Guyanese Women Are Mixing Tech and Tradition to Monitor Climate Change

Guyana, at the top of South America, is one of the poorest countries on the continent. It is also particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels, heavy rainfall, and hurricanes since most of the population lives on its coast, which, in some places, can lie as low as 7 feet below sea level. Dutch colonizers unfortunately long ago reclaimed flat, unstable marshland to enlarge their territory. Ocean water regularly surges over sea walls.

Another issue afflicting Guyana is gender inequality. Women receive less schooling than men and are much more likely to be married off before the age of 18. But, while the country may have a fundamentally unequal society, according to UN Women, it is Guyanese women who are making waves in the environmental movement.

Guyana’s Marine Conservation Society, a nonprofit headed by a Guyanese woman named Annette Arjoon-Martins, is using drones to fly over 116,000 acres of land that include mangrove forests to look for illegal logging. Mangroves help prevent erosion along waterways.

“At one time, the entire coastline of Guyana was covered by mangroves,” Arjoon-Martins told the Trinidad and Tobago-based Caribbean Beat more than a decade ago. “A lot of people would cut mangroves down for firewood because of challenges of getting kerosene. Now Guyana is experiencing the effects of climate change as tides are higher and waves are stronger.”

Arjoon-Martins told The Associated Press in May that her group, which consists of mainly indigenous women, will soon begin to gather soil samples that will allow them to measure how much carbon is sequestered in remote coastal ecosystems, making it the first collection of such data. These secluded areas have long gone unmonitored by researchers, but, AP points out, this kind of information may prove critical toward influencing government policies that could protect these far-flung regions.

The women are being paid $700 month. The average monthly salary in Guyana is less than $800 a month.

Between the use of drones and the groundwork being carried out by the Marine Conservation Society, Arjoon-Martins said: “We are merging traditional knowledge and scientific research to get all this information that we need but never had before and couldn’t afford to get.”

The World Bank has said that “the impact of rising sea levels and intensified storm surges in Guyana would be among the greatest in the world.” Already, the country faces a faster rate of sea-level rise than most other parts of the planet. The ocean’s overflow would likely harm the entirety of Guyana’s coastal agriculture. AP explains that more than 66 percent of the country’s coastal urban areas are likely to suffer coastal erosion in flood conditions caused by climate change.

All of this is particularly time sensitive as Guyana undergoes a shift from agriculture to oil production as its main source of income. The country “is racing to build infrastructure” to start “drilling operations that would normally take a decade,” says the conservation news site Mongabay.

Amy Westervelt, a journalist who covers climate change, told Mongabay in April about the shift toward oil production in conjunction with ExxonMobil. This reality sets back a national effort to switch to renewable energy, she said: “They’re doing the thing that will exacerbate that problem.”

“I look at that,” Westervelt continued, “and I think, What a total failure of international climate negotiations that Global South countries — the ones that have fossil fuel resources — are in this position of having to use oil money to pay for climate adaptation. That’s ridiculous.”

Guyana’s vice president, Bharrat Jagdeo, recently said that the nation’s oil production was a “little operation” and that criticism from environmentalists was “nonsense.”

But that’s not flying when it comes to the country’s environmentalists and residents, who are living the nightmares of warming seas and coastal erosion.

“You can talk about conservation until the cows go home, but if people aren’t an integral part, it isn’t going to work,” Arjoon-Martins said.