Katrina's anniversary blues, climates of the Caribbean

There's nothing quite like an anniversary to revive interest in a humanitarian emergency. And today -- one year on -- it's Hurricane Katrina's turn.

Right on cue, politicians have been praising the relief and reconstruction efforts so far whilst attempting to say something encouraging about the long process of recovery ahead. Mainstream news networks have dispatched their reporters to interview victims for their 12-month retrospective.

In all likelihood, the attention will be short-lived.

"We in New Orleans know that our moment is ending," writes Jordan Flaherty, a Louisiana editor and activist on the ZNet website. "This anniversary will bring one last deluge of media attention, but after that - barring another catastrophe - the spotlight will move on."

According to Flaherty, the tour buses in the city are again filling with celebrities, politicians and dignitaries, all keen for a moment of media exposure centring on a convenient, yet somehow random calendar date. For there is an inherent contradiction here.

"How do you commemorate the anniversary of something that is still happening?" he asks.

Half of the city's population remains dispersed, many consigned to gruesome trailer parks surrounded by barbed wire run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Flaherty goes on to point out that most schools and hospitals are still closed, especially those serving poor people. Central planning issues remain unresolved, and few people feel protected by the rebuilt levees.

According to sociologist John Logan of Brown University in Rhode Island, the trailer parks could turn into virtual shanty-towns reminiscent of slums around third-world cities. "(This) is a 10-year crisis that affects hundreds of thousands of people," he is quoted by the Christian Science Monitor as saying.

The FAIR media watchdog has reported that trailer park residents are even being prevented from talking to the media. It's looking more and more as if this this is the story the authorities don't want told.

The California-based International Medical Corps says that rates of depression in trailer parks are now seven times higher than the national average. A report by the Harvard Medical School says that Hurricane Katrina doubled the rate of serious mental illness in areas ravaged by the storm.

Despite divergent findings on the rates of suicide post-Katrina, both studies are crystal clear on the severity of the mental health challenge.

The trouble with quick in-and-out anniversary coverage, then, is its failure adequately to illustrate the long-term desolation of the disaster, both physical and psychological.

"It's the kind of quiet not easily conveyed on cable news channels, which abhor silence like the vacuum that it is," writes Danny Heitman, a Baton Rouge-based columnist, also in the Monitor.

"Though these soundless streets are the very texture of this tragedy, they don't make marketable television, nor is their quality easily conveyed in newspapers and magazines."

The anniversary will come and go, he adds, "then we will prepare for another day post-Katrina, when the cameras will leave us once again."

And now for the bad news ...

Whatever reservations anyone might have about the long-term coverage of major disasters such as Katrina, at least there is coverage.

The bitter reality is that high-profile climatic disasters such as Katrina are only the tip of the iceberg. And without wishing to punish the metaphor, it's an iceberg that's fast melting.

According to a new report from a coalition of leading environment and aid groups, the impact of Katrina is dwarfed by other hurricanes and extreme weather events in the Americas region, most of which have gone almost completely unreported.

Remember Hurricane Catarina in 2004, the first storm of its kind ever to hit Brazil? No? Well how about Hurricane Wilma, that struck Cuba in October 2005? Maybe not.

The report - "Up in Smoke? Latin America and the Caribbean" - confirms that largely regular and predictable temperature and rainfall patterns are changing, becoming less predictable and often more extreme.

The 2005 hurricane season was one of the most destructive in history, it says, and all the evidence suggests it's going to get worse. Melting glaciers in the Andes will change river flows and threaten water supplies for millions of people. Illegal logging and deforestation worsen the impact of flooding.

If anyone's tempted to regard this as a regional problem, the report also explains how climate change in Latin America could unleash a kind of permanent El Nino effect, killing off the Amazon and accelerating the release of carbon into the atmosphere.

"This could then become one of the environmental feedback mechanisms that scientists fear will trigger irreversible and catastrophic global warming," says the group, which includes Christian Aid, WWF and Greenpeace.

In his foreword to the report, former Colombian environment minister Juan Mayr Maldonado, concludes bleakly that much of the damage has already been done. The only remaining course of action is for rich countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

He also says there needs to be a rethink of the model of international aid "to establish a new social contract that leads down the path of poverty reduction and greater equality to sustainable development".

Noble sentiments indeed. Undoubtedly, there is a consensus these days on the perils that we face in climate change. You have to ask yourself, though. Is anyone out there actually listening hard enough to translate any of this into meaningful action?

Mark Snelling
Alertnet journalist