Project of The BVI Beacon, The Virgin Islands Daily News, América Futura - El País América, Television Jamaica and the RCI Guadeloupe in collaboration with Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
The growing invasion of sargassum in the Caribbean has impacted the quality of life of the islands' residents. But local governments and some of their metropolises have so far failed to coordinate an international response to address the problem, which scientists believe is triggered by global pollution, the climate crisis, and a shortage of funds to mitigate it.
Despite the millions in funds invested in mitigation and research projects, celebrating summits and agreements, health problems related to sargassum increasingly affect people living on the French Caribbean islands.
Sargassum cleanup efforts, often paid for by Caribbean hotels and tourism businesses, were estimated at nearly $210 million in 2021, a figure some researchers believe is an underestimate.
The absorption of sargassum in desalination plants and power generation plants has caused citizens in the British Virgin Islands, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico to get cut off from these essential services for days. That or they get smelly tap water. But the governments of the three islands have fallen short in implementing mitigation and management plans for these invasive algae.
Since 2011, fishermen throughout the Caribbean have faced production declines due to sargassum. In Jamaica, one of the top 10 fish-consuming countries in the region, fishermen saw a 36% decline in current catch tons in 2017 compared to 1990.
Beach erosion, heightened stress on coral reefs and marine fauna species threatened by the accumulation of algae that prevents them from moving are some of the implications of the extreme flow of sargassum on the Caribbean coasts.
Biofuel, bricks, paper, beauty products and even a carbon capture system, are some of the options that researchers, scientists, and entrepreneurs in the Caribbean are experimenting as solutions to address the sargassum crisis, but there are still no large-scale solutions.
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Reporters: Freeman Rogers (The BVI Beacon), Olivia Losbar (RCI Guadeloupe), Maria Mónica Monsalve (América Futura, El País América), Krista Campbell (Television Jamaica), Suzanne Carlson (The Virgin Islands Daily News), Rafael René Díaz (Centro de Periodismo Investigativo), Mariela Mejía (Diario Libre) and Hassel Fallas (La Data Cuenta)
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This coverage was possible thanks to the support of Open Society Foundations through scholarships awarded during the first edition of the CPI's Caribe Fest in May 2023.
By Freeman Rogers (The BVI Beacon), Olivia Losbar (RCI Group Guadeloupe), Maria Mónica Monsalve (América Futura, El País América), Krista Campbell (Television Jamaica) and Suzanne Carlson (The Virgin Islands Daily News) with Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
Schools evacuated due to toxic gas. Smelly tap water at home. Tourist operators and fishers struggling to stay in business. Job losses. Power outages affecting tens of thousands of people at a time. Dangerous health problems. Even lives lost.
Such crises were some of the consequences of sargassum in the islands of the Caribbean in 2023, and they have become common in the region since 2011 when massive blooms began inundating the shorelines in the spring and summer months.
On April 18, 2023 in Guadeloupe, the air-quality monitoring agency Gwad’Air advised vulnerable people to leave some areas because of toxic levels of gas produced by sargassum. Six weeks later, about 600 miles to the northwest, sargassum blocked an intake pipe at an electricity plant at Punta Catalina in the Dominican Republic. One of the facility’s units was forced to temporarily shut down, and a 20-year-old diver named Elías Poling later drowned while trying to fix the problem.
A team removes sargassum at the facilities of the Punta Catalina Thermoelectric Power Plant in the Dominican Republic in 2023.
Photo by Punta Catalina Thermoelectric Power Plant
In Jamaica, during the months of July and August, fishers found themselves struggling through one more season as floating sargassum blocked their small boats and diminished their catch.
“Sometimes, the boats can’t even come into the creek,” said Jamaican fisherman Richard Osbourne. “It blocks the whole channel.”
In the British Virgin Islands (BVI), most of Virgin Gorda’s 4,000 residents had to deal with sporadic water shutoffs and odorous tap water for weeks after sargassum was sucked into their main desalination plant last August.
And in Puerto Rico, a highly unusual late-season influx inundated the beaches of the Aguadilla area for the first time, leaving residents like Christian Natal and many others out of work for a week when it shut down businesses including the jet ski rental company that employs him.
Christian Natal works at a water vehicle rental company in the “Crash Boat” beach in the municipality of Aguadilla that had to close last year due to the unusual arrival of sargassum to the northwest of Puerto Rico.
Photo by Gabriel López Albarrán | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
These victims are among thousands of people hurt by sargassum blooms last year alone in the Caribbean, where about 70% of the population of around 44 million lives near the coast, according to the World Bank.
Scientists blame the explosive growth of the seaweed on global pollution, climate change, and other international problems that Caribbean islands did little to cause and lack the political power to resolve.
“Seaweed must be seen as an impact of global warming, with the opening up of the right to compensation on the grounds that we are small, vulnerable islands,” said Sylvie Gustave dit Duflo, the vice-president of the Guadeloupe Region in charge of environmental issues and president of the French Biodiversity Office.
She added that the countries of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) — which include 15 member states and five associate members that are territories or colonies — recorded economic losses of about $102 million due to sargassum in 2022 alone.
“These figures do not take into account the losses recorded in all the other Caribbean countries, including the French islands,” she said. Nor do they take into account yearly costs of beach cleaning estimated to be as high as an additional $210 million.
Ezekiel Bobb, who lives near the ocean at Handsome Bay, Virgin Gorda, has suffered from the odor of decaying sargassum in recent years. He has tried to do his part by using it for fertilizer in his garden, but he is unable to make much dent in the massive amounts that wash ashore.
Photo by Freeman Rogers | The BVI Beacon
Gustave dit Duflo and other experts say the global problem requires a global response. But so far, the Caribbean has failed to coordinate even a region-wide strategy, and the international community has largely turned a blind eye. National-level responses — which in most Caribbean countries include a draft management strategy that hasn’t been officially adopted or adequately funded — have done little to take up the slack.
Most sargassum influxes are predictable, and the worst impacts are often preventable. But again and again, Caribbean governments have waited to react until the crisis stage. And even then, the responses have often focused on protecting the tourism industry while other groups, such as local communities or fishers, are left behind.
As a result, residents’ health, livelihood and natural environment have been endangered, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on reactive emergency responses that experts say could have been better spent on prevention, planning and mitigation.
At the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28) last December in Dubai, Gustave dit Duflo helped unveil a French proposal for the sort of international response she says is urgently needed. It includes forming a global coalition to better understand the problem, ensuring that sargassum is on the agenda of major international forums, and continuing previous work in partnership with the European Union, among other measures.
But to implement the proposal, governments in the Caribbean and further abroad will have to overcome hurdles that have previously stymied cooperation, including political and legislative differences, funding shortages, and debate about whether to prioritize health, the environment, the economy, or other areas.
In the meantime, sargassum has already started to arrive on the Caribbean’s shores once again. And once again, the region is not ready.
By April 8, 2024 (above), sargassum was once again washing ashore near the desalination plant at Handsome Bay, Virgin Gorda, but the promised protective boom had not been installed.
The ‘Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt’
Sargassum is not a bad thing in itself. Nor is it new to the Caribbean, where it has always washed ashore in modest quantities in the spring and summer, providing habitat for marine life and helping build beaches as it decays.
But 2011 brought too much of a good thing. Way too much.
Without warning that year, sargassum suddenly swamped shorelines. It piled several feet high on some beaches. It stank like rotten eggs as it decomposed. It shut down resorts, dealing a major blow to a tourism sector in some areas of the Caribbean still struggling to recover from the 2008-2009 global recession. It gave coastal residents headaches, nausea and respiratory problems. It disrupted turtle nesting sites and threatened reefs and mangroves.
Sargassum has caused problems for boats operating at the ferry terminal in Road Town, Tortola in the British Virgin Islands (shown above on May 20, 2023.)
Photo by Freeman Rogers | The BVI Beacon
As sargassum continued to flood the Caribbean and the western coast of Africa 8,000 miles away, scientists made a surprising discovery. Historically, most of the seasonal influx in the Caribbean had come from a two-million-square-mile gyre in the northern Atlantic Ocean: the Sargasso Sea.
“The Sargasso [Sea] has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s an ecosystem that was perfect, so to speak,” said Dominican Republic oceanographer Elena Martinez. “It was there surrounded by four oceans gyres, or currents, that kept it perfect.”
But scientists soon learned that most of the new Caribbean influx wasn’t coming from the Sargasso Sea anymore: It was coming from a new sargassum ecosystem that had formed in the southern Atlantic Ocean.
The area dubbed the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt in a 2019 article in Science is now visible from space, and its length often exceeds 5,000 miles, according to scientists who use satellites to track it.
Its cause is still debated. Sargassum researcher Dr. Brian Lapointe sees the Atlantic belt as a global version of a smaller bloom he witnessed in 1991 that shut down a nuclear power plant and other electricity facilities along the Florida coast.
Since the 1980s, the world population has nearly doubled, explained Lapointe, a professor at Florida Atlantic University. This, in turn, has led to a massive increase in the sargassum-boosting nutrients washing out of major rivers like the Mississippi in the US, the Amazon and Orinoco in South America, and the Congo in Africa.
“To grow that world population, we’ve used these fertilizers; we’ve deforested along all the major rivers in the world,” he said. “The nitrogen has gone up faster than the phosphorus from all these human activities, including wastewater, sewage, from the increasing human population.”
Another likely culprit is climate change. Martinez said warming waters may have disrupted the giant gyre that held the Sargasso Sea in place for thousands of years, releasing sargassum to float south and form the new belt.
Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt diagram.
REVIEW article Commercial Potential of Pelagic Sargassum spp. in Mexico, Frontiers
The new belt also receives additional nutrients from the Sahara dust that frequently blows across the Atlantic — which itself could be exacerbated by climate impacts such as the expansion of deserts as temperatures rise. Some scientists also argue that warming oceans provide a more sargassum-friendly growing environment.
Experts tend to agree that the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt is here to stay — and that it is a global problem that needs a global response.
‘A terrible scene for the people’
That much was clear by 2018, when the belt grew to a record size that was estimated at 22 million tons and much of the Caribbean saw its worst-ever inundation. The season spurred increasing calls for a collaborative international response.
The following year, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres visited St. Lucia for a July meeting of the Caribbean Community, and he took a side trip to the small fishing village of Praslin Bay.
Surrounded by dignitaries, Guterres walked down a dock lined with small boats bobbing atop thick mats of sargassum, which for years had plagued fishers, sea moss farmers and other residents in the area.
“So it’s a terrible scene for the people?” he asked a resident in a video posted
on the United Nations website.
