As June ushers in the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season, the long-held Caribbean rhyme that guides seasonal preparation still echoes across the archipelago: June too soon, July standby, August a must, September remember, October not yet over. For generations, this rhyme has been more than a folk tradition — it is a survival manual, etched into collective memory by countless storms that have rewritten lives and landscapes.
I grew up in St. Vincent & The Grenadines, and one story has never left me. In November 1999, Hurricane Lenny defied all seasonal expectations, roaring from the west into a coast generations had considered safe. A friend of mine, Joseph, had just finished seven years of skipping lunches and mending nets to pay off his 30-foot fishing boat. He tied it to shore with three heavy ropes, but by dawn, only the frayed ends of those ropes remained. The boat was gone. Joseph did not cry. He just sat on the beach, where the storm had rearranged the sand into an unrecognizable landscape. A month later, he left for work on a cruise ship out of Miami. In 25 years, he has come home only four times. This is what hurricanes do to small island communities: they do not always kill you, but they yank the life you built out from under your feet, forcing you to live it on someone else’s terms.
The crisis grew more urgent just last year. In July 2024, Hurricane Beryl became the earliest Category 5 storm ever recorded in the Atlantic, cutting a devastating path through the Grenadines. Ninety percent of Union Island’s housing stock was destroyed, and every roof on the small island of Mayreau was torn off. Three weeks after the storm, I met a woman named Celia there, who had sheltered in a stone church with her two children through the worst of it. When the eye of the storm passed over, her four-year-old son Malachi looked up and asked, “Mummy, is God angry at us?” Celia told him no, but she hid the truth: the church walls were shaking, and the stained glass had shattered into a horizontal rain of colored shards. When they emerged, only one wall of their home was still standing. Pinned to that wall, where their kitchen once stood, was Malachi’s baby photograph. That photo will likely cross oceans before Celia ever sees a cent of payout from the global Loss and Damage fund promised to vulnerable nations.
This is not just a story of bad weather. The Caribbean has warmed by nearly 2°F since 1980. That number is not an abstract statistic: it is why Beryl reached Category 5 strength in July, months earlier than the historic peak of the season. For Caribbean nations, hurricanes are never just weather events — they are reverse development, erasing decades of progress in a single night. When Hurricane Maria hit Dominica in 2017, it caused damage equal to 226% of the country’s annual GDP. More than two full years of the nation’s collective output was destroyed overnight. Ninety percent of all housing was leveled, the entire power grid was knocked out, and poverty rates were projected to jump to 43%. With no disaster reserve to draw on, Dominica was forced to borrow against its children’s future to rebuild what its people had already paid for once.
What you will not find in World Bank reports is the human cost of repeated disaster. Maria struck Dominica just two years after Tropical Storm Erika had already gutted much of the island. After Maria, a teacher in Roseau told me of 12-year-old students who had already lost three homes since 2015. Three homes, one childhood. Small island nations are hit again before we can finish rebuilding from the last storm, mortgaging the same schools and clinics twice in a single generation — and paying interest on the debt we did not ask for. We call the constant endurance of this trauma “resilience”, but the truth is, these children are not resilient. They are exhausted. We use the word resilience because the alternative — admitting that we have abandoned them to this fate — is too unbearable to face.
This year, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is forecasting a below-normal hurricane season, and many breathed a sigh of relief. But we in the Caribbean know better. We cannot afford to relax. Every leading forecaster attaches the same critical warning to this outlook: it only takes one storm to destroy a generation. A “quiet” season does not mean no dangerous storms — it just means fewer chances that the deadly storm will miss your island home.
Who stands watch with us over the Atlantic sky today? That question has a newly devastating answer: the global power that once led climate science and storm forecasting has deliberately walked away from its post. In February 2025, the current U.S. administration revoked the decades-old legal finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health, even as the U.S. National Academies of Sciences confirmed that the evidence of climate harm is stronger than ever. The administration did not even bother to refute the peer-reviewed science — it simply stepped around it. A sitting cabinet secretary openly declared that “CO₂ was never a pollutant.” Imagine that: a politician sitting in a temperature-controlled office in Washington declaring carbon emissions harmless, while the people of Mayreau climb through the rubble of their collapsed homes and shattered lives. That official will never have to bury a neighbor killed by a storm that could have been forecast. They live in a world where the bill for climate change is sent elsewhere: to small islands that contributed almost nothing to global emissions, but are paying nearly the full price.
