"Access to clean drinking water is the most threatened right of Caribbean people," says Zachary Harding, CEO of Hyperion Equity, the Private Equity firm that manages the Caribbean Climate Fund.
Harding, in his post as the first CEO of the Caribbean Climate Smart Accelerator, facilitated the implementation of a water harvesting technology that has effectively taken a Jamaican children’s hospital off the water grid.
This is a massive achievement in the local context, where one in four people (usually among the poorest 20 per cent) does not have domestic access to piped water and droughts and infrastructural issues result in periodic “lock-offs” for the remainder of the population.
To put the situation in context, Barbados, given its lack of fresh water resources, has a water availability of just 306 cubic metres per capita per year, which makes it the 15th most water‐scarce nation in the world.
Jamaica has suffered from an aging and overburdened water system with tens of thousands of reported leaks per year, and in Dominica, water service was not restored to many areas until mid-2018— more than half a year after Hurricane Maria devastated the island.
It is not surprising that, of the 37 countries that the World Resources Institute has identified as having “extremely high” levels of water stress, seven are from the Caribbean – Dominica, Jamaica, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados and St. Kitts and Nevis, with the latter three being designated as water scarce (less than 1000 m3 of freshwater resources per capita).
“The paradigm of publicly provided water, originating largely from traditional sources and processed through energy-intensive technologies will become less and less feasible,” says Harding.
“Every effort must be made to take the water supply chain off the grid and ‘out the box.’” Over the past half a decade, national governments have invested in infrastructure upgrades and implementations, including mains replacement, water treatment plants and leakage reduction initiatives, each with limited degrees of success, mostly due to financial and logistical difficulties, inferior design and construction and inconsistent and short sighted planning that has overlooked the burden of long term maintenance.
According to the Caribbean Regional Fund for Wastewater Management, up to 85 % of wastewater across the Caribbean is untreated.
Climate change-related challenges such as floods, sea level rise, drought and extreme weather are the new norm for the Caribbean.