- Climate Change Threatens Water Supply in St. Vincent and the Grenadines
The Central Water and Sewerage Authority (CWSA) is concerned about significant changes in weather patterns in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, as well as the influence on the country’s water supply.
Danroy Ballantyne, Head of Water Resources at the CWSA, told VC3 that the wet season of 2023 saw some of the lowest reported rainfall in recent history. Ballantyne stated that CWSA’s stream flow data shows a 32% decline at the Dalloway intake in November 2023 and a 50% reduction in rainfall last year.
“There was a 50% decrease in rainfall in November, which is typically one of the wettest months of the year. The wet season in 2023 was one of the shortest on record based on a ten-year average. Our dry seasons are more frequent; we experienced dry seasons in 2010, 2014, and 2015; the early part of that year was indeed dry; and then we had the 2019 dry season; from 2019 to 2023, we saw a decrease in rainfall.”
“Our stream flow data indicated that in Dalloway, which is actually the Buccament River, we experienced a flow reduction of approximately 32% last year during the wet season. In addition, we’ve seen extremes in rainfall in Georgetown with the December storm, as well as the Sandy Bay flood in 2016/2017. We had a tremendous amount of rain in December last year, causing a massive landslip in Georgetown’s upper watershed, which is currently hurting one of our intakes, the perseverance intake’, Ballantyne said.