This climate denial is not just words — it has tangible, deadly consequences. Washington has already cut hundreds of jobs from the U.S. National Weather Service and proposed slashing funding for the Miami forecasting laboratories that refine Atlantic storm tracking. Experts warn that without this work, hurricane forecasting accuracy could drop by as much as 40%.
Translate that into the lived reality of a mother in Basseterre, Bridgetown, Castries, Kingstown, Kingston, St Georges or St John’s. That 40% drop in accuracy is the difference between getting your grandmother to safety before the storm hits, and leaving her behind because forecasters said the storm would turn north. That is not a statistical error in a climate model — that is the difference between life and a search party. Storms draw their strength from warm ocean water, heated by the same carbon emissions Washington now declares harmless. The forecast cone that tells a family when to board up their home and evacuate comes out of those Miami labs. When Washington chooses to blind itself to climate science, it blinds us too.
The Caribbean scholar Lloyd Best once taught us to see our regional economy as a modern plantation: built for the benefit of wealthy global powers, with our survival treated as an afterthought. The tools meant to protect us have always been held in other people’s hands. The United States has now withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, abandoned its seat on the board of the global Loss and Damage Fund, and let its climate pledges evaporate. When the world’s largest historical emitter decides that science is negotiable, we get no vote. We just get the bill and a fresh grave to dig. The colonial mindset did not disappear — it was repackaged as a domestic budget cut, sold to U.S. voters as “putting America first”.
But the failure is not only Washington’s. Earlier this year, when the Pacific small island nation of Vanuatu brought its landmark International Court of Justice ruling on climate change to the UN General Assembly — asking only that all nations affirm their legal duty to protect vulnerable climate frontlines — one Caribbean nation, Trinidad and Tobago, was absent from the vote. It did not oppose the measure, did not abstain, it simply did not show up, even as a sister island spoke for all small island developing states. We cannot demand global solidarity if we refuse to practice it ourselves.
This is no time to endure this crisis and then forget it. The U.S. president who rolled back climate protections will hold office for this season and two more, but the damage he has done will not expire when his term ends. A generation of climate-resilient infrastructure and forecasting capacity can be destroyed in one season, and takes a decade to rebuild. Whoever succeeds him will inherit a watchtower with its eyes already put out. When we say the Caribbean cannot wait, we mean it: we are facing three more hurricane seasons with a warning system that has been deliberately starved of funding and authority. Our lives are on the line, and waiting is just wagering our lives to appease political interests in a distant capital. We refuse to wager our lives.
Lament must become a vow, because despair is just dependency in darker clothing. We are not starting from nothing: we already have a regional disaster agency that responded rapidly to Beryl, an insurance facility that delivers payments within days, and a meteorological institute in Barbados that trains our own forecasters. All that is missing is scale, sustained financing, and the political will to take ownership of our own protection.
So it is time for us to build it ourselves. Let us build our own independent satellite reception, free from the budget cycles and political whims of foreign governments. Let us build our own regional forecasting centre, free to issue warnings without needing a signature from Miami. Let us create our own regional disaster bond facility, funded by a small levy on the tourism industry that profits from our beautiful beaches, while we bear all the climate risk.
Let us set clear, binding deadlines: by the 2029 hurricane season, we will have a fully Caribbean-owned, regional forecasting capability. By 2030, we will have a fully regionally capitalized disaster bond mechanism. This work does not need Washington’s permission — it only needs our collective resolve.
We must build this for the people who actually call this region home: for Celia and Malachi, for the 12-year-old children in Roseau who have lost three homes before they even hit puberty. I think of those families huddled around their radios, straining to hear a voice that can see the storm coming before it hits them. That voice is being deliberately switched off, thousands of miles away in another hemisphere. The watchman has walked off the wall, and called that action freedom. But the wall is still ours. Our children are still behind it. No one is coming to save us. We have to hold it ourselves.
