small island developing states] to actually also consider different economic sectors, because very often its been very self-evident that you would focus on tourism, you would develop for tourism, and that you, by definition, then almost would become dependent on tourism, he said. And I think the strange thingthis conflict has never been vocalized by [small island developing states].

What has been vocalized is a clarion call for substantive action taken by rich, developed countries. Now that the ramifications of climate change have reached countries that could long pretend it didnt exist, the small island developing states hope the message is finally getting through.

The poet John Donne wrote that no man is an island entire of itself. In the same vein, Solih drove home the point the island nations have been making for years: There is no guarantee of survival for any one nation in a world where the Maldives cease to exist.

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Can the Maldives and Caribbean Islands Encourage Tourism While Safeguarding the Environment? - AFAR Media

It was in 2011 that a band of seaweed longer than the entire Brazilian coastline sprouted in the tropical Atlantic, mystifying scientists as the area is known for its lack of nutrients that would feed such growth. A decade later scientists might finally have some answers, or at least some prime suspects.

A group of U.S. researchers believe they catched the perpetrator: human sewage and agricultural runoff carried by rivers to the ocean.

The science is not yet definitive. This nutrient-charged outflow is just one of several likely culprits fueling an explosion of seaweed in the warm waters of the Americas. Six scientists told Reuters they suspect a complex mix of climate change, Amazon rainforest destruction and dust blowing west from Africa's Sahara Desert may be fueling mega-blooms of the dark-brown seaweed known as sargassum.

In June 2018, scientists recorded 20 million metric tons (20 billion kilogram) of seaweed, a 1,000% increase compared with the 2011 bloom for that month.

"There are probably multiple factors" driving the growth, said oceanographer Ajit Subramaniam at Columbia University. "I would be surprised if there is one clear villain."

Still, a recent study examining the chemistry of seaweed from the 1980s up to 2019 offers the strongest evidence yet that water coming from city and farm runoff has been a major contributor to expansion of the so-called Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, which now stretches for nearly 9,000 kilometers.

That study, co-authored by biologist Brian Lapointe at Florida Atlantic University, found that sargassum collected recently in coastal waters from Brazil to the southern United States, and including several Caribbean nations, contained levels of nitrogen that were 35% higher on average than in samples taken more than three decades earlier. The findings were published in May in the journal Nature Communications.

Nitrogen is found in human and animal waste and in fertilizers. The results suggest that sewage and farm runoff that's flowing into rivers throughout the Americas and then on to the ocean is feeding offshore sargassum growth. Currents carry much of this seaweed to the Caribbean Sea, where it's bedeviling the region's tourism-dependent coastal economies.

The samples also showed, for example, a 111% rise in the ratio of nitrogen to phosphorus during the same time frame. That ratio has been nearly constant across the world's oceans going back decades. The change suggests the water chemistry has been radically altered.

The researchers singled out the Amazon River for particular scrutiny.

As global temperatures rise, scientists believe that rainstorms are intensifying in certain areas of the globe, including over the Amazon. Those storms are increasing the frequency of extreme flooding, which likely is pushing more nitrogen-rich runoff out to sea, Lapointe told Reuters, in a sequence he calls "a double whammy."

Experts note that peak Amazon River flooding pushes a plume of nutrients hundreds of kilometers out to sea in March and April, coinciding with major sargassum blooms. From there, currents push the seaweed around the coast of Venezuela into the Caribbean Sea and sometimes even farther north into the Gulf of Mexico.

Climate change is also fueling stronger hurricanes, which at sea are pulling more nutrients up from the seabed to potentially fertilize sargassum.

Scientists have also theorized that dust from the Sahara Desert, along with smoke and ash, could be contributing to the seaweed boom. As the particles are blown westward over the Atlantic Ocean, they run into clouds and get rained down as fertilizing iron and phosphorus deposits in the water.

Proving exactly how much each of these factors might be contributing to sargassum's growth will take years of funding and research. But scientists say that doesn't mean governments can't act now to reverse the trend.