“Yes,” the man responded. “It’s killing the fishes in the bay. The stench. It’s destroying our electronics because of the fumes.”
After his visit, Guterres described his sadness on seeing a “landscape that resembled an algae desert for hundreds of meters.”
Then he called for international action.
United Nations Secretary General António Guterres visits Praslin Bay, St. Lucia in July 2019 on the sidelines of his attendance at the Caribbean Community Heads of Government Summit that year.
Photo by United Nations
“Oceans don’t know borders, nor does climate,” he said. “It is a global collective responsibility to take action now.”
But that broad international action has not materialized as planned. Despite a growing patchwork of studies and projects across the region, various attempts by the UN and others to coordinate a Caribbean-wide response have been largely stalled by funding shortages, geopolitical issues, the Covid-19 pandemic and other factors.
One of the most extensive efforts came about three months after Guterres’ visit to St. Lucia, when Guadeloupe hosted the First International Conference on Sargassum in October 2019. Partners at the event — where the three-year Sarg’Coop program financed by about $3.2 million in European Union funds was officially launched — included the French government, the Guadeloupe Region, UNESCO and other entities. In attendance were representatives from more than a dozen Caribbean countries and territories, as well as the US, Mexico, Brazil and France.
Some progress followed. For instance, the Guadeloupe Region — in partnership with the French government, the French National Research Agency and two Brazilian agencies — launched a call for projects that enabled a dozen international studies to be carried out on the health, environmental and economic impact of the seaweed, as well as possible uses for it.
Other regional meetings have been held since then as well. Last June, for instance, an European Union-Caribbean conference on “Turning Sargassum into Opportunity” was held in the Dominican Republic, and the topic was discussed the following month at a summit of the EU and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (EU-CELAC) in Brussels, Belgium.
But almost five years after the 2019 Guadeloupe conference, the broader goals have not come to fruition on a regional level as envisioned, experts acknowledge. No Caribbean strategy is in place, and the region-wide warning and monitoring center envisioned at the conference has not been established.
Large sargassum mats sweeping into the shoreline in Manchioneal, Portland, Jamaica – one of the top three worst affected areas in the island.
Photo by Mona GeoInformatics Institute
Instead, many of the actions that grew out of the Guadeloupe conference have centered mainly on the French Caribbean. Funded in part by about $66 million allocated for 2018 to 2026 by the government of France — which for decades has struggled with algae washing ashore on its European coasts — the French islands have launched some of the most extensive response efforts in the Caribbean in recent years.
But even this has not been enough to protect residents.
Describing Guterres’ visit to Praslin Bay as “nothing more than a photo op,” Martinique-based professor Dr. Dabor Resiere and seven other researchers claimed in a March 2023 article that the “local authorities failed to take advantage of such an important visitor to give international recognition to the sargassum phenomenon in the Caribbean.”
Four years later, they added, the situation remained “unchanged.”
“Despite the French government’s plans to tackle the sargassum problem, these toxic algae are continuing to inundate the coasts of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana in ever-greater volumes,” the researchers wrote in the Journal of Global Health, adding, “Today, there is no national and international consensus on facing this public health problem. There is no Caribbean network or a broad consensus to advance research at this level.”
Even Praslin Bay saw scant relief in the years after it welcomed the UN secretary general.
In 2022, St. Lucian sargassum researcher Dr. Bethia Thomas produced videos about the village and two other nearby communities as part of her doctoral thesis. In each video, several residents listed complaints ranging from breathing problems to fisheries destruction to corroding jewelry.
“It affects how I breathe, and I also think it affects the children and the way that they function, because sometimes they’re so moody and they cannot sit and do the activities because it’s so awful,” a teacher says in the video of Praslin Bay. “And I think it’s affecting us mentally.”
Concerns about sargassum’s effects on the mental health of coastal residents and workers were noted in a September 2023 report by the 34-member Western Central Atlantic Fishery Commission. “The unpleasant odor, the deterioration of their environment, lack of access to the beaches for relaxation, uncertainty about the future, increase in physical ailments such as respiratory illness and skin rashes, and concerns about other potential health risks, among other things, will naturally affect mental health,” stated the commission, a regional fisheries body established under the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.
However, the report added that such mental health impacts are not currently being studied.
In the absence of a regional strategy, national sargassum management plans have been developed in most countries and territories in the Caribbean, including eight through grant-funded projects affiliated with the University of the West Indies in St. Lucia, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, BVI, Anguilla and Montserrat.
But few have been officially adopted at the government level, and even fewer are adequately funded or closely followed.
Sargassum lines the shore in July 2023 in Anegada in the British Virgin Islands.
Photo by Freeman Rogers | The BVI Beacon
“Sometimes the small communities get left behind,” Thomas said. “Maybe not intentionally, but in small island developing states with limited resources, you have to prioritize. And perhaps other things — like building a new hospital and constructing new roads, new schools — might take precedence over developing a sargassum management plan.”
Partly as a result, sargassum responses can vary dramatically from island to island.
But in probing major influxes in six Caribbean countries and territories last year, CPI found one constant: people are suffering.
Negligible investment from polluting countries
As residents experience health and economic consequences, Caribbean leaders often complain about a shortage of money to deal with the crisis. Local funds, they note, are tied up with many competing priorities, including handling climate-related impacts like hurricanes, droughts and flooding.
They also say that the cost of the sargassum crisis should be shouldered in part by the larger countries mostly responsible for it, but that accessing international climate financing for the purpose is not easy.
A CPI review of projects funded by the Global Environment Facility and by members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development between 2000 and 2021 found out that of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on climate change projects in the world, less than $7 million went to address sargassum-related issues. About 89% of those funds, or $6 million, were spent in the Caribbean.
But for many non-independent islands, the problem is compounded by a political status that renders them ineligible for most climate financing.
“We have no access to global funds: Resilience fund, the loss-and-damage fund,” said BVI Health and Social Development Minister Vincent Wheatley, whose home overlooks the Virgin Gorda desalination plant that was recently damaged by sargassum.
The sargassum that filled Handsome Bay, Virgin Gorda (shown above on Sept. 1, 2023) was sucked into the intake pipe of the island’s main desalination plant and caused damage that led to water shortages and cut-offs.
Photo by Anika Christopher | The BVI Beacon
At the annual UN Climate Change Conferences, he explained, overseas territories are not parties and don’t have their own seat at the negotiating table.
“We fall under the [United Kingdom],” he said. “So whatever the UK negotiates, it will pass on to us.”
Therefore, he said, the BVI and other overseas territories have been in separate negotiations with the UK.
“We banded together to petition the UK to carve out a specific fund for [its] overseas territories,” he said, adding that these discussions are ongoing and include sargassum.
A lack of funding and regional coordination has also stymied efforts to monetise the seaweed by finding a large-scale sustainable use for it.
“Even though there are so many things you can make with sargassum, the actual amount of sargassum that is used for products is still very low,” said Dr. Franziska Elmer, a sargassum researcher based in Mexico.
Sargassum plan proposed at COP28 in Dubai
The 2023 sargassum bloom in the Caribbean had mostly abated by Dec. 2, when Gustave dit Duflo, the French Biodiversity Office president, stood at a podium 8,000 miles away during a side event at the COP28 meeting in Dubai.
As dignitaries looked on, she issued a stark warning about sargassum.
“It is a very invasive and aggressive phenomenon, and through all the Caribbean it affects tourism, and all the economies of the region are based on biodiversity and tourism,” she told those gathered at the French pavilion on the sidelines of the conference. “The Caribbean has a lot of hot-spots of biodiversity. So if we don’t act, in 20 years this marine biology, including the reef, will disappear from our coast.”
Close up drone shots of floating sargassum in the coastal community of Robin’s Bay, St. Mary, Jamaica. This is one of the top three areas worst affected by sargassum every year.
She then explained the French government’s proposal to address the issue. The program, she said, has four prongs: forming an international coalition to better understand the problem and its causes; addressing sargassum in international forums like the COP of Biodiversity; acting in the framework of the Cartagena Convention; and working with the EU to support the continuation of the regional Sarg’Coop project launched during the 2019 conference in Guadeloupe.
The French government has presented the proposal as an unprecedented move at COP 28, with the aim of placing the sargassum issue on one of the high-level panels of the United Nations Conference on the Oceans to be held in Nice, France, in June 2025.
Such collaboration is essential, according to Gustave dit Duflo.
“We manage sargassum at a local level, but this is not a phenomenon of an island. It is the whole basin of the Caribbean and a part of the Atlantic,” she said. “This is why all the countries that are impacted, we need to create an international coalition to be able to find means and ways to act.”
Since COP28, the Netherlands and its overseas countries and territories decided to join the international program proposed by France alongside Costa Rica, Mexico, Dominican Republic and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, Gustave dit Duflo told CPI.
A meeting will be held soon with the European Commission to define the project’s legal guidelines and financing, she said.
Also at COP 28, the EU and the government of the Dominican Republic co-organised a related panel at the Dominican Republic pavilion, where they launched an initiative to “turn sargassum into an economic opportunity” by tapping the EU-Latin America and the Caribbean Global Gateway Investment Agenda.
To succeed, such projects will need to build on work that came out of efforts like the 2019 conference in Guadeloupe — and overcome the challenges that delayed them.
Since early 2019, for instance, Météo France, the French weather service, has been operating a sargassum monitoring and detection service in the French West Indies and French Guiana. But so far, these efforts have not expanded into the regional center envisioned at the 2019 conference despite various monitoring systems launched in recent years, such as the Jamaica Early Advisory System, the regional CARICOOS tracker in Puerto Rico, and the Satellite-based Sargassum Watch System at the University of South Florida.
The Sarg’Coop program launched at the 2019 conference also planned to replicate work done in Martinique, which in 2015 had set up a hydrogen sulfide and ammonia monitoring system that was later developed into a large-scale measurement network and extended into Guadeloupe in 2018.
Under Sarg’Coop, the Martinique-based research institute Madininair was given responsibility for supporting St. Lucia, Dominica, Tobago, Cuba and Mexico in preparing similar networks. But the Covid-19 pandemic delayed progress, and only recently did the effort get back on track with work carried out in each of those countries.
Asked about the past obstacles to implementing a common international strategy, Gustave dit Duflo, also a lecturer in neuroscience at the University of the West Indies, pointed to geopolitics. As one example, she cited the May 2023 summit of the Association of Caribbean States in Guatemala. The summit discussions, she said, were largely dominated by the conflict in Ukraine as countries in the region debated the issue of supporting Russia or the United States.
