Why Caribbean Hurricanes Are Worse for Women and the Poor

Hurricane Maria.jpg

Pilar Gonzalez sits on a cot at a shelter as Hurricane Maria approaches Puerto Rico in Fajardo on September 19, 2017. Maria headed towards the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico after battering the eastern Caribbean island of Dominica, with the US National Hurricane Center warning of a ‘potentially catastrophic’ impact.

Photo by RICARDO ARDUENGO/AFP/Getty Images.


The devastation in Dominica is “mind-boggling,” wrote the country’s prime minister, Roosevelt Skerrit, on Facebook just after midnight on September 19. The next day, in Puerto Rico, NPR reported via member station WRTU in San Juan that “most of the island is without power … or water.”

Among the Caribbean islands impacted by both deadly storms are Puerto Rico, St. Kitts, Tortola, and Barbuda.

These are not isolated instances of random bad luck.


Nor were the effects of a 7 magnitude earthquake that rocked Haiti in 2010 limited to killing some 150,000 people. United Nations peacekeepers who were sent in to help left the country grappling, to this day, with a fatal cholera outbreak.

These are not isolated instances of random bad luck. As University of the West Indies geographers who study risk perception and political ecology, we recognize the deep, human-induced roots of climate change, inequality, and the underdevelopment of former colonies—all of which increase the Caribbean’s vulnerability to disaster.

Risk, vulnerability, and poverty

Disaster risk is a function of both a place’s physical hazard exposure—that is, how directly it is threatened by disaster—and its social vulnerability, specifically, how resilient it is.



The country is among the Western Hemisphere’s poorest in large part because of imperialism. After Haitians successfully overthrew their European enslavers in 1804, global powers economically stifled the island. From 1915 to 1934, the U.S. first militarily occupied Haiti and then followed a policy of intervention that continues to have lasting effects on its governance.

International interference and the resulting weak institutions, in turn, impeded development, poverty reduction, and empowerment efforts.

In such a context, disasters aggravate a country’s numerous existing social vulnerabilities. Take gender, for example. Mental health professionals offering support to victims after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake found that an extraordinarily high number of displaced women—up to 75 percent—had experienced sexual violence. This prior trauma exacerbated the women’s post-disaster stress responses.

Geography and gender


Across the region, people spend most of their income on daily essentials like food, clean water, shelter, and medicine, with little left over for greeting Irma and Maria with lifesaving hurricane-resilient roofs, storm shutters, solar generators, and first aid kits.

For the poor, emergency radios and satellite telephones that could warn of impending disasters are largely unaffordable, as is homeowners insurance to hasten recovery.






No place for politics


Many contemporary governments in the region are, arguably, also doing their part to make life generally worse for marginalized communities. In Trinidad and Tobago, divestment in public education has hurt working-class university students, youth from low-income communities, and older adults who were previously eligible for financial aid.

In oil-rich Guyana, dependency upon fossil fuels has invited an eager ExxonMobil in for a round of drilling, despite its track record for extracting, polluting, and taking profits largely elsewhere. And, from Jamaica to Belize, widespread corruption and land rights violations have severed relationships of trust between people and the states that are, in theory, supposed to protect them.


When storms threaten, such policies and practices intensify the Caribbean’s societal and ecological risk.


In practice, this means identifying their most vulnerable communities and working to improve their day-to-day well-being—not just their survival in a storm.

The Caribbean’s own Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), from the island of Martinique, recognized these complexities in his book The Wretched of the Earth.




The Conversation