"This phenomenon will continue until there is a change in public policy," said Carlos Noriega, an oceanographer at Brazil's Federal University of Pernambuco. Brazil, for example, could slow deforestation, which has led to a boom in cattle ranching that allows loose soil, manure and fertilizer to wash into rivers.

He also noted the burgeoning human population in Brazil's Amazon region. The five largest cities there have grown by nearly 900,000 people since 2010, and much of the region lacks sufficient sewage treatment.

"Treating sewage and stopping deforestation, that's the only way to control it," Noriega said.

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Anything to do with Bermuda? Caribbean seaweed mystery | Daily Sabah - Daily Sabah

Jewels Caribbean, 2230 N. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr., will be debuting an expanded CBD and Delta 8 menu beginning Saturday, Oct. 2.

The bar, restaurant and entertainment venue first debuted a selection of cannabidiol (CBD)-infused foods including jerk wings, chocolate chip cookies, coco butter cocktails and margaritas during their 4/20 Day celebration in 2019. But the items were popular enough that they continued to offer CBD-infused desserts and CBD-infused cocktail upgrades on a regular basis.

We wanted to offer a place with great ambiance where people could actually partake in the products they buy while listening to great music and no judgments, says co-owner Natasha Jules.

Thus far, most places that sell both CBD and Delta 8 are strictly retail and their edible lines are very limited. I have yet to see packaged Jerk Chicken Spring Rolls with CBD at a retail shop.

Of course, the new CBD8 Bar takes the usual offerings to a new level, adding Delta 8 options as well.

Guests can still enjoy items from the regular food menu, including choices like Jewels signature burgers, available with a choice of jerk or plain mayonnaise, lettuce, tomato and fries ($10.95); jerk chicken with rice and peas and sauteed cabbage ($13.95) along with curry fish served with rice and vegetables ($14.95) and sides like fried sweet plantains ($5).

Desserts include chocolate chip cookies, peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies and brownies ($3 each). But guests can also upgrade to CBD-infused edibles for $5.

New Delta 8 offerings include Flamin Hot Cheetos ($10, 100 mg D8); Doritos ($10, 100 mg D8); nutty nougat squares ($30, 100 mg D8), cookies ($10, 50 mg D8) and brownies ($10, 50 mg D8). Guests can also indulge in Grape Ape shots, lemonade slushies or honey buns for $6-$8.

The new CBD8 Bar will be featured every Saturday evening through the month of November. On Oct. 2, the new menu will be accompanied by Hip Hop Night with a $5 cover charge at the door.

Jewels Caribbean is open Fridays from 5 p.m. to midnight and Saturdays from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m.

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New CBD8 Bar to premiere at Jewels Caribbean this weekend - OnMilwaukee.com

The University of Bergen invites students on board the Norwegian sailing ship Statsraad Lehmkuhl on an adventurous voyage in the Caribbean and in the Pacific Ocean.

The sailing ship Statsraad Lehmkuhl left the port of Arendal in Norway in the end of August 2021 and set sail for its circumnavigation One Ocean Expedition.

During the next year and a half, the Norwegian sailing ship will be on its longest voyage ever. The One Ocean Expedition is a part of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. The main goal is to create attention and share knowledge about the crucial role of the ocean for a sustainable development in a global perspective.

The ship is equipped with modern instruments and will collect high-quality data of ocean physics, chemistry, and biology continuously throughout the journey. It will also serve as a floating university, bringing crews of students and young leaders together at different legs. High-level meetings and public events will happen during port visits.

Real-time access to data, video and stories from the ship will serve to inspire and engage not only scientists but also citizens for ocean-based action towards sustainable development worldwide. You can follow the expedition via oneoceanexpedition.com.

The University of Bergen is one of several partners to the expedition. Our researchers will use the data from the ship, and we will take students on board on two courses.

In November 2021 the course SDG313 will be conducted on board the ship in the Caribbean Sea. The field course focuses on causes, consequences, and solutions to the climate challenges.