Regional collaboration has also been hindered by legislative differences across borders, according to the scientist.
Guadeloupe senator Dominique Théophile made a similar observation when he was commissioned to conduct a study on sargassum management strategies in the Caribbean ahead of the 2019 conference. After several trips to St. Lucia, the Dominican Republic and Mexico, he found that the most successful area management plans were carried out by major hotel groups on a local scale.
But such strategies often could not be deployed throughout the entire Caribbean.
For instance, health and environmental laws in French and other European territories precluded a practice that is common elsewhere in the region — spreading sargassum behind beaches — because of the possibility that the seaweed could contain arsenic and other heavy metals that could affect the ocean or groundwater.
Because of such laws, Théophile explained, the French sargassum management strategy attaches heightened importance to health and environmental impacts. Often for financial reasons, other countries’ initiatives don’t address such environmental and health considerations in corresponding detail, he said.
As countries work to rectify such issues and establish an international response, time is of the essence for residents of the coastal Caribbean.
Shortly after the COP28 drew to a close, scientists at the University of South Florida estimated the sargassum floating in the tropical Atlantic Ocean at about five million metric tons, compared to a December average of about two million. By February, the mass had increased to some nine million tons — the second highest quantity ever recorded for the month.
In other words, another record-setting sargassum season could have just started.
Reporters Rafael René Díaz Torres (Centro de Periodismo Investigativo), Mariela Mejía (Diario Libre), and Hassel Fallas (La Data Cuenta) collaborated in this investigation.
This investigation is the result of a fellowship awarded by the Center for Investigative Journalism’s Training Institute and was made possible in part with the support of Open Society Foundations.
In the quiet seaside village of Capesterre on Marie-Galante island in Guadeloupe on April 18, 2023, the air-quality monitoring institute Gwad’Air issued a “red alert” to warn people away from coastal areas.
The culprit was sargassum. After washing ashore for days, the floating seaweed was emitting a dangerous level of hydrogen sulfide gas as it rotted on the beach.
The problem was not new for residents of Marie-Galante, a sleepy agricultural island of 11,000 inhabitants that is part of Guadeloupe’s biosphere reserve.
Since the first mass strandings more than ten years ago, rotting sargassum has frequently plagued residents and tourists and forced several businesses and restaurants to close their doors for months at a time.
Among the struggling proprietors are sisters Marie-Louise and Lyselène Bade, who recently shuttered their small hotel Le Soleil Levant.
Marie-Louise Bade is the owner of the small hotel Le Soleil Levant, which had to close due to the sargassum invasion in Guadeloupe.
Photo courtesy of Marie-Louise Bade
Though they still operate a bakery and grocery store they inherited from their mother, Marie-Louise said a Gwad’Air technician recently asked her a worrying question: “How do you manage to stay here?”
She often wonders the same thing.
“You know, I love wearing costume jewelry, but now I can’t keep it on my skin for more than a quarter of an hour. They oxidize and make my skin itch. When you see what it does to electrical equipment and metal, you wonder what it does inside your body, to your lungs,” she said.
According to Marie-Louise Bade, since sargassum has increased in Guadeloupe, metal furniture and artifacts have begun to corrode more quickly.
Photo by Olivia Losbar | RCI Guadeloupe
Thanks to recent research carried out in the French Caribbean — much of which has struggled with similar problems as Marie-Galante — scientists can now better answer that question.
But this knowledge has not been enough to protect Bade and many other Guadeloupe residents.
Even as the French Caribbean has emerged as a regional leader in the fight against sargassum, researchers such as Martinique-based doctor Dabor Resiere have said response efforts there have fallen far short.
As a result, many residents regularly face dangerous health risks — and the French government has turned to the world stage to call for an international response to address sargassum as a global problem.
‘Airborne poisoning outbreak’
By the time 2018 brought a record sargassum influx to Caribbean shorelines, the health effects of the rotting seaweed had become much better known. In December of that year, a group of sargassum researchers in Martinique issued a stark warning.
In a letter published in The Lancet medical journal, they noted that doctors in Martinique and Guadeloupe — French islands with a combined population of nearly 800,000 — had recently recorded more than 11,000 cases of acute sargassum toxicity during an eight-month period. Among them were three cases admitted to intensive care.
“To mitigate this emerging airborne poisoning outbreak, the French government has already promised €10 million [US $10,835,600] to supply equipment that can be used to remove the seaweed within 48 hours, to monitor hydrogen sulfide concentrations on the affected shores, to train doctors, and to assign experts in toxicology in affected areas,” wrote Resiere and 10 other researchers based in Martinique and France.
“Despite this commendable first effort by the French government, a mitigation plan to address this enigmatic sargassum invasion should urgently be discussed at an international level to boost marine research, pool resources, and consolidate local political priorities,” Resiere said.
The French government — which for decades has struggled with algae washing ashore on its European coasts — has launched two national sargassum plans funded with about $26 million for 2018-2022 and about $40 million for 2022-2026. Millions more were spent by local authorities in sargassum collection operations and investment in dedicated equipment.
As a result, the French islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint Martin and Saint Barthelemy have launched some of the most extensive response efforts in the Caribbean in recent years. Besides the ongoing research, these efforts have included air-quality-monitoring programs, clean-up initiatives, and one of the rare national response strategies that has been officially adopted by the government.
In 2019, Guadeloupe also hosted the first International Sargassum Conference, where the Guadeloupe Region — in partnership with the French government, the French National Research Agency and two Brazilian agencies — launched a call for projects with financial support from the European Union and other sources.
This effort ultimately funded 12 projects — the results of which were presented on Feb. 28, 2024 — as part of the National Sargassum Prevention and Control Plan. Besides probing the algae cycle and the environmental effects of sargassum, these projects have also investigated health impacts.
One of the outcomes, the SargaCare project, led to a July 2022 study on more than 3,000 pregnant women on Martinique, which reported finding evidence of a higher risk of potentially fatal preeclampsia in expectant mothers exposed to sargassum fumes.
A later SargaCare study suggested that prolonged exposure to the fumes increases the risk of patients developing sleep apnea.
‘The situation remained unchanged’
But despite this work, health researchers have warned that response efforts have not kept pace with the problem in the French Caribbean or the wider region.
In Guadeloupe and Martinique, they wrote, “the situation remained unchanged. Despite the French government’s plans to tackle the sargassum problem, these toxic algae are continuing to inundate the coasts of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana in ever-greater volumes.”
The Covid-19 pandemic, they stated, was partially to blame for the problem because it had sucked up health resources. But they also noted the absence of a coordinated regional health response and warned that Caribbean governments eager to jumpstart their post-pandemic tourism economies may be inclined to downplay the sargassum problem.
“The public continues to be adversely affected, some have sold their dream houses which are becoming unlivable, some have abandoned their schools and workplaces for lack of a solution to this scourge,” the researchers wrote. “It is urgent to come to the aid of these families who, in addition to the health consequences due to the significant emanations of hydrogen sulfide, have to bear the material consequences, being often forced to replace all their household appliances or the metal parts of their houses.”
2023 season
By the time the researchers’ letter was published in March 2023, a new sargassum season was already causing health problems across the French Caribbean.
In late January 2023, a 59-year-old woman was treated by emergency services for acute toxicity after taking part in a sargassum clean-up on Tartane beach in Trinité, Martinique.
On March 2, the Martinique municipality of Le Robert partially closed the Four à Chaux school due to high exposure to gas released by sargassum.
Boats float in sargassum off Batelière Beach in Schoelcher, Martinique, on Sept. 12, 2023.
Photo by Jacques Dijon | RCI Guadeloupe
And when the air pollution alert was triggered in Guadeloupe’s Saint-François lagoon area on Sept. 15, people were asked to move away from a populated marina area that hosts hotels, restaurants and tourism businesses offering water activities.
Marie-Galante
Back in Marie-Galante, Marie-Louise Bade continued to struggle as well. Bade, who goes by “Malou,” operates multiple businesses on her island, where the economy is powered by tourism, fishing, sugarcane and banana crops, and a rum distillery.
“For 11 years, I’ve had to put up with this,” Bade said. “For 11 years, every time I open my doors, I think, ‘My God, what other appliance is going to break down this morning?’ No matter how much we repair, clean, the walls turn gray. Algae eats away at all the plumbing. … So everything is destroyed and there are leaks all the time.”
Tourists, she said, stopped coming.
“I can’t rent out the rooms anymore,” she said. “People open the windows, they have a view of the sargassum. There’s the smell. And on the walls, the pipes, the air-conditioning: Everything turns black.”
On Sept. 12, 2023, an operation was organized by the municipality of Schoelcher, with the help of a fishing boat, to collect sargassum washed up on Batelière Beach, Martinique.
Photo by Jacques Dijon | RCI Guadeloupe
Her health has suffered as well.
Bade described continuous itching, small pimples appearing on her skin, vision issues, and respiratory problems that now force her to take asthma medication.
Various governmental efforts have not provided relief in her day-to-day life, she said. About two years ago, for example, the Guadeloupe regional health agency distributed questionnaires for about a month. But since then, she said, no follow-up action has been taken to her knowledge.
The businesswoman said the town doctor regularly monitors the effects of sargassum on the population’s health, and he encourages her to consult him every three months.
Last year, residents got a brief respite when booms were installed offshore in August in hopes of preventing the seaweed from reaching the beach.
For a while, the solution worked, according to the town’s mayor, Jean-Claude Maes. Residents started walking along the coast again as they hadn’t done for years, and a few entrepreneurs decided to set up new businesses, Maes said.
But the respite was short-lived: The booms were swept away last October by swells caused by Hurricane Tammy. Plans to reinstall them by December still have not come to fruition.
An anti-sargassum boom was installed last year to protect La Feuillère Beach in Capesterre de Marie-Galante, but it was damaged by Hurricane Tammy in October. On Dec. 1, 2023, it was lying on the shoreline awaiting reinstallation.
Photo by Olivia Losbar | RCI Guadeloupe
Though such responsibilities normally fall to towns and cities, the French government has decided to bear 80% of the financial cost of combating sargassum. But the mayor said that funding was slow in coming last year.
‘Irritation and anxiety’
While residents suffer, research continues. Professor Dabor Resiere, a sargassum researcher and department head at Martinique University Hospital, said previous studies have focused largely on the effects of acute toxicity caused by high levels of sargassum gasses.
But there is a dearth of information on chronic toxicity at lower doses, he said. To learn more, the professor and his team have been visiting patients in the field as part of a Martinique University Hospital monitoring program they plan to export soon to Guadeloupe, St. Lucia and other islands.
