An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior mul­ti­me­dia re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

Re­port­ing from An­tigua

Record lev­els of sar­gas­sum sea­weed are im­pact­ing the Caribbean and west­ern At­lantic, with the in­flux lead­ing to a va­ri­ety of con­se­quences, in­clud­ing tourism dis­rup­tion, health risks, and eco­nom­ic im­pacts.

The Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian spoke to sev­er­al re­gion­al stake­hold­ers last week at the Caribbean Trav­el Mar­ket­place in An­tigua on the im­pact the sar­gas­sum sea­weed is hav­ing on their tourism prod­uct.

To­ba­go Ho­tel and Tourism As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent Regi­nald MacLean told Guardian Me­dia last week, that de­spite spend­ing over $250,000 last year to fight sar­gas­sum, the cri­sis is on­ly get­ting worse.

MacLean said the sea­weed is not just an eye­sore but is dri­ving vis­i­tors away, nar­row­ing beach­es and drain­ing busi­ness own­ers who are forced to spend hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars to keep shore­lines clean. He is ask­ing for greater part­ner­ship and faster in­ter­ven­tion be­fore To­ba­go’s tourism rep­u­ta­tion is dam­aged be­yond re­pair.

Ba­cloet Beach Club in Scar­bor­ough, To­ba­go, co-own­er Glo­ria Jones Knapp told Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian in An­tigua that when the sar­gas­sum comes on their beach, their staff cleans it, de­pend­ing if it comes on a week­ly or month­ly ba­sis.

“Then we have to clean it dai­ly, twice a day. Some­times we re­ly on the cur­rent to take it away, but late­ly, this is not the case. The mon­ey that we spend on this dif­fers from month to month. I would say it’s about a $10,000 kind of in­put, de­pend­ing on the amount, and this month, it has been quite heavy. There is a tonne load of sar­gas­sum com­ing our way from Flori­da all the way down to the Caribbean,” Jones Knapp re­vealed.

She out­lined that most coves in To­ba­go are at the bot­tom of hill­sides, which makes it quite dif­fi­cult to get any ma­chin­ery down to these ar­eas. Since her prop­er­ty en­com­pass­es the beach, their staff and the peo­ple who are hired to re­move the sea­weed must do so man­u­al­ly.

“It’s very te­dious, but it’s nec­es­sary for the guests not to have the prob­lem of hav­ing the sar­gas­sum at their feet, and we do this re­li­gious­ly, and I think it’s an in­di­vid­ual thing, but we have not seen a drop in tourist ar­rivals for the past five months, but as a ho­tel own­er must you en­sure that the beach­es re­main clean, dur­ing this time for the tourist.”

Al­so speak­ing on this was To­ba­go Tourism Agency Ltd, act­ing chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer San­dra Orr-Toney, who said that the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA), stake­hold­ers, and the pri­vate sec­tor, have been work­ing to­geth­er to mit­i­gate this is­sue.

She said col­lab­o­ra­tion is key, as this year the sar­gas­sum is on the east side of the is­land and most of the ho­tel own­ers have in­vest­ed in equip­ment to get rid of it im­me­di­ate­ly, but said the over­all cost is not yet known.

Shar­ing how this sit­u­a­tion is be­ing han­dled, Ryan Forde, the chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the Bar­ba­dos Ho­tel and Tourism As­so­ci­a­tion, said the is­land’s hote­liers have re­port­ed see­ing more sar­gas­sum than in typ­i­cal years com­ing across the At­lantic.

He said Caribbean is­lands and big coun­tries like Mex­i­co are al­so be­ing hit tremen­dous­ly, and it’s against this back­ground that the hote­liers,Non-Gov­ern­men­tal Or­gan­i­sa­tion(NGO) and Gov­ern­ment in Bar­ba­dos are try­ing to be more proac­tive with pur­chas­ing prop­er equip­ment.

Asked about the year­ly spend to clean up the sea­weed, Forde said while he did not have such da­ta, equip­ment can range be­tween US$40,000 to US$60,000 to help with the clean-up ef­forts.

“Some peo­ple would have got­ten a boom that works out at sea. That is, some­where around US$300,000 to buy one of those. It stops the sea­weed in the sea and cleans up the sar­gas­sum more. But the re­al in­vestors cur­rent­ly are the pub­lic sec­tor as they have to hire rough­ly about 100 to 200 staff to go and clean in the morn­ing. The in­flux of sar­gas­sum that’s com­ing is very labour-in­ten­sive to do as an in­di­vid­ual by hand or with a rake,” Forde ex­plained.

He not­ed that the fi­nal in­vest­ments would be known in a cou­ple of months, but stat­ed that there have not been re­ports of a drop in tourists com­ing to Bar­ba­dos, thus far.

The St Vin­cent and the Grenadines Ho­tel and Tourism As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent, Iso­la Gid­dens, said that across her is­land, there are ex­ten­sive clean-up ef­forts by the ground staff at var­i­ous ho­tels, as it is present near­ly every day.

What Gid­dens wants to see hap­pen is the sar­gas­sum be­ing used as fer­tilis­er in peo­ple’s gar­dens or even for fu­el.

She is hope­ful that there is a part­ner­ship be­tween the pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tors for a year­ly in­vest­ment, for ho­tels to help fight the sea­weed.

Cli­mate ex­pert Steve Max­i­may said the sar­gas­sum al­so af­fects the fish­er­folk as they are un­able to catch any fish due to the in­flux. This in turn af­fects the fish that ho­tels would serve to their guests.

He not­ed that coun­tries such as Bar­ba­dos and St. Lu­cia have start­ed us­ing sar­gas­sum as bio­fu­el, as plant food, but those are in small quan­ti­ties.

On the eco­nom­ic im­pact, Max­i­may said there has been re­duced de­mand in some coun­tries, as a re­sult of the beach­es not be­ing at­trac­tive dur­ing

this pe­ri­od.

“There is can­cel­la­tion of tours, and the loss of rev­enue year­ly is a lot for ho­tels, div­ing com­pa­nies, and oth­er wa­ter sport ac­tiv­i­ties, which tourists look for­ward to,” he added.

Im­pact

CNN re­port­ed last week that ris­ing ocean tem­per­a­tures due to hu­man-caused cli­mate change have spurred this sar­gas­sum sur­plus, su­per­charg­ing the sea­weed. In April, the Uni­ver­si­ty of South Flori­da es­ti­mat­ed this year’s bloom is al­ready at 31 mil­lion tonnes — “40 per cent more” than the pre­vi­ous record from June 2022.

Bri­an La­Pointe, a re­search pro­fes­sor at Flori­da At­lantic Uni­ver­si­ty’s Har­bour Branch Oceano­graph­ic In­sti­tute said sar­gas­sum goes from be­ing a very ben­e­fi­cial re­source of the North At­lantic to be­com­ing what we re­fer to as … a harm­ful al­gal bloom when it comes ashore in ex­ces­sive bio­mass.

“What we have seen since 2011 are ex­ces­sive in­un­da­tion events all around the Caribbean re­gion, the Gulf, as well as the South Flori­da re­gion,” ex­plained La­Pointe, who has stud­ied the sea­weed for decades.

“Sar­gas­sum has been around for eons. Colom­bus ran in­to it right in the Sar­gas­so Sea,” La Pointe told CNN. “But what we are see­ing now is above and be­yond what we had his­tor­i­cal­ly.”