This year, our Climate Action field course focused on SDG-13 and Agenda2030 includes a highly interdisciplinary group of students from many different countries, including Norway, North America, Africa and the Caribbean. The voyage starts in Curaao, with a stop in Jamaica and ends in Cuba. In each port the students will host local school children, who will be introduced to climate and ocean sustainability through hands-on activities on deck. In addition to the modern oceanographic and meteorological instruments onboard, we are bringing a replica of a 1000-meter-long original hemp rope. With the students we will repeat and hope to calibrate some of. the important original measurements of ocean temperature and salinity that were made during the first global oceanographic expedition in history on board the sailing vessel HMS Challenger 150 years ago, says UiB professor Kerim Hestnes Nisancioglu who is responsible for the course thought in the Caribbean.

Pacific sailing

After arriving in Havana, the ship continues, first north toward New York, before turning again and sailing south along South America, around Cape Horn in Chile, and to the port city of Valparaso, where the University of Bergen is mustering with 90 students in May 2022.

On an adventurous voyage across the Pacific Ocean, UiB takes the students on a very special semester. For four intensive months, the students will study sustainability through the course SDG200 at the same time as they live and are trainees at Statsraad Lehmkuhl.

How often do you get the opportunity to sail across the Pacific Ocean and visit destinations such as Tahiti, the Cook Islands, Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Palau? This is a fantastic opportunity, says an enthusiastic associate professor at UiB, Katja Enberg.

Interdisciplinary sustainability topic

Enberg will lead UiB's four-month stage in the Pacific Ocean and looks forward to bringing students on board the ship. The new course, SDG200, addresses knowledge from various disciplines - which is crucial to solving the challenges of the future.

Students will learn what opportunities exist to solve the sustainability challenges, and how to work together across disciplines to find solutions. Interdisciplinarity is essential to be able to solve sustainability challenges and teaching and learning in interdisciplinary groups forces us to look at the challenges from different points of view. Therefore, the course is open to students with any disciplinary background, she says.

Trainees on the ship

The voyage from Valparaso to Palau is as much as 12,000 nautical miles (over 22,000 kilometers). Along the way, the students will be trainees on the ship, and participate in duties on board Statsraad Lehmkuhl. The ship is often far from land, and the students must therefore have good physical health (get a seafarers medical certificate before boarding) and be mentally prepared to be on a sailing ship without internet and mobile coverage over long periods of time. For example, the first leg from Valparaso to Tahiti is a full 36 days at sea without setting foot on land.

The students are divided into three shifts, each working twice four hours every day. When you are on duty, you are assigned specific tasks, such as standing at the helm, have the man over board watch, being a fire guard or galley guard - and of course hoisting up, lowering and adjusting sails! For the remaining 16 hours, the students study, rest and eat, Enberg says, and continues: Because all the students need to contribute in order to make the ship travel from one port to another, this voyage is a perfect parallel to how we need to tackle the sustainability challenges if some are neglecting their responsibilities, everyone will suffer.

This article was first published on October 1 by University of Bergen.

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Bergen: Floating university to gather ocean data from Norway to Caribbean - Science Business

By Cassandra Garrison, Sarah Marsh and Jake Spring

PUERTO MORELOS, Mexico Sept 29 (Reuters) - As the sun rises in Mexicos Quintana Roo state, home to the white sandy beaches of Cancun and Tulum, Rear Admiral Alejandro Lopez Zenteno readies his sailors for another day of dragging rafts of brown seaweed to shore and out of view of cocktail-sipping tourists.

Zenteno heads the operation for the Mexican Navy, which coordinates with the state and local governments to protect an area visitor trade that was valued at more than $15 billion annually before the coronavirus pandemic hit, according to Quintana Roos tourism secretariat.

When it washes ashore, the plant - known as sargassum - turns black and emits a sewage-like stench so powerful it has been known to make travelers ill. It attracts insects and turns the areas famed turquoise snorkeling waters a sickly brown.