“We don’t know about the average resident who lives near a stranding site, who receives a small amount of [exposure to sargassum gas] every day,” said Resiere. “We can see that the majority of these patients continue to have trouble sleeping, continue to have generalized fatigue, continue to have conjunctivitis, irritation and anxiety. This anxiety, this depressive syndrome: All these symptoms we observe in patients. But now we need to demonstrate it scientifically.”
Other research is continuing as well. After the results of the 2019 call for projects were presented this February, the Guadeloupe Region and its partners launched a new call for projects. This round will continue studying health impacts, as well as addressing other topics including sargassum’s effects on marine ecosystems and the hydrodynamic conditions that affect blooms.
But in Marie-Galante, Bade and her sister have more immediate concerns.
Currently, the metal roof of their businesses leaks because of holes they blame on corrosion caused by the sargassum gasses. But they are reluctant to invest in repairs as long as they are faced with continued uncertainty.
Despite the risks, they have no plans to leave. For Bade, it is inconceivable to close the business bequeathed to her by her mother, in which she and her sister grew up.
“What would the town be without a bakery?” she asked.
This investigation is the result of a fellowship awarded by the Center for Investigative Journalism’s Training Institute and was made possible in part with the support of Open Society Foundations.
The 2023 sargassum season started early at the Bolongo Bay Beach Resort on St. Thomas in the United States Virgin Islands.
Around the end of March, staff launched the response system they have devised over the years in the absence of any official guidance from the government: hand-raking the beaches and spreading the seaweed to dry on the grounds of the 65-room property, which is nestled in a cove on the southern side of the island of about 50,000 people.
As usual, the family-owned resort had to foot the full bill for the response.
It is not alone. Without a national sargassum management strategy or a dedicated pool of funding from the V.I. government, the financial burden for cleaning the shorelines in the territory has often fallen squarely on resorts, yacht charterers and other tourism operators.
“We’re in the millions of dollars being spent on mitigation over the last decade,” said Lisa Hamilton, President of the V.I. Hotel and Tourism Association.
Workers with ORB Landscaping and Trucking use rakes and bins to haul massive piles of sargassum away from the Frenchtown boat ramp on St. Thomas on Oct. 20, 2023. They were called in for “emergency cleanup by the government.”
Photo by Suzanne Carlson | The Virgin Islands Daily News
Often these costs come on top of lost revenue as tourists increasingly select their vacation destinations to avoid affected beaches.
Variations of this scenario have played out repeatedly across the Caribbean since sargassum began to regularly swamp the region in 2011.
For example, tourism operators in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, were among the 2023 victims. Last September, the municipality — which had been spared from major sargassum events in the past — was hit by its first major influx shortly after Hurricane Lee passed to the north in September. As a result, tourism virtually shut down on the popular Aguadilla beaches of Peña Blanca and Crash Boat for about a week, Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI) found.
“When people come [to the beach] and see that and [smell] the odor, they go to other beaches,” resident James Ramos said while he cooked the popular barbecue chicken “pincho” skewers that he sells daily on Crash Boat beach. “This was one of the worst [sargassum events] I have ever seen.”
Without a government mitigation plan mandated by April 2023 but never produced, Aguadilla business owners worked to clear the seaweed themselves. But they said they had questions about how to respond, with no clear guidelines on its disposal and no government program to reimburse them for their lost earnings.
In Puerto Rico, James Ramos said that the arrival of sargassum kept people away from the beach where he has a business selling “pinchos”.
Photo by Gabriel López Albarrán | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
The Puerto Rico Department of Natural and Environmental Resources (DRNA for its initials in Spanish) was ordered to prepare a mitigation plan for the management of sargassum under a law signed in January 2023 by Governor Pedro Pierluisi.
But that plan, which should have been ready by the start of April 2023, has stalled partly for lack of funding, said Mariana León Pérez, a researcher in marine and coastal sciences who was involved in the project’s early stages.
In its place, the DRNA recently published an updated and expanded action protocol for the management of sargassum that it initially created in 2015. But the protocol did not answer all the questions facing the affected Aguadilla businesses, whose struggles also point to larger issues about jurisdiction between the federal and local governments in the U.S. territory, according to León Pérez.
“[It is necessary] to clarify the jurisdiction; which permits are needed in terms of disposal of sargassum on land. That remains pending,” she explained. “We are already quite clear about what process must be followed to request permits for removal, but after you remove it, what do you do with it? So we have to clarify the disposition and use part.”
Aguadilla Mayor Julio Roldán said such issues presented a problem during the September accumulation.
“There were some people who own dairy farms who wanted to have sargassum, because it is a good protein for cows, but obviously they were not clear if that could be done or not. Since it was not specific in the [DRNA] protocol, it could not be achieved,” Roldán told the CPI.
“How bad is the sargassum?”
Studies have shown that Caribbean tourism drops by 7% to 35% during times of sargassum accumulation, and roughly 55% of all hotels in the region report being affected by sargassum, according to Dominican Republic-based oceanographer Elena Martinez.
Cleanup efforts — frequently funded by tourism properties desperate to keep their guests happy — often involve the use of heavy machinery on beaches. But this process exacerbates erosion, resulting in the need to invest additional millions of dollars in erosion restoration, said Martinez, who works as the research and development lead at SOS Carbon, an organization that designs systems to collect sargassum before it reaches shorelines.
Though total cleanup costs are unknown, they have been estimated to reach as high as $210 million in a single year in the Caribbean — a number the some researchers believe to be an underestimate.
A worker piles up sargassum at the Frenchtown boat ramp on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands on Oct. 20, 2023, after a late-season influx of seaweed that filled Charlotte Amalie Harbor, making it difficult for boats to navigate the busy port.
Photo by Suzanne Carlson | The Virgin Islands Daily News
Meanwhile, tourists planning a Caribbean vacation have been asking variations of the same question on travel websites and social media: “How bad is the sargassum?”
While several satellite tracking maps are available online, predicting where exactly an influx will occur is still challenging: Sargassum movements vary widely based on wind direction, currents, and other factors.
As a result, vacation planners have taken to social media to crowdsource answers to specific questions about where and when sargassum might hit. Also stoking travellers’ concerns are media reports, like a recent USA Today headline that warned, “A record-size blanket of smelly seaweed could ruin your spring beach trip. What to know.”
“Sargassum has a palpable effect on our tourism product and the people involved in the industry,” Dona Regis-Prosper, Secretary-General of the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO), told CPI. “When it’s heavy, our destinations suffer vacation cancellations and beachfront room closures, leading to staff layoffs and reduced economic gain for the sector and associated communities. Therefore, the sargassum invasion has had a negative impact on the tourist industry, the region’s main economic driver.”
Sargassum is more than just a nuisance, and can be associated with potentially serious health impacts. An April 18, 2023 air pollution alert in Capesterre de Marie-Galante in Guadeloupe warned vulnerable people to stay away from the coast, as the smell of decomposing sargassum made the air difficult to breathe. At times, such incidents have kept tourists away from the village and forced businesses to close.
Another wave of sargassum in Guadeloupe in September affected a populated marina with a variety of hotels, restaurants, and businesses offering water activities.
Last year in Jamaica, the popular tourist town of Negril experienced one of its worst sargassum seasons, which caused serious issues for beachfront hotels forced to spend thousands of Jamaican dollars to clean the beaches daily.
In the British Virgin Islands, the popular Nanny Cay Marina has tried using boats’ propellers to clear out the seaweed clogging its docks — a method that worked but proved expensive as gasoline costs mounted.
“Cleanup costs are prohibitive, with several destinations spending millions to restore the sociological and economic balance of affected areas,” said Regis-Prosper. “Kudos must be extended to those who have undertaken this challenging task and made strides toward recovery.”
A boom holds sargassum back from yachts at Nanny Cay Resort and Marina in the British Virgin Islands on June 17, 2023.
Photo by Freeman Rogers | The BVI Beacon
She added that the CTO “applauds the efforts of organisations that are searching for and funding educational and start-up initiatives dedicated to repurposing sargassum to benefit our destinations. We will continue to encourage researchers, marine scientists, entrepreneurs and innovators to explore imaginative ways and means of managing sargassum by using it for carbon sequestration, agricultural use, and biofuel, for example.”
$25,000 per day
Until a large-scale solution is found, costs will likely continue climbing for tourism properties. In the U.S. Virgin Islands, no full spending breakdown has been made public, but a government official said in 2022 that the territory’s hotels collectively spent around $25,000 a day to clean up sargassum during major influxes.
Other numbers emerged during a public hearing in 2021, when environmental consultant Amy Dempsey said that the 264-room Margaritaville Vacation Club spends around $50,000 a month to remove sargassum, while the 180-room Ritz-Carlton spends more than $500,000 a year and removes as many as six 40-yard bins of sargassum in a day.
“Economically, for places like Margaritaville and a lot of the hotels on east-facing beaches, it is a major cost for them, the sargassum removal,” said Paul Jobsis, Director of the Center for Marine and Environmental Science at the University of the Virgin Islands. “And of course their guests don’t like it because it doesn’t feel good when you go swimming in a bunch of sargassum.”
This investigation is the result of a fellowship awarded by the Center for Investigative Journalism’s Training Institute and was made possible in part with the support of Open Society Foundations.
It is the second-most populated of the British Virgin Islands (BVI). It boasts swanky seaside villas, a five-star beach resort built by Laurance Rockefeller in the 1960’s, and the billionaires’ yachting playground of North Sound.
But in mid-August 2023,Virgin Gorda residents started complaining about the fetid odour of their tap water.
“When you take a shower, you come out smelling like sulphur dioxide — like bad eggs,” construction contractor Christina Yates said at the time.
The problem was widespread across The Valley, which is home to most of the island’s approximately 4,000 residents. Some said the water burned or gave them a rash when they showered. Others said it killed their house plants when they watered them. And soon, many residents had no tap water at all for hours or days at a time.
As the complaints grew louder, the government offered an explanation that many residents had suspected: Sargassum had entered the intake pipe at the desalination plant that produces most of the island’s public water. This problem had exacerbated longstanding issues with the water distribution system, leading to rationing that cut the supply nearly in half.
Sargassum lines the shore in Handsome Bay, Virgin Gorda, last September in the British Virgin Islands. The seaweed damaged the island’s main desalination plant, leading to water shortages and smelly tap water.
Photo by Anika Christopher | The BVI Beacon
The water crisis was not the first. In the BVI and other Caribbean islands in recent years, sargassum has periodically damaged water and electricity plants and left residents without basic services.
