Melissa Shows How Quickly Climate Change Is Outstripping Defenses

Jamaica has invested tens of millions of dollars in bolstering coastal defenses by planting mangroves, building seawalls and strengthening urban infrastructure. It wasn’t close to enough to withstand Hurricane Melissa’s 185-mile-an-hour winds and 13-foot storm surge that destroyed thousands of homes, washed away roads and bridges, flooded farm fields and took down the electrical grid.

“The pace and scale of today’s Category 5 storms are now outstripping what most systems were designed to handle,” Stacy-ann Robinson, an associate professor of environmental sciences at Emory University in Atlanta, said in an email. In Black River, located in the western part of Jamaica, for instance, part of a seawall failed, contributing to the inundation that damaged more than two-thirds of the buildings in the historic town. Estimated insured losses in the country may exceed $4 billion.