And it just keeps coming. Since 2011, seaweed here and across the Caribbean has exploded for reasons scientists suspect is related to climate change but dont yet fully understand.

In Quintana Roo alone, Mexicos Navy since March has removed more than 37,000 tons of sargassum -- more than the weight of three Eiffel Towers -- from beaches and surrounding waters.

"We dont expect this to end anytime soon, Zenteno said onboard a seaweed-clearing ship known as a sargacero, one of 12 deployed by the Navy.

Entrepreneurs across the region, meanwhile, are searching for ways to monetize the muck. Theyre experimenting with seaweed-based products including animal feed, fuel, construction material - even signature cocktails.

Sargassum is seen as a nuisance, said Srinivasa Popuri, an environmental scientist in Barbados with the University of the West Indies. He views the Caribbean as blessed with a resource that grows naturally and requires no land or other inputs to flourish.

Popuri is working on extracting substances from seaweed that could have applications for the pharmaceutical, medical and food industries.

Story continues

Whether such efforts prove viable remains to be seen. Commercializing seaweed can be challenging given the expense of collecting it.

Still, creativity is blossoming along with the seaweed.

SARGASSUM SOLUTIONS

One of the biggest potential uses lies in demand for so-called alginates, a biomaterial extracted from brown seaweed, which is a common ingredient in food thickeners, wound care and waterproofing agents for its gel-like properties.

The global market in 2020 was worth almost $610 million, a figure thats expected to grow to $755 million by 2027, according to consulting firm Global Market Insights.

Omar Vazquez, meanwhile, is building houses.

Vazquez, a nursery owner in the seaside town of Puerto Morelos near Cancun, for several years had used sargassum as a fertilizer. In 2018, he came up with the idea of turning it into a construction material. He said the resulting sargassum bricks, baked in the sun, allow him to build a house 60% cheaper than if he were to use traditional cement blocks.

Now dubbed Seor Sargazo by his neighbors, Vazquez said he has built and donated 10 such houses to local families in need. He hopes to turn his now-patented Sargablock material into a for-profit franchise.

Everyone was complaining that sargassum was stinky, sargassum is a problem. What I did was find a solution for it, said Vazquez, 45, showing Reuters around Casa Angelita, the first house he built with seaweed and which he named for his mother.

The Ritz-Carlton hotel in Cancun found a tastier use for sargassum. For a time, it served up a cocktail made with tequila, vinegar, sugar, rosemary and a syrup derived from sanitized seaweed.

Some businesses are nervous about relying on a resource with variable supply: Theres no way to know how much might grow in a year.

Others are concerned that large-scale harvests for business initiatives might lead to sea turtles and other endangered creatures being scooped up indiscriminately.

Still other efforts are waiting on scientific testing for safety. In Jamaica, entrepreneur Daveian Morrison is building a processing plant to scale up his experiments, including turning seaweed into charcoal for people to burn in lieu of firewood. He said his recipe for animal feed made from the protein-rich plant proved a hit at a local goat farm, but it needs more testing to ensure the seaweed doesnt contain dangerous levels of arsenic or other harmful substances.

In Barbados, a University of the West Indies research team is distilling sargassum along with waste from a rum distillery to make methane, which can be turned into compressed natural gas to power transportation across the island.

There is this beautiful coincidence that the ocean is producing all this biomass, said Legena Henry, a renewable-energy lecturer at the university. She said shell soon be converting her own car to run on the fuel, with the hopes of a wider rollout next June.

SEAWEED EXPLOSION

Sargassum is most famously found in the Sargasso Sea in the north Atlantic, where the seaweed has been documented for hundreds of years. How it traveled south to the tropical Atlantic is unclear.

Some scientists have theorized that the intense 2010 hurricane season may have carried a bit of it to the central western Atlantic, planting the seeds for a new sargassum belt that now stretches nearly 9,000 kilometers.

That seaweed explosion might just reflect the system going over some tipping point, said biologist Joseph Montoya at Georgia Tech University. We don't know.