Last May in the Dominican Republic, for instance, sargassum knocked out a generation unit at the Punta Catalina Electric Generation Company, which produces about 30% of the country’s electricity, despite a $4 million investment in filters a year earlier.
A team removes sargassum at the facilities of the Punta Catalina Thermoelectric Power Plant in the Dominican Republic in 2023.
Photo by courtesy Punta Catalina Thermoelectric Power Plant
In 2022, sargassum affected a desalination plant on St. Croix in the United States Virgin Islands so badly that the governor declared a state of emergency.
And in September 2021 in Puerto Rico, hundreds took to the streets to protest widespread, days-long power outages that the government blamed on the seaweed.
But despite this history, the BVI government had done little to prepare, even though its own draft sargassum management strategy warned since April 2023 of the risks at the Virgin Gorda plant and recommended measures that could have prevented the water crisis.
‘Emergency stages’
Following complaints in the summer, the government announced on Sept. 1 that it had “resolved” Virgin Gorda’s water issues by flushing water lines, conducting tests, and taking other steps. But residents said otherwise. On Sept. 20, they launched an online petition calling on government leaders to meet with them and explain the way forward.
Sargassum, dirt and other debris were still piled on the shore in front of the desalination plant in Handsome Bay, Virgin Gorda, last November, more than two months after the seaweed damaged the facility.
Photo by Freeman Rogers | The BVI Beacon
“The situation has reached emergency stages in the last two weeks,” the petition stated, citing a 2010 United Nations resolution proclaiming “safe and clean drinking water and sanitation” as a basic human right. “We are very concerned that September is one of the periods of lowest water demand due to the off-peak tourism season and yet there appears to be low water levels. The lack of water creates unhygienic situations that concern our community especially now that schools are back in session.”
The petition received nearly 200 signatures, and the government responded by hosting a community meeting on Oct. 10.
Among the speakers was Michael Matthew, the general manager of the company Aqua Design BVI Limited, which operates the struggling desalination plant.
Since the previous winter, Matthew explained, sargassum had periodically washed ashore in mass quantities in Handsome Bay, the largely residential village where the water plant is located.
“Because it wasn’t removed, … after sitting on the shore for approximately eight months, it decomposed to the point where, after the seasonal tides changed with the rough weather, it actually brought some of the material all the way back out to our intake,” Matthew said as he showed photographs of shore-side sargassum mountains that reached several feet in height. “And what happened at that point in time, it started to overwhelm our structure. It’s not designed for sargassum.”
To protect the equipment, he explained, the plant cut production from around 360,000 gallons per day to as low as 230,000 gallons. He added that plans were in the works to replace membranes and install other new equipment with the hope of reaching a target of 430,000 gallons per day by the end of February 2024 — although attempts to confirm progress since then were unsuccessful.
Warning signs
Given the numerous warning signs, the water crisis shouldn’t have come as a surprise in the first place.
Since early spring, sargassum had regularly swamped shorelines across the territory.
On nearby Tortola in June 2023, it had entered an intake pipe at the main electricity plant, knocking out power for several hours for most of the island’s approximately 25,000 residents.
A worker cleans sargassum near the main electricity plant on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands on June 5, 2023. The day before, much of the island lost power for several hours after the seaweed was sucked into the intake pipe that provides cooling seawater to the plant.
Photo by Freeman Rogers | The BVI Beacon
But perhaps the most obvious red flag for Virgin Gorda was its own recent history.
In 2015, a sargassum influx knocked the Handsome Bay plant offline for nearly a year, forcing the government to install a temporary emergency facility. Officials have not disclosed the cost of the temporary facility or explained why a similar approach was not used last year.
But at the time, leaders took notice. In November 2015, the then-minister of Natural Resources promised a comprehensive sargassum policy and implementation strategy. The following March, British billionaire Richard Branson invited environment ministers and entrepreneurs from around the region to a sargassum symposium at his new resort on Mosquito Island in Virgin Gorda’s North Sound.
But despite this push, progress dragged, with delays exacerbated by major hurricanes in 2017 and then the Covid-19 pandemic.
A waste strategy drafted in 2019 included advice for handling the excess seaweed, but it wasn’t until April 2023 that the government created a draft sargassum management strategy as part of a project funded by about $290,000 from the United Kingdom government’s Darwin Plus program that also created strategies for the UK territories of Montserrat and Anguilla.
But a year later, the draft, which the BVI government provided on request, has not been officially adopted or even circulated in the public domain. And the Virgin Gorda water crisis suggests that the document has been largely ignored — just like the related recommendations in the 2019 waste strategy.
Vulnerable area
The 2023 draft strategy, in fact, identifies Handsome Bay as one of the three most sargassum-vulnerable areas in the BVI, and it explicitly warns of the risks associated with the desalination plant there.
Like the 2019 waste strategy, it also recommends several measures that could have helped prevent the water crisis: monitoring vulnerable areas with cameras; funding and creating an early-warning system; using booms and other equipment to collect sargassum before it reaches the shore; setting up systems for safely removing the seaweed from the shore in a timely manner; conducting hazard mapping at sensitive areas; and others.
But residents said such measures were not implemented in Handsome Bay to their knowledge.
Loretta Demming, who runs a small shop and salon in the village, said diggers and trucks typically arrive to remove sargassum only when it reaches a crisis level.
“It has to be real, real bad,” she said.
Like other residents, Demming shared a litany of related complaints. The gas emitted by the sargassum turns jewelry and other metals black, she said, and she is no longer able to swim in the ocean near her home.
Ezekiel Bobb, a former hotel worker who has lived in Handsome Bay for about 30 years, said a more consistent and rigorous removal strategy is urgently needed.
“At least three times a week, you can have the JCB [digger] and a truck, and you just remove most of it,” he suggested, adding, “I think there should be more and more emphasis put into it, because it’s terrible.”
Ezekiel Bobb, a former hotel worker who lives in Handsome Bay, said a more consistent and rigorous sargassum removal strategy is urgently needed in the BVI.
Freeman Rogers | The BVI Beacon
He has tried to do his part by using sargassum for fertiliser in his garden, but he is unable to make much of a dent.
“Especially at night when you’re sleeping, it’s like somebody’s putting their finger in your nose when you’re trying to sleep to stifle you,” he said. “It’s like it’s blocking out your nostrils. Even if you close the windows tight.”
The ‘every-year surprise’
During the October meeting on Virgin Gorda, officials explained various plans for protecting the water plant in the future.
For instance, Matthew said, they had consulted with a dive company, which suggested reorienting the plant’s intake grill so the seaweed can’t fall directly into it.
“They also suggested extending [the 850-foot intake pipe] by 800 feet, which is very expensive,” he said. “That structure has been there for almost 30 years — 1994 we installed that. So adding 800 feet to it would put us outside of the normal zone that will be affected by the sargassum.”
That step, he said, would require funding from the government.
But it is unclear where the money would be sourced for such work. The BVI is an overseas territory of the United Kingdom — which makes it ineligible for most global climate financing — but it is financially independent and earns most of its government revenue from tourism and financial services.
The government’s 2024 budget, however, includes no specific line item for managing sargassum. And even the team that drafted the 2023 sargassum strategy noted that they were unable to obtain from the government the details of related allocations in the past.
BVI Health and Social Development Minister Vincent Wheatley, who represents Virgin Gorda in the territory’s legislature, lives in a house that overlooks Handsome Bay. In an interview for this investigation, he described longstanding struggles to find funding for a sargassum response in a territory that has been battered by other climate change impacts, including catastrophic damage from Hurricane Irma in 2017.
“I had put in $50,000 for the removal of the sargassum [in the budget in 2019], but it only lasted for like one year,” he said. “I don’t think the FS [Financial Secretary] or whoever saw it as something that needs to be in a budget all the time. That’s why I nicknamed sargassum the ‘every-year surprise.’ We never plan for it, as if it’s not going to come.”
And because of the territory’s status as an overseas territory, he said, accessing climate financing from abroad is usually not an option.
“We have no access to global funds: Resilience fund, the loss-and-damage fund,” he said. “What we are attempting to do is to find some avenue to get access to some funding.”
Long before the water plant was damaged last year, he added, he requested that the sargassum be removed early in the season. But the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources and Climate Change — which he no longer oversees and which didn’t respond to requests for comment — didn’t react quickly enough, he said.
By April 8, 2024 (above), sargassum was once again washing ashore near the desalination plant at Handsome Bay, Virgin Gorda, but the promised protective boom had not been installed.
Photo provided
In January, however, BVI Premier Dr. Natalio “Sowande” Wheatley described sargassum management as one of his government’s priorities, and said that a boom would soon be installed in Handsome Bay to keep the seaweed away from the shoreline.
But by mid-March, residents had seen no sign of the boom, and attempts to obtain more information about that project and other planned measures in the area were not successful.
Meanwhile, sargassum has begun to wash ashore in Handsome Bay once again.
Reporters Rafael René Díaz Torres (Centro de Periodismo Investigativo), and Mariela Mejía (Diario Libre) contributed to this investigation.
This investigation is the result of a fellowship awarded by the Center for Investigative Journalism’s Training Institute and was made possible in part with the support of Open Society Foundations.
During more than half a century of working as a fisherman in Jamaica, Richard Osbourne has seen the industry steadily decline in the face of pollution, climate change, overfishing and other issues.
Then came the sargassum.
Over the past decade, the seaweed has frequently swamped the community of Portland Cottage, where Osbourne operates a small fishing boat. And he believes the problem may be getting worse. In 2023, when he said the scale of the influx was second only to 2022, the seaweed came early and reached a peak in July and August.
Boat engines and other equipment have taken a beating, and attempting to skirt the sargassum blooms means using more petrol, which burns a bigger hole in fishers’ pockets. But Osbourne and his colleagues said the worst of the impact is the reduced catch.
Sargassum “kills the fish; it kills the mangroves, it kills the oysters. Everything that lives in the sea, it damages them, down to the very alligator. A very dangerous thing,” Osbourne said.
Fishers across the Caribbean have experienced similar issues since massive influxes began arriving in the region in 2011.
“It’s a very serious issue, I think, especially because it’s almost an annual occurrence now,” said Melanie Andrews-Bacchus, a Trinidad-based consultant who has worked on fisheries issues in more than a dozen Caribbean countries. “The sargassum is becoming thicker; I guess a lot harder to manage in some instances. …It’s definitely a serious issue for the small-scale fisheries sector especially,” she added.
