The Island That Grew Back
Hurricane Maria crossed Dominica in three hours in 2017 and stripped every leaf from every tree on the island. Two months later its prime minister told the UN the country intended to become the world’s first climate-resilient nation. What that has actually meant, on an island with nine volcanoes and no beaches.
On the evening of 18 September 2017, Hurricane Maria crossed Dominica as a Category 5 storm with sustained winds around 260 kilometres an hour. It took roughly three hours. When the light came up, the island that had been the greenest in the eastern Caribbean was brown — not damaged, stripped, every leaf removed from every tree across the whole of a mountainous 750-square-kilometre country.
Assessments afterwards put damage and losses at well over double the country’s annual GDP. The great majority of buildings were damaged or destroyed. Roads, water systems, the electricity grid and the agricultural sector were essentially gone at once.
Two months later the prime minister told the United Nations General Assembly that Dominica intended to become the world’s first climate-resilient nation. It was, at the time, a startling thing to say from the position the country was in.
Not that kind of Caribbean island
Dominica — pronounced with the stress on the third syllable, and not to be confused with the Dominican Republic — is volcanic, young and steep. It has nine potentially active volcanoes, more than any island of its size in the world, and its interior rises to nearly 1,450 metres at Morne Diablotins.
There are almost no white-sand beaches, and that absence is the reason the island was never developed for mass tourism, which is in turn the reason the forest is still there. Morne Trois Pitons National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage site covering the volcanic centre of the island — the Boiling Lake, which is a flooded fumarole and the second-largest hot lake on earth, reached by a six-hour round-trip hike through the Valley of Desolation; the Titou Gorge; the Emerald Pool; and a set of waterfalls that arrive at a rate that stops being remarkable by the third day.
The Waitukubuli National Trail runs the length of the island in fourteen segments — the first long-distance walking trail in the Caribbean, using old Kalinago and maroon paths and plantation tracks. Maria destroyed large sections of it and rebuilding has been segment by segment.
The waters are as good as the land. Champagne Reef has volcanic gas venting through the sand so that you snorkel through bubbles; the drop-offs off Soufrière are steep and healthy; and Dominica is one of the very few places in the world with a resident population of sperm whales that can be seen year-round, studied continuously for decades by researchers who know individual animals and their family groups.
The last Kalinago territory
The other thing that makes Dominica singular is that the Kalinago — the people the Europeans called Caribs, and after whom the whole sea is named — still hold territory here.
They resisted European settlement for longer than anywhere else in the Lesser Antilles, using exactly the terrain that later kept the developers out: steep, forested, defensible ground with no good harbours. The British and French fought over the island repeatedly and it changed hands several times before the British secured it in 1763, by which point Kalinago numbers had already collapsed.
In 1903 a reserve of about 3,700 acres was formalised on the rugged east coast. It is now the Kalinago Territory, home to a community of around two to three thousand, governed by an elected chief and council, with land held communally rather than individually — which prevents sale to outsiders and also, as community members will tell you, makes it difficult to raise a mortgage.
The Kalinago Barana Autê is a village-run cultural centre where the canoe-building, larouma-reed basketry and cassava processing are demonstrated by people who use them. The basketry in particular — a double-walled weave with a waterproof layer between — is a technique documented from before contact and still made for sale.
The island was too steep to plant and too poor to develop, which is why it kept its forest and its first people. Both facts have the same cause.
Selling a passport
One economic fact about Dominica needs stating because it explains a substantial share of the public budget: the country runs a citizenship-by-investment programme, and has since 1993, making it one of the longest-running such schemes in the world.
The arrangement is straightforward. A qualifying contribution to a government fund, or an approved real-estate investment, buys citizenship and a passport with visa-free access to a large number of countries. The revenue has at times represented a very large share of government income — in some years, comparable to or exceeding all other sources combined.
It has funded a great deal of the post-Maria rebuild: housing, the hospital, roads, and the resilience programmes described above. For a country whose entire annual output was wiped out twice over by a single storm, and which cannot borrow at reasonable rates because international finance classifies it as middle-income, it is not difficult to see the appeal.
It has also drawn sustained scrutiny. The European Union has pressed the eastern Caribbean programmes over due diligence, and visa-free access has been reviewed and in places tightened as a result. Cases of individuals acquiring citizenship who should not have passed screening have been reported repeatedly across several of the schemes in the region.
Dominica and its neighbours have responded with tighter vetting and higher thresholds, and argue — with a good deal of justification — that the alternative revenue source has not been offered by anyone. It is one of the clearest illustrations anywhere of what a very small state’s options actually look like when the money for adaptation has to come from somewhere.
What resilience actually means
The pledge made in 2017 has produced a set of concrete programmes rather than a slogan, and they are worth listing because the specifics are what other small island states are watching.
Building codes were revised and enforcement tightened, with the housing recovery programme constructing homes designed to withstand Category 5 wind. The electricity network is being moved underground in stages, since the grid was the single biggest cause of prolonged post-storm misery. And a Climate Resilience Execution Agency was created to run the whole effort as a standing function rather than a project.
The energy plan is geothermal. Dominica sits on the same volcanic system that produces the Boiling Lake, and a plant in the Roseau Valley has been under development for years with the intention of supplying domestic demand from a source that no hurricane can blow over. Progress has been slower than announced — which is normal for geothermal everywhere — but the resource is real and large relative to the island’s needs.
The financing question is the hard one, and Dominica has been unusually direct about it internationally: a country that contributes a negligible fraction of global emissions cannot fund adaptation to their consequences out of its own budget, and access to concessional finance is gated by income classifications that treat small islands as middle-income and therefore ineligible. That argument — made alongside Barbados and other small states — has moved the debate at the multilateral banks more than most diplomacy from countries this size ever does.
Going now
The forest came back fast, which surprised even the botanists — within two years the canopy had closed over much of the island, though the composition has shifted and the large old trees that were lost will take a century.
Tourism is deliberately small. There is no international airport taking wide-bodies; you connect through Antigua, Barbados or Saint Lucia into Douglas–Charles, and the drive to Roseau takes an hour over the mountains. Accommodation is mostly small, locally owned eco-lodges and guesthouses rather than resorts, and the government has resisted the all-inclusive model with a consistency that is unusual in the region.
What you get for that is an island where the hiking is the best in the Caribbean by a wide margin, the diving is uncrowded, the sperm whales are there in winter, and the person checking you in is likely to be the person who owns the building.
It also means the country is fully exposed to the next storm, and everyone on the island knows the date of the last one without being reminded.
Mia has reported from thirty-one Asian countries over twelve years, with a soft spot for the ones without a metro. Her temple-conservation series was shortlisted for the Amnesty Media Award. She travels by night train whenever one exists.