Also unclear is why the Caribbean sargassum blooms have grown to such monstrous masses. Scientists say climate change, water pollution, Amazon deforestation and dust blowing in from the Sahara Desert are all likely factors.

New research published in May in the journal Nature Communications points to another suspect: Major rivers - including notably the Amazon - are pumping more human sewage and agricultural runoff into the ocean, where the nutrients are likely fertilizing the sargassum.

The University of South Florida has been tracking sargassum since 2011 and it recorded a significant uptick in 2015. In May, a record 18 million metric tons were detected by satellite in the tropical Atlantic and Caribbean. Thats up nearly 6% from the previous May record set in 2018, and up more than 800% from levels seen a decade ago, according to Chuanmin Hu, an oceanographer at the University of South Florida.

Mexicos coastline is especially vulnerable, thanks to an ocean current swirling in the western Caribbean Sea that pulls sargassum towards the nations beaches. A July 21 map by the Sargassum Monitoring Network of Quintana Roo, a non-governmental organization, showed that 28 of the states 80 beaches were experiencing an "excessive" amount of sargassum, the most severe grade.

(Reporting by Cassandra Garrison in Puerto Morelos, Jake Spring in Brasilia and Sarah Marsh in Havana; editing by Katy Daigle and Marla Dickerson)

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FEATURE-Besieged by seaweed, Caribbean scrambles to make use of the stuff - Yahoo Finance

By NAN Travel Editor

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Tues. Sept. 28, 2021: As more and more focus shifts to climate change and rising sea levels, the worlds first underwater space station is coming to the Caribbean.

Renowned aquanaut, ocean explorer and environmentalist Fabien Cousteau of Proteus Ocean Group, will launch his project, PROTEUS, in Curacao.

It is conceived as the underwater version of the International Space Station; it will be a platform for global collaboration amongst the worlds leading researchers, academics, government agencies, and corporations to advance science to benefit the future of the planet.

PROTEUS is being promoted as the worlds most advanced underwater scientific research station and habitat to address humanitys most critical concerns: medicinal discoveries, food sustainability, and the impacts of climate change.

PROTEUS is envisioned to be more than four times the size of any previously known underwater habitat, and will feature state-of-the-art labs, sleeping quarters, and a moon pool. PROTEUS will include the first underwater greenhouse, allowing inhabitants to grow fresh plant life for food, marking a unique approach to address some challenges that come with underwater living, such as not being allowed to cook with open flames. The habitat will be sustainably powered by hybrid sources including wind and solar. It will include a full-scale video production facility to provide continuous live streaming for educational programming, and delivery of augmented and virtual reality to collaborators world-wide.

Cousteau was recently on the island to conduct a site mapping with a team of 4 experts from Map the Gaps and R2Sonic.

Cousteau and Proteus Ocean Group are working with Map the Gaps and R2Sonic to map the entire marine-protected area, covering a total surface area of 1,482 acres of reef and 1,077 acres of inner bays, in Curaao.

Map the Gaps is a non-profit organization formed of maritime mapping professionals, students and industry partners committed to growing awareness and increasing diversity in ocean mapping. R2Sonic provides technologically advanced multibeam echosounders that deliver high quality of data. In this project R2Sonic is dedicated to help collect the hydrographic data and share it so that all of us can learn more about our underwater terrain.

Together, these organizations will provide vital data and a deeper knowledge base to benefit Curaao, by enabling sustainable conservation measures. It will also provide critical information for the site of the first PROTEUS, which is planned to be located off of the Island of Curaao, at a depth of 60 feet (3 atmospheres), in a marine-protected area.

As our life support system, the ocean is indispensable to solving the planets biggest problems. Challenges created by climate change, rising sea levels, extreme storms and viruses represent a multi-trillion-dollar risk to the global economy, stated Cousteau. Surprisingly, despite the ocean representing over 99% of our worlds living space, only 5% has been explored to date. PROTEUS, contemplated as the first in a network of underwater habitats, is essential to driving meaningful solutions that protect the future of our planet. The knowledge that will be uncovered underwater will forever change the way generations of humans live up above.