The extent of the impact, however, is still unknown, according to a September report by the Western Central Atlantic Fisheries Commission, a 34-member regional fisheries body established under the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.
“The impacts of sargassum influxes on fishermen livelihoods have not yet been fully analysed and documented,” the report stated. “For example, within the fisheries sector there has been a loss of fishing days, reduced catches of flying fish, damage to fishermen engines, and increased operating costs. However, the economic losses associated with these events have not been quantified and calculated.”
Often, fishers are left to face the problem on their own. In Jamaica, many said they have not received help from the State to remove sargassum, and they either have to do it on their own or wait for nature to take care of the problem.
The clean-up efforts that do receive government support often focus on tourist areas, and some fishers have seen improper disposal — such as dumping sargassum in ecologically sensitive areas — that could further damage the natural environment on which their livelihood depends.
A National Sargassum Response Plan for Jamaica was drafted in 2015, and officials at the country’s National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) said they use it to guide their response to influxes. But the plan was never officially adopted at the government level, and accounts from fishers and public officials alike suggest that it has not been consistently followed or adequately funded.
In fact, most fishermen interviewed by CPI said they had never heard of it.
Monique Curtis, NEPA’s spokesperson, said that most of the funds set aside to assist in the cleanup of beaches had to be returned because communities and fishers rarely requested them. She said they prefer to clean up themselves or allow the sargassum to disintegrate naturally.
Ministers blamed the lack of education of the public for this and recognized efforts need to be ramped up. They said they would improve education efforts moving forward.
Fishing in Jamaica
Though Jamaica’s economy is largely tourism and service based, the fisheries industry contributes to the livelihoods of more than 100,000 people — nearly 5% of the population, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation.
The country also has one of the highest per capita levels of fish consumption in the Americas. Jamaicans eat an average of 26.42 kilograms of seafood per year, ranking eighth out of 35 countries in the Americas, according to 2020 data from the Food and Agriculture Organisation. Six of the seven higher consuming countries — led by Antigua and Barbuda, at 57.12 kilograms per year — are small island states in the Caribbean.
But Jamaica’s industry has long been under threat: In the mid-1990s, catch ranged between 19,000 and 25,000 tons annually, and by 2017 it had dropped to 16,000 tons, according to the FAO.
The sargassum has exacerbated the problem in recent years — because about 95% of the island’s fishing fleet is made up of smaller boats powered by one or two outboard engines that can easily be overwhelmed by the seaweed.
Donovan Haye, Scientific Officer at the Caribbean Coastal Area Management Foundation (C-CAM) in Jamaica, said certain types of fishing, such as net fishing, trawling and line fishing, often are so badly impacted that they are nearly impossible during the sargassum peak season.
Donovan Haye, scientific officer at the Caribbean Coastal Area Management Foundation, details the impact of sargassum on Jamaica’s south coast of Clarendon.
Photo by Devon Fletcher | Television Jamaica
Strategy
After a particularly bad influx in 2015, Jamaica’s National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) drafted the response plan and tapped an emergency fund for about $32,000 to clean up eight beaches and carry out other mitigation efforts.
But since then, clean-ups and funding alike have been limited, and key elements of the plan haven’t been implemented even though NEPA uses it as a working strategy.
The plan, for instance, calls for the creation of a mitigation fund. But this fund was never established, the government acknowledged, and information provided by NEPA for this investigation indicates that the agency has spent less than $10,000 — including about $6,500 from the Tourism Enhancement Fund — on clean-up efforts since 2015. Most of this spending came between 2016 and 2018, after which clean-ups were mostly spearheaded by beach operators and owners, according to NEPA.
The draft plan also calls for the creation of a data collection centre, but NEPA said it hasn’t been established either.
Another major part of the response plan is public education, which is included in two of its four components. But eight years later, five of six fishermen CPI interviewed in three of the parishes badly affected by sargassum said they had never heard of the document.
The only one familiar with it — Devon Malcolm, the secretary of the Half Moon Bay Fishermen’s Co-operative at Hellshire Beach in St. Catherine — said he’s attended several public sensitization sessions with NEPA and the Caribbean Coastal Area Management Foundation (C-CAM), a non-governmental organisation that promotes conservation in Jamaica.
Fisherman Devon Malcolm details his worst experience with sargassum, including a foot injury from direct contact with the toxic floating weed while trying to get his boat out to sea.
Photo by Devon Fletcher | Television Jamaica
But despite such sessions, Haye, the C-CAM Scientific Officer, said that it’s challenging disseminating information about sargassum to all the fishermen who need to know about it, because they’re not all located in one place and do not subscribe to the same type of media.
Fisheries Minister Floyd Green conceded that the government needs to do more to educate fishers about sargassum and to protect them from its negative effects.
“There has been limited support provided over the years when these reports come in, in terms of support to help clean up, but we definitely could do a better job in that regard,” he said.
Despite the fishers’ struggles, he noted that Jamaica has not been affected by sargassum as badly as many other countries in the region.
The assistance the government does provide fishers often is not specific to sargassum, he added: Instead, it addresses the general problems affecting their sector, which also include warming waters and overfishing.
“What we have looked at is a more global context, in terms of some of the bigger issues affecting fisheries,” he said. “You know sargassum is one of the climate-related issues that faces our fishers. … When you combine them, they have really brought a heavy toll on our nearshore fisheries.”
One fisherman at the Portmore Causeway in St. Catherine, Jamaica, showed his reduced catch. Fishers appeal to the authorities to urgently address the sargassum situation before it decimates their livelihood altogether.
Photo by Kirk Wright | Television Jamaica
Government support for such issues, he said, has often focused on helping fishers move further offshore by providing training in long-line techniques and related equipment such as GPS devices.
Huge losses, little help
Haye, however, also lamented that resources are lacking “to compensate fishers” in Jamaica “for any natural disaster event,” let alone sargassum.
Additionally, he noted the challenge to “quantify and determine who has been affected and how, and what level of compensation they require.”
But fishermen are quick to count the cost of sargassum. At the Bluefields Fishing Beach in Westmoreland, located in the south of Jamaica, Kevin Lattibudaire estimated that a major influx of sargassum can cost him up to about $1,300 to $1,900 a month in lost catch.
Osbourne, the Portland Cottage fisherman, said he has seen sargassum irreparably damage up to 100 pounds of fishing net worth almost $8 a pound.
Portland Cottage fisherman Icallie Swaby added that the seaweed has affected his boating equipment. “When it goes into the engine foot, your engine foot can’t turn and it mash up the engine, making it overheat,” Swaby said.
Large sargassum mats sweep into the shoreline in Manchioneal, Portland, Jamaica – one of the worst affected areas in the island.
Photo courtesy of Mona GeoInformatics Institute
And during the worst of any sargassum season, fishers may be unable to go out to sea for days at a time.
Green said the government has not been able to fully determine the cost of the sargassum impact, and so it depends on anecdotal information from affected fishers to assess each season and determine a plan of action.
“Oftentimes, [the fishers’ clean-up] process is not a costed process,” he said. “They do it themselves.”
Clean-up questions
Haye said many tourism operators on popular bathing beaches can often better afford to take matters into their own hands, having the sargassum removed from their premises so it doesn’t affect their businesses.
“The vast majority of the beaches, especially fishing beaches where fishermen normally ply their trade, there isn’t the same level of resources available to devote to that kind of activity,” he said.
In the absence of stricter monitoring from the government, Haye worries that tourism operators may not always follow best practices when removing the seaweed.
“It does raise the red flag that just collecting the sargassum from the beach and stockpiling it somewhere where it will deteriorate, you could be removing contamination from one area, putting it in another,” he said.
Malcolm, the St. Catherine fisher, said he has seen sargassum at two nearby beaches being removed only to be dumped “somewhere in Hellshire” with “a lot of sand in it.”
Jodiel Ebanks, the former beaches coordinator at NEPA, pointed to guidelines established under the National Sargassum Response Plan that require written permission from NEPA before collecting and removing the seaweed.
However, NEPA does not have cameras or consistent policing of affected areas to ensure that guidelines are followed, and it depends on reports of breaches to enforce the protocols outlined in the sargassum plan.
‘All of my foot burned off’
Fishers sometimes remove or bury sargassum too, but they worry about health issues that they don’t fully understand.
Wolde Kristos, who manages the Bluefields Fish Sanctuary in Westmoreland, said they often don’t use protective gear or even gloves when handling the seaweed.
Malcolm said he realised there could be harmful chemicals in the sargassum because it bleaches the stones on the shore and kills the small fish that live in these stones.
Then there’s his own experience coming into direct contact with it one day when he was trying to push his boat out to sea through thick sargassum mats.
“When I stepped on it, [it felt like] all of my foot burned off,” he said.
On the southwestern coast of the island, in Bluefields, Westmoreland, the fishermen acknowledged that they are largely ignorant about the risks associated with the seaweed.
“I don’t know much about health-wise,” said Garmell Lattibudaire, adding that he would like to learn all he can.
The fishermen have reason to be concerned. Haye, the C-CAM scientific officer, explained that scientists have identified “abnormally high levels of contaminants” including arsenic in sargassum samples collected from different areas in Jamaica.
Green, the fisheries minister, said he too is concerned about the heavy metals in sargassum and the fact that it has largely fallen on fishermen to “deal with it themselves” so they can still earn money during times of high influxes.
Senator Matthew Samuda, Jamaica’s environment minister, worries about harmful gases like methane that are released when sargassum decays.
Both ministers admitted there has been limited support to fishermen to clean sargassum from their beaches.
“We probably do need to redouble our efforts on public education,” Samuda added.
Green said the state’s future assistance will include training as well as the provision of resources like GPS devices and longline vessels for fishermen to go further out to sea, where sargassum is less of a hindrance to their trade. But this plan has not yet materialised, and he declined to provide details about how it might be funded.
Silver Lining
Despite the struggles, the country has seen progress, including various research and response initiatives based out of the University of the West Indies.
On Jan. 11, 2024, for instance, the Mona GeoInformatics Institute at UWI launched a Sargassum Early Advisory System to help communities — especially tourism and fishing interests — prepare for seaweed accumulations.
A similar system is being used by other regions, including in Ghana. Darren Fletcher, the technical projects coordinator at MGI, stressed that a critical part of adapting to sargassum is “to treat it as an opportunity rather than a nuisance.”
Boats were grounded as sargassum mats swept the shoreline in Manchioneal, Portland, Jamaica – a symbol of the crippling impact on fishing in one of the worst affected zones in the island.
