The Caribbean island defying the existential threat of hurricanes

A year after record-breaking Hurricane Beryl, the Caribbean is still reeling – but on one island, defiant traditions are fuelling its climate resilience.

In the predawn darkness, the streets are still damp from the night before as thousands gather, ready to parade through of St George’s, the capital of the Caribbean nation of Grenada. Chains scrape against the asphalt and horns jut from helmets pointing skyward.

A conch shell sounds, the rallying call that heralds J’Ouvert morning, the official start of carnival, called Spicemas. As dawn breaks, people flood the streets with their bodies blackened with oil and charcoal.

This is Jab Jab, one of Grenada’s oldest carnival traditions, born of emancipation, resilience and resistance. These masqueraders raise chains as symbols of liberation and dress this way to embody the very figures that oppressors of the past once used to demonise them – using mockery and satire to turn insult into power. Its unruliness is deliberate, a rejection of the order once imposed by colonial rule.

That same spirit of defiance is what Grenadians are leaning on today in the face of deep challenges brought by extreme weather. In July 2024, Grenada was left badly damaged when Hurricane Beryl swept over the island and those around it. Fuelled by hot seas, the strongest storms, like Beryl, have arrived earlier and intensified explosively.

As a second-generation British-Grenadian returning to join these carnival celebrations a year after Hurricane Beryl, I wanted to take the temperature of the island’s climate resilience. How is Grenada building back after the storm, and where is the country in its longer-term pursuit of climate justice?

David A Farrell, principal of the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology, says Hurricane Beryl was unlike anything the region had seen. “It became the earliest category five storm on record in the Atlantic, developing when people were still preparing for the season.”

For Farrell, it’s a signal that things are shifting. “This suggests that the baseline for the start of the hurricane season may be shifting to earlier in the year and the season getting longer.”

Ageing infrastructure, highly erodible soils, steep terrain and wide stretches of low-lying coastline all magnify the impacts of storms. “These factors combine to make the impacts of stronger storms far more severe in the region.”

In Grenada, and on its tiny sister isles of Carriacou and Petite Martinique, Hurricane Beryl flattened homes, tore up crops, shuttered schools and left clinics struggling to reopen. Recovery is ongoing, but the financial burden has been immense and the psychological toll on residents is huge.

When it comes to richer nations stepping up to offer financial support for hurricane recovery, “there is a lot of talk and no action”, says Tevin Andrews, minister for Carriacou and Petite Martinique affairs and local government.

Andrews and other politicians in Grenada warn that outside finance still lags far behind what’s needed. Global promises often stall in bureaucracy, leaving countries like Grenada to rely on debt or insurance schemes that cannot cover the true scale of loss, he says. The question, experts argue, is not only how to rebuild stronger and with limited resources, but how an island adapts when storms themselves are changing faster than the systems designed to withstand them.

The world’s oceans are not only warming, but the rate of warming has more than quadrupled since the 1980s, according to the World Meteorological Organization. And this heat is fuel for hurricanes. This extra ocean heat also fuels “rapid intensification”, when a storm’s winds accelerate by at least 35 miles per hour in under 24 hours.

“Rapid intensification leaves far less time for communities to prepare, and that’s particularly dangerous for small islands with extremely vulnerable communities,” says Farrell.

Hurricane Beryl is just one example of a storm intensifying explosively as it approached the Caribbean. In 2017, Hurricane Maria rapidly intensified before it struck Dominica, which lies to the north of Grenada.

Looking ahead, Farrell says the science is clear. “Research conducted in the region suggests the frequency of intense category three, four and five storms are likely to increase in coming years if climate change continues unabated.”

On the sister isles of Carriacou and Petit Martinique, where Beryl struck hardest, the scale of destruction was unprecedented. Andrews recalls walking through villages where nearly every roof had been torn away.

“Ninety-eight percent of homes were damaged or destroyed,” he says. “That includes schools, clinics, government buildings – everything. Entire families were displaced.”

One year on, Andrews estimates around 60% of buildings have been repaired or rebuilt. But progress is uneven. The challenge is not only financial, though the government’s preliminary assessment put the recovery bill at nearly 470 million Eastern Caribbean dollars (around $170m/£130m). It is also logistical. “Getting quality building materials to Carriacou has been one of the hardest things,” Andrews says. Cargo boats cannot keep up with the demand, he notes, and construction costs across the Caribbean have soared as multiple islands rebuild at once.

In Beryl’s aftermath, however, some older traditions have resurfaced. Andrews points to the revival of “windbreakers” – sturdy trees planted close to homes on the weather-facing side, a practice once common among elders. Another is the use of secure basements. “As a matter of fact, because of the downstairs [basements], many people survived Hurricane Beryl,” he says.