As an island recognized worldwide for its pristine oceans and diverse marine life, we are honored to have Curaao as home to PROTEUS. We fully support the team involved in this project and are committed to the vision and partnership, serving as stewards for the environment, commented Hugo Clarinda, Deputy Director of the Curaao Tourist Board. This is an impressive and important project for science, the world and the future of our fragile eco-system, full of immense riches yet to be discovered. Curaao is passionate about the health of our oceans and will continue to be advocates of this type of research and projects of this magnitude.

Sithree van Heydoorn, the Minister of Education commented: The site mapping is an exciting next step in the building of PROTEUS which will allow for unprecedented access to a deeper understanding of the ocean. Through its development, well be able to learn more about the marine biodiversity of Curacao on a local level and further educate the community on the human-ocean connection.

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World's First Underwater 'Space Station' Is Coming To This Caribbean Island - Caribbean and Latin America Daily News - News Americas

Saint Lucia: A near-impossible balancing act

Philip Joseph Pierre, Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Economic Development and Youth EconomyofSaint Lucia,said his nationsuffersfromserious challengesdue toits small sizeandvulnerability to natural disasters and climate change.While strugglingtofindsolutions forthoseexisting problems,Saint Luciawas hitwith COVID-19.

We are now being inundated by the new, while still being overwhelmed by the old,he statedin his pre-recorded address to theannual high-level debateof the UN General Assembly.

Thepandemic forced last years debate to be held almost entirely virtually,butthe 2021 session is being held in a hybrid format, combining in-person and virtual participation.

Mr. Pierre saidsmall island nations like Saint Luciacontinue to contend with the near-impossible balancing act of preserving lives and livelihoods amid the insidious twists and turns of the coronavirus pandemic.

Thisincludes pushing backagainstmisinformationabout thevirus andwhat he called vaccineapartheidthat has seen some countries stockpile vaccines, while othercountries watch helplessly as COVID-related deaths continue to rise for want of a jab.

At the same time,Mr. Pierresaidthepandemicseemsto haveslowed down everything but the deterioration of our beloved planet earth.COVID-19grabs the headlines,butit is a fact that the pandemic emerged at a time when theworld was already on an unsustainable path to achievethe2030[Development]Agendaand the Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs).

With less than a decade left to achieve the 2030 Agenda,thePrime Minister notedthatthe UNDecade ofActionrequires urgent solutions towardssalvaging our global living quarters.

It can be argued that theCOVID-19 pandemic and the climate change challenge confront us with an intermeshed problem of symptom as cause and cause as symptom, he said.It provides us with a harsh and timely reminder thathuman health and planetary health are linked.

The cost of meeting these challenges and undertakinghealth or climateresilience activities, isway beyondthe financial reach of small islands, he lamented.As such, he appealed forcontributionstowards recovery efforts andfor all nationsto pay their commitments to theAdaptationandMitigationFunds.

Prime Minister of the Bahamas,Phillip Edward Davis, alsocalled for equitable distribution of vaccines, including to small island developing States, which are not manufacturers. It is also important to make safe treatments and therapeutics accessible and to designate them as public goods, he added.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made abundantly clear what many of us have always known to be true: we are all in this together, he told the Assembly in his in-person address.

We must collaborate to end the COVID-19 pandemic and address public health issues. We must cooperate to mitigate the effects of climate change. Access to development financing must be adequate and fair. Lagging response on any of these issues will have dire consequences for the global economy, the Prime Minister said.

Even as his country was dealing with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the Prime Minister reminded the Assembly that just two years agothis month, the Bahamas had been devastatedby Hurricane Dorian,one of the strongest storms ever recorded in the Atlantic, and the physical and emotional wreckage are still with us.

He lamented his countrys sense of foreboding in the wake of the storm, saying: Every rainfall is a reminder of the horror. How can we continue to do nothing in the face of such tragedy? To any leader who still believed there was enough time to address climate change, he said I invite you to visit Abaco and Grand Bahama, where the devastation wrought by Dorian is now part of the countrys landscape.