Photo courtesy of Mona GeoInformatics Institute
Haye said predictive technologies like the new advisory system are a step in the right direction, and he argued that they should be combined with techniques for safely removing sargassum at sea before it reaches the shore.
Ultimately, though, he said the world must tackle the sargassum problem in the same way it has addressed ozone depletion in recent decades: with a global response.
“This is not something that we can solve on our own. Like all of these global climate change environmental issues, it is going to require collective action,” he said. “Not to negate the essential need for us to clean up our own backyard, … but we need to be working in partnership on a global scale to address some of these issues.”
This investigation is the result of a fellowship awarded by the Center for Investigative Journalism’s Training Institute and was made possible in part with the support of Open Society Foundations.
For more than 20 years, Mexican biologist María del Carmen García Rivas has led a crusade to protect the coral lining the Yucatan Peninsula in the Caribbean Sea.
As director of the Puerto Morelos Reefs National Park in México, she has advocated for reforms to reduce runoff and other pollution from coastal development.
She has spearheaded efforts to control lionfish, an exotic invasive species that has put at risk the nearly 670 species of marine fauna that inhabit the park. And since 2018, she has organized brigades to restore reefs damaged by tissue-destroying coral diseases known as white syndromes. But now, yet another threat has been keeping her awake at night: massive blooms of sargassum seaweed reaching the coast of the park.
“When the sargassum, a macroalgae that usually floats, reaches the coasts, it begins to decompose, generating an environment without oxygen that kills different organisms,” she said. “It mainly affects species that cannot move or move very little, such as some starfish, sea urchins, the sea grasses themselves, and of course corals.”
People picking up excess sargassum from the Mexican coast in the Mayan Peninsula .
Photo by Gladys Serrano | El País
Along the coast of Quintana Roo, the Mexican state where the Puerto Morelos Reefs National Park is based, the local government collected 70 tons of sargassum during 2023 alone, said Huguette Hernández Gómez, the state’s Secretary of Ecology and Environment. Added to what they collected during the last four years, the figure reaches 200 tons.
Regional problem
This story is familiar across the Caribbean. Though modest amounts of sargassum benefit marine life in the region, massive influxes arriving since 2011 have upset the ecological balance in some areas in ways that could be irreversible.
The seaweed has exacerbated existing stress on the region’s reefs, which last year faced a massive bleaching event linked also to warming waters associated with climate change. Exposure to extreme temperatures for extended periods breaks down the relationship between the corals and the algae living inside of them. Corals are left pale or white, and the lack of food from algae can lead them to die, according to the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Sargassum mats have also blocked sea turtle nesting sites and inundated mangroves, which serve as crucial nurseries for countless aquatic species.
Birds feed on small fish caught in seaweed mat along the South-Eastern coast of the Portmore Causeway in St. Catherine, Jamaica on May 2, 2023.
Photo by Kirk Wright | Television Jamaica
In some areas, beaches have been eroded by the seaweed and by the heavy machinery used to remove it. Many fishers complain that their catch has dwindled sharply.
But because of the magnitude of the relatively recent problem — which is affecting coastlines from West Africa to the Americas — the true extent of the environmental damage is poorly understood, according to Dr. Brian LaPointe, a biologist and sargassum expert at Florida Atlantic University.
“We haven’t gotten very far in the research to understand the causes or how to deal with it and manage and mitigate the impacts on the environment,” LaPointe said.
Second largest barrier reef
The effects that García Rivas has seen in Mexico illustrate the implications for the entire region. The park she oversees is part of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System, which stretches along more than 600 miles of coastline in Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras.
As the second longest barrier reef in the world — only the Great Barrier Reef in Australia is longer, at about 1,400 miles — the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef is home to some 500 species of fish and 60 species of stony corals, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). It also supports the livelihoods of one to two million people in the region, the WWF states.
Sargassum invades the sea of the Mexican coast of the Mayan Peninsula.
Photo by Gladys Serrano | El País
Floating sargassum can provide a healthy habitat, but when it washes against the shore in mass quantities it often suffocates certain organisms, said James Foley, Director of Oceans for The Nature Conservancy.
“In coastal areas like Belize, the problem is further exacerbated by the fact that the sargassum also attracts a lot of marine rubbish: local garbage that runs off from the rivers that come into the Caribbean from Central America. So it ends up being a pretty toxic environment,” he said.
The sargassum also creates a barrier that blocks light and prevents organisms below it from photosynthesizing, according to Foley.
A 2021 study published in the scientific journal Climate Change Ecology, which analyzed the situation in three bays in Quintana Roo, Mexico, found that under the sargassum mats the light seepage decreased up to 73% and the water temperature could be as much as 5 degrees Celsius warmer.
Bacterial diseases
In addition, García Rivas said, bacteria carried by the sargassum may be affecting the corals as well.
“Some of the diseases suffered by the corals could be related to all the bacteria brought in by the sargassum or that arise during its decomposition,” she said. “Although it becomes an environment without oxygen, there are bacteria that may be able to survive, affecting not only the corals but also generating fish mortality.”
Such effects exacerbate existing threats to the reef, she said, noting that the worst historical damage has come from coastal development and inadequate management of sewage and other waste.
Sargassum at the Palmas del Mar marina in the municipality of Humacao in Puerto Rico, where it has arrived massively.
Photo by Xavier García | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
“In general, contaminated seawater does not allow corals to live properly,” she said. “It weakens them. And when they present diseases or are stressed by heat, it is easier for them to die.”
A similar scenario has played out in Jamaica, according to Dr. Camilo Trench, a marine biologist at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Jamaica.
“The problem is that the seaweed grows fast and the corals grow slowly,” Trench said. “So if the sargassum is in the area with other macroalgae, it can overgrow the coral reef area quite quickly. So now it will not only reduce the space that the corals will have to grow: It will also reduce the settlement area of the coral nursery.”
Sargassum smothers other species too
Coral might be one of the most visible animals affected by sargassum, but is not the only one. A study published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin analyzed a massive sargassum influx that swamped the shores of the Mexican Caribbean in 2018, decomposing and turning the water cloudy. As a result, the researchers found, organisms from 78 wildlife species died. The worst affected were demersal neritic fish, which live at the bottom of shallow areas of the sea, and crustaceans.
Other scientists have raised concerns about sargassum’s effects on turtle nests. In 2017, Briggite Gavio, a professor of marine biology at the National University of Colombia, visited Cayo Serranilla, a tiny 600-by-400-meter island at the northernmost tip of the Colombian Caribbean. The island is only inhabited by military personnel and it’s a perfect place for sea turtles to nest.
But when Gavio was there as part of a scientific expedition, sargassum had formed a mat up to 40 centimeters high on the beaches. “We were able to observe that some turtle hatchlings had trouble getting past the barrier posed by the sargassum mat, and were vulnerable to predation by ghost crabs, rats and other predators,” she wrote in a 2018 paper about her observations.
Similar observations about the effects of sargassum in sea turtles have been made by scientists on other islands such as Antigua and Barbuda.
Killing mangroves too
Sargassum also appears to have a potentially lethal impact on Caribbean mangroves, an important natural barrier for extreme hurricanes.
“These are plants that live on the seashore and are tidal plants, but they depend on their aerial roots and their respiratory roots, which are underground, for oxygen,” said Trench, the biologist in Jamaica. “Now imagine a mat covering those roots and preventing oxygen from flowing through them. It can definitely cause death if it is long-term and similar to the impact of something like oil slicks on the mangrove or litter, such as solid waste.”
Sargassum has impacted areas of Jamaica where mangrove forests are located, such as in Salt River.
Photo by Kirk Wright | Television Jamaica
As with corals, mangroves sometimes end up smothered, sustaining damage themselves and putting at risk other species that depend on them.
No ‘virtuous circle’
For García Rivas, the biologist in Mexico, one fact is particularly alarming: Unlike many other problems facing the reefs she oversees, the sargassum influx has no clear solution.
“We haven’t come up with a virtuous circle as we have, for example, with lionfish,” she said. “Despite being an invasive species, [lionfish] can be fished and eaten, which mitigates the problem.”
Local government looks for solutions
Faced with this problem, last year the state of Quintana Roo created a committee of 60 experts from different areas that worked for seven months to help create what is now known as the Integral Strategy for the Management and Use of Sargassum in Quintana Roo.
The strategy covers eight areas: health; research and monitoring; knowledge management, processes and logistics; utilization; legal framework; economic instruments and cross-cutting axes. Its key advances include designating the state of Quintana Roo as the authority in charge of granting permits to researchers and companies working to turn sargassum into a product.
“The state government is the one that gives all the permits for issues ranging from transportation, collection to final destination. With that we avoid that companies are going around in circles between whether to ask the federal or municipal government where to acquire the permits,” said Hernández Gómez, the ecology and environment secretary.
The response is costly. Last year, she said, the Secretariat of the Navy was assigned about $3 million to collect sargassum at sea using its ships and anchorage barriers, while the Federal Maritime Terrestrial Zone was assigned about $7 million more to collect it from beaches. In Quintana Roo, through the Secretariat headed by Hernandez Gómez, another $1.7 million is coming in to address the problem.
“And this year that investment will be maintained,” she said.
This investigation is the result of a fellowship awarded by the Center for Investigative Journalism’s Training Institute and was made possible in part with the support of Open Society Foundations.
Biofuel. Bricks. Paper. Beauty products. A carbon capture system.
Many Caribbean entrepreneurs see an unprecedented economic opportunity in the sargassum that has regularly swamped the region since 2011.
But despite their enthusiastic pitches — and widespread consensus that the only realistic solution to the crisis is monetizing the seaweed — no consistent large-scale use for it has been found.
“Even though there are so many things you can make with sargassum, the actual amount of sargassum that is used for products is still very low,” said Dr. Franziska Elmer, a Mexico-based scientific project manager for the United Kingdom-headquartered carbon solutions company Seafields.
As a result, sargassum is usually handled as waste, with annual costs for clean-up and disposal estimated by researchers in the region to be as high as $210 million in the Caribbean.
Companies like Seafields hope to change that. In recent years, entrepreneurs and researchers have doggedly sought the secret to turning sargassum into “brown gold”, as professor Mona Webber, from the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, likes to call the seaweed.
The United Kingdom-based company Seafields is working to build aquatic farms that store sargassum in enclosed paddocks like the one shown above in St. Vincent and the Grenadines last year.
Photo courtesy of Seafields
But daunting challenges remain to finding a profitable business that will make a sizable dent in the millions of tons of sargassum that wash up on the region’s shorelines each year.