Architecture is changing too. Contractors are now required to build under closer supervision from planning authorities. “We cannot be naive and think this was a one-off,” Andrews says. “Every year the risk is there. We must build stronger, more resilient.”

Rebuilding is not just about roofs and roads. Every new wall and every repaired clinic requires money, and for small states like Grenada, finding this finance is its own battle.

The government has used so-called “hurricane clauses”, mechanisms designed for small states that let them halt debt payments after disasters, temporarily freeing up millions that would otherwise have gone to creditors. The government has also drawn on its regional catastrophe insurance, intended to provide short-term financial relief after a disaster. Yet Andrews stresses that these measures are only a stopgap.

For Grenadian environmental lawyer Rosana John, Beryl was more than a meteorological event – it was also a legal and moral one. The average person in Grenada contributes just 2.9 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year, compared with 14.3 tonnes for the average US resident. Over the course of the two countries’ histories, the difference is even starker – Grenada has produced barely 0.002% of the climate-warming CO2 emissions than the US has.

“Grenada is paying for a crisis it did not cause,” John says. “We contribute next to nothing in emissions, yet we are the ones facing the destruction of our homes, our livelihoods, our very heritage.”

She points to ongoing slow progress in implementing the international loss and damage fund, a mechanism meant to channel money from wealthy, high-emitting nations to vulnerable states hit hardest by climate impacts. Though agreed in principle at UN climate talks in 2013, it has only just begun to take shape. “By the time funds arrive, the urgency has passed, the damage has deepened, and the cost of recovery has multiplied,” John says.

When finance does arrive, it often comes as loans, not grants, driving countries like Grenada deeper into debt. “Instead of relief, we’re pushed toward debt-creating finance,” she says. “That is not climate justice.”

John sees judicial strategy as a crucial part of the response. She points to the International Court of Justice’s July 2025 advisory opinion on climate change, which emphatically affirmed that countries have legal obligations to prevent climate harm and protect both current and future generations. Though it is not binding, the ruling provides powerful legal ground for accountability and climate reparations.

“We need to be more assertive and creative in pursuing climate justice,” she says.

For John, Grenada’s battle is both local and globally symbolic. “Hurricane Beryl reminded us that the climate crisis does not follow a predictable schedule,” she says. “True justice means having the resources to rebuild before the next storm hits, not after.”

Her call for justice carries echoes of a much older tradition here. Resistance in Grenada has never only been fought in courtrooms or at climate talks, it has also lived in its culture. If Beryl exposed the fragility of buildings, Jab Jab and similar elements of Grenadian culture have revealed the resilience of a people.

Ian Charles, cultural custodian and head of the cultural organisation Jambalasee Grenada, says Jab Jab is more than performance. “Jab Jab is resistance and revolt against a system that was deliberately meant to break you,” he explains. “There is a sense of energy, of linking with your ancestors – you wake them, you remember them.”

Asked what this symbol of national strength, a Jab Jab, might say if Hurricane Beryl stood before them, Charles doesn’t hesitate: “Jab is strength, jab is liberation… The chants could vary, but they would find some way to draw strength and turn a bad into a good.”

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These cultural traditions may have a very tangible role in Grenada’s future. Randall Dolland, chairman of the Grenada Tourism Authority, says the country is confronting a hard truth: rising seas may one day take away the very coastlines it is known for. “In decades to come, we may no longer have beaches,” says Dolland. “But what we will always have is culture.”

Dolland stresses that this is not only an exercise in building “Brand Grenada” but a matter of long-term survival for the tourism industry. With tourism accounting for a substantial portion of Grenada’s GDP, the implications are existential. The IPCC warns that sea levels in the Caribbean could rise by close to a metre by 2100 if emissions continue at their current pace. Many beaches in the region are already retreating as storm surges and coastal erosion accelerate.

“We cannot continue to sell something that climate change might soon take away from us,” says Dolland.

Instead, Grenada is leaning into the cultural experiences that storms cannot wash away: the defiant charge of Jab Jab, the storytelling and rhythm of big drum in Carriacou, the spice markets, the food traditions, the heritage of maroon festivals. In Dolland’s words, these are not “add-ons” to the beach holiday. They are becoming the main draw. “If our culture survives, then so do we,” he says.

Carnival and climate-resilience may seem like strange bedfellows, but both summon – and build on – the same instinct rooted in Grenada’s history: to resist, to rebuild, to endure. And as the island braces for the possibility of fiercer storms, carnival and culture are a symbol of the deep roots of the island’s deep-rooted resilience.