So, we are not here to call for measured steps. We are here to say that big, radical change is the only response that can save our country. We are out of time, Mr. Davis declared, urging states to raise their ambitions and make real commitments to cut emissions at COP26 in Glasgow. We dont want that conference to be like the preceding 25, he said, calling for states not to agree to the same promises that wont be kept.

There must be real progress on bridging the gaps in investment and access to technology and skills, especially in the areas of climate mitigation and adaptation, he said, emphasizing the need for more innovative financing and debt solutions, including for climate adaptation swaps.

He went on to point out the increasing gap in global financing for meeting the SDGsby 2030, estimated at $2.5 trillion in 2019, and reiterated his countrys support for the inclusion of a multidimensional vulnerability index in the decision-making of international financial institutions and the international donor community.

Like his Bahamian counterpart, the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston A. Browne, also concentrated his address on the pandemic and climate change, which he called the two overarching issues that confront mankind.

Beginning with COVID-19, he echoed others who spoke of the lack of a coherent response to ending the crisis, including vaccine inequity.

He stressed that developing countries were not seeking handouts, and many had paid into a global system that promised early access to vaccines, however, selfish nationalism forced many to rely on vaccine charity.

No country wanted to beg for vaccineswe were ready to pay, said Prime Minister Browne, yet most jabs manufactured by major pharmaceutical companies were bought or contracted and hoarded by a few wealthy nations.

If, at the onset of the pandemic, developing countries had been given access to proper COVID-19 vaccinesand medical supplies, globally, we would be in a better place, he asserted.

Calling inoculation discrimination, wrong, unjust, and patently unfair, Mr. Browne& advocated for equitable vaccine distribution at affordable prices and less expensive COVID testing.

Vaccines are a global good; they should not be a commodity for profit at the expense of human life, he said.

Noting that climate change has already had catastrophic consequences on some small island States, the Prime Minister called for global solidarity and firm commitments to reduce global temperatures below 1.5 degrees and provide quality financing and climate technologies to save our planet.

Pointing out that industrialized countries have an obligation to assist the States most affected by climate change because they created a problem in the first instance, Mr. Browne signalled that the development funding assistance for small islands developing States should not be seen as a gift or charity but as a form of climate reparations to compensate for past climate damage.

Full statementhere.

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'Overwhelmed by old challenges', Caribbean leaders say COVID-19 has forced a new battle for the survival of their nations - UN News

Caribbean countries added to the CDC's and the U.S. State Department's Level 4 advisory on Sept. 21 include Antigua and Barbuda as well as Bermuda, due to the rise in Covid cases on those islands.

The Level 4 "very high" classification is the most severe travel warning that the U.S. currently hands to countries. The CDC advisory warns that people should avoid traveling to locations with a Level 4 classification and, if they must travel, they should be fully vaccinated.

The advisory updates do not offer any legally binding way to prevent travelers from heading to a destination.

The CDC assesses Covid-19 risk based on each destination's new cases and new-case trajectory. The level is raised if a destination reports more than 500 new cases per 100,000 people over the past 28 days or more than 500 cases if the population is smaller than 100,000.

Close to 90 destinations are now listed at the Level 4 highest risk category, among them Caribbean islands Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, St. Lucia, Haiti, St. Maarten, the Bahamas, Dominica, Aruba, Curacao, Guadeloupe, Martinique, St. Barts, St. Martin, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Cuba and the British Virgin Islands.

Bonaire is the newest addition to the Level 3 "high" category, joining Anguilla, the Turks and Caicos, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The category means that between 100 and 500 cases have been reported in the past 28 days.

The Dominican Republic is the only Caribbean country on the Level 2 "moderate" list while Montserrat, Saba and Statia are classified as Level 1 "low" risk.

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More Caribbean countries added to the U.S.'s Level 4 listings - Travel Weekly