Entrepreneurs who spoke to the Puerto Rico Centro de Periodismo Investigativo described operating in a largely unregulated environment where information is patchy and funding is hard to find.
Benjamin Jelen is a Research and Development Director at C-Combinator located in Cataño, Puerto Rico, where they study the potential use of sargassum-derived products.
Photo by Xavier García | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
“Most of the regulations are focused on managing the pickup, and there’s not much regulations on products. And that makes it difficult to make products,” said Elmer, the Seafields researcher.
The work of C-Combinator is mostly made with Mexican sargassum, but company executives say they have the infrastructure to work with the seaweed that accumulates on the coasts of Puerto Rico.
Photo by Xavier García | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
“You may start making your product, and then half a year later, they say, ‘Oh, now there’s a new regulation,’” she added.
Without more stability, many entrepreneurs have struggled to obtain even small grants, much less the large investments they need to scale up, according to a 2021 study led by Dr. Hazel Oxenford, a biologist at the Centre for Resource Management and Environmental Studies (CERMES) at the University of the West Indies in Barbados.
“Addressing [the sargassum] issue solely as a hazard has proven extremely costly, and attention is slowly turning towards the potential opportunities for sargassum reuse and valorization,” they wrote in the journal Phycology, dedicated to the study of algae. “However, turning the ‘sargassum crisis into gold’ is not easy.”
The researchers grouped the constraints facing sargassum entrepreneurs and researchers into five categories: an unpredictable supply; issues associated with the seaweed’s chemical composition; harvest, transport and storage; governance; and funding.
Three years later, Elmer and other researchers and entrepreneurs across the region say they still grapple with such obstacles.
Heavy metals
But despite these challenges, they continue working to find solutions. One popular early idea was using sargassum for fertilizer or animal feed. But some entrepreneurs have pulled back from this approach after research found a high content of arsenic in the seaweed and recommended against using it for nutritional purposes.
Among them was Daviean Morrison in Jamaica. Morrison first launched his company Awganic Inputs with the hope of producing organic goat feed, but he later abandoned that idea and began researching the possibility of producing charcoal, which is widely used by farmers in many rural parts of the island.
Daviean Morrison launched his company Awganic Inputs in Jamaica with the hope of producing organic goat feed with sargassum.
Photo courtesy of Awganic Inputs
But he struggled to find sufficient funding to collect enough sargassum.
“Even if we look at the collaboration with the NGO and the civic groups, who are supposed to move it for free, it’s a $15,000 [US$96]-per-trip charge for a truck, and the most we remove there is about three tons,” he said.
After the Covid-19 outbreak slowed the charcoal business — and 2023 brought less sargassum than 2022 to Jamaica — Morrison put the plan on hold.
He now operates a wireless internet business in rural communities, saving his profits to fund the anticipated relaunch of his charcoal endeavours when funding allows.
Daveian Morrison filling up water drums for his first prototype sargassum goat feed mill project.
Photo courtesy of Awganic Inputs
Related research efforts in Jamaica have run into similar problems.
Contracted by the government in 2018, the University of the West Indies’ Natural Products Institute (NPI) probed sargassum’s potential in biofuel and food additives, as well as carrying out “very preliminary assessments of the effect of sargassum extracts on [prostate and breast] cancer cells,” according to Webber, who is also the director of the university’s Centre for Marine Sciences.
But the effort proved costly, and investors were hard to find, Webber said.
Ultimately, the work stalled after the discovery of arsenic and other harmful chemicals in sargassum, according to the scientist.
Currently, she explained, scientists do not have any feasible method of extracting such chemicals, though the UWI team hopes to obtain funding for the purpose in the future.
“No one at UWI is currently doing research on uses of sargassum,” Webber added.
Capturing carbon
Eventually, product creators in need of a consistent sargassum supply may get a helping hand from Seafields.
The UK-headquartered company — which also has research operations in Mexico and St. Vincent and the Grenadines — hopes to create a series of sargassum farms in the southern Atlantic Ocean with a total area about the size of Portugal. After extracting nutrients and other useful elements from the seaweed collected at the farms, the company would bale and sink the rest in order to capture carbon and sell credits on the carbon market.
Backed by investors and a $310,000 grant from Innovate UK, the company hopes the system would also help ensure a consistent supply of the seaweed year-round.
But the venture is not easy, according to Elmer, who is currently based in Mexico.
Though Seafields hopes to expand its collection system to other islands, she noted a lack of data on sargassum blooms in different areas.
“If you don’t have the data, you first have to spend several months or a season to actually monitor and look at the place before you can make really big investments,” she said.
The nature of the seaweed itself also presents challenges, according to the marine biologist.
“The main one is that the sargassum has to be quite fresh,” she said. “A lot of sargassum arrives on the beach. You may not be able to use it all or even pick it all up until it gets rotten and starts to decompose. The other hurdle is that you never know how much you get each day. Like, it’s up and down.”
A lack of consistent legislation and policy coordination across the region raises other obstacles, she said.
A Caribbean-wide regulatory framework, she added, would help entrepreneurs scale up their products. “Because then if you start a solution, you could bring it to other islands,” she said.
Mexico, brick by brick
In Mexico, Omar Vázquez Sanchez has been turning heads since 2018, when he created bricks out of sargassum.
He markets his Sargablocks as a housing solution, particularly for poor families. Vazquez Sanchez explained that the project was born out of desperation, after he lost a three-month government contract to clear sargassum from the beach. He drew on childhood memories of his grandparents’ adobe house and decided to make his own.
Since 2018, Omar Vázquez Sanchez has been creating sargassum-based building blocks in Mexico where he created the company Sargabloks.
Photo by Bris Landaverde | Sargabloks
Vazquez Sanchez said he started selling Sargablocks last year. Although he declined to disclose his profits, he said he has been earning enough to pay his bills and support nine employees.
“With Sargablock, they have probably built about 40 or 50 houses,” he said.
The blocks that Sargablok manufactures with sargassum seek to help in the construction of homes for families with limited resources in Mexico.
Photo by Bris Landaverde | Sargabloks
However, he has struggled to scale up without support from the Mexican government or private partners, who he said are reluctant to invest in part because of his insistence on donating three percent of profits to charity.
“If it had been invented in Germany, trust me, all the Mexicans would … be building with Sargablock,” he said. “But it’s a Mexican product.”
Now, he is looking abroad. He hopes to franchise his business and create partnerships with interested countries, opening a Sargablock factory in Colombia and securing deals with Belize and Dominican Republic before moving forward to Guadeloupe, Martinique and Puerto Rico, he said.
But in order to expand in this manner, he must purchase larger machinery that can make at least double the 2,000 bricks per day he said he is currently able to produce.
According to Omar Vázquez Sanchez, the intention of Sargablock is to distribute it to countries such as Colombia, Belize, Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Martinique and Puerto Rico.
Photo by Bris Landaverde | Sargabloks
Rum and Sargassum
In Barbados, researchers at the University of the West Indies are working to develop biofuel using sargassum and the waste water from rum distilleries.
She, too, is seeking funding.
“This is a new fuel that we’re putting in old technology to get fossil-free transport, and so it’ll take some investment to get to the point of customers actually buying from us,” Henry said in a video posted last June by CERMES.
She hopes to have methane-powered vehicles on the streets of Barbados by January 2026.
“Until then, we’re setting up this sort of demonstration gas station, which we’ll use to continue to gather data to understand the solution, but we’re very sure that it works,” she said. She noted that the student researchers went into this experiment with only stipends from the Inter-American Development Bank, and once they started to see results from the biogas tests, the IDB requested a technical paper on their findings, which was published in April 2021.
Also in Barbados, entrepreneur Joshua Forte has worked with the UWI Cave Hill Campus to create a plant supplement using sargassum.
Now, he sells the product through his company Red Diamond Compost Incorporated, and said it performs better than a popular synthetic fertilizer he tested it against.
“Even by cutting the synthetic fertilizer by half and adding our super seaweed bio-stimulant to it, it still had even greater results,” he said.
When he started the project about eight years ago, he said, he felt like “the only person out there looking to do something” with the seaweed. Today, he has plenty of competition, and he has not yet been able to find investment to expand into bio-fungicide production as he had initially planned.
But he has high hopes for the future.
Looks good on paper
Other sargassum solutions range widely.
At the National University of Colombia in Bogotá, marine biologist Briggite Gavio and her student Diego Aguilera have been using the seaweed to make paper.
The effort is part of a larger project on risk reduction and economic alternatives in the Colombian archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina.
Universidad Nacional de Colombia professor Briggite Gavio, together with student Diego Aguilera. Both are working to generate paper from sargassum.
Photo by Camila Alzate | El País
The paper-making process is labour intensive. Once a collection permit is obtained, Gavio removes the seaweed by hand from beaches on the island of San Andrés. Sand is then sifted out before the algae is sun-dried and transported to Bogotá in coolers. There, it is washed, dried, ground and mixed with coconut husks, water and other ingredients.
After this mixture is chemically processed, it is pressed and left to dry for about a week.
Currently, the research team is working on refining the process in hopes of producing a better quality paper.
This is how sargassum, brought from San Andres, is dried to become raw material for paper.
Photo by Camila Alzate | El País
But there are many challenges. Last year, for instance, a large sargassum influx predicted early in the year never came.
“Precisely when I need sargassum is when it doesn’t arrive,” Gavio said. Nevertheless, she hopes that their efforts will eventually provide the islands with sustainable solutions to a major problem that has threatened their tourism industry and other aspects of life.
“The only one working on it is me,” she said, adding, “Right now, the treatment when it arrives is to dump it in a landfill, but it is not a long-term solution.”
Solutions
The Oxenford study offered dozens of recommendation for lifting the obstacles blocking sargassum entrepreneurs: improving forecasting systems; using government subsidies to facilitate marketing; improving harvesting and transportation systems; developing safety standards; devising better storage methods and other ways to ensure a steady supply; encouraging “sargassum industrial parks,” and many others.
But none of these steps, the researchers noted, will work if taken in isolation.
“It is recommended that the solutions and actions proposed are integrated into a regional strategy and action plan that promotes valorization as an economic opportunity and as a means of alleviating influx impacts,” they wrote.
Otherwise, the researchers predicted a bleak future.
“The evidence suggests that although efforts to explore opportunities in the Caribbean are well underway, sargassum influxes will remain more of a hazard than a benefit unless current constraints are adequately addressed,” they stated.
This investigation is the result of a fellowship awarded by the Center for Investigative Journalism’s Training Institute and was made possible in part with the support of Open Society Foundations.
