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 seaweed in the islands of the Caribbean in 2023, which have become common in the region since 2011, when massive blooms began inundating the shorelines in the spring and summer months.

On 18 April 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 north-west, it 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.

In Jamaica, during the months of July and August, fishers found themselves struggling through another season as floating sargassum blocked their small boats and diminished their catch.

“Sometimes, the boats can’t even come into the creek,” said Richard Osbourne, a Jamaican fisher. “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 shut-offs 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 such as Christian Natal out of work for a week when it shut down businesses, including the jetski rental company where he works.

These people were among the thousands affected by sargassum blooms last year alone in the Caribbean, where about 70% of the population of about 44 million lives near the coast, according to the World Bank.

Scientists have blamed the explosive growth of the seaweed on global pollution, climate breakdown 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 $102m 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 $210m.

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 has not 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, the health, livelihoods and natural environment of residents have been endangered, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on reactive emergency responses that experts said 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 to unveil a French proposal for the sort of international response she said was urgently needed. It included 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 EU, 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 prioritise 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.

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 in 2011 sargassum suddenly swamped shorelines without warning. It piled several feet high on some beaches. It stank like rotten eggs as it decomposed and shut down resorts, dealing a major blow to a tourism sector in some areas of the Caribbean that were 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.

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 2-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 Elena Martínez, an oceanographer based in the Dominican Republic. “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 was not coming from the Sargasso Sea any more: it was coming from a new sargassum ecosystem that had formed in the southern Atlantic Ocean.

The area, named “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. Dr Brian Lapointe, a sargassum researcher, 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 such as 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 fertilisers, 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 breakdown. Martínez 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.

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.

That much was clear by 2018, when the belt grew to a record size that was estimated to weigh 22m tonnes and much of the Caribbean saw its worst-ever inundation. The season spurred increasing calls for a collaborative international response.

But broad international action has not materialised. 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.

No Caribbean strategy is in place, and a region-wide warning and monitoring centre proposed in 2019 has not been established.

In 2022, the Saint Lucian sargassum researcher Dr Bethia Thomas produced videos about the village of Praslin Bay and two other nearby communities as part of her doctoral thesis. In each video, several residents listed complaints ranging from breathing problems to the destruction of fisheries to corroding jewellery.

“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 said in the Praslin Bay video. “And I think it’s affecting us mentally.”

In the absence of a regional strategy, national sargassum management plans have been developed in most countries and territories in the Caribbean, including Saint Lucia, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the BVI, Anguilla and Montserrat.

But few have been officially adopted at the government level, and even fewer are adequately funded or closely followed.

“Sometimes the small communities get left behind,” Thomas said. “Maybe not intentionally, but in small island developing states with limited resources, you have to prioritise. And perhaps other things – like building a new hospital and constructing new roads, new schools – might take precedence over developing a sargassum management plan.”

Negligible investment from polluting countries

As residents experience health and economic consequences, Caribbean leaders have often complained about a shortage of money to deal with the crisis. Local funds, they said, are tied up with many competing priorities, including handling climate-related impacts such as hurricanes, droughts and flooding.

They also said 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 was not easy.

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 researcher based in Mexico.

Sargassum and Cop28: invasion starts to garner attention

The 2023 sargassum bloom in the Caribbean had mostly abated by 2 December when Gustave-dit-Duflo 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 hotspots of biodiversity. So if we don’t act, in 20 years this marine biology, including the reef, will disappear from our coast.”

She said the French government wanted the issue to be discussed on one of the high-level panels of the United Nations conference on the oceans to be held in Nice, France, in June 2025.

“We manage sargassum at a local level, but this is not a phenomenon of an island,” she said. “It is the whole basin of the Caribbean and a part of the Atlantic. 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.”

As countries work to establish an international response, time is of the essence for residents of the coastal Caribbean.

Shortly after Cop28 drew to a close, scientists at the University of South Florida estimated the sargassum floating in the tropical Atlantic Ocean at about 5m metric tonnes, compared with a December average of about 2m. By February, the mass had increased to about 9m tonnes – the second-highest quantity ever recorded for the month.

In other words, another record-setting sargassum season could have just started.

• This article, coordinated by the Puerto Rico Center for Investigative Journalism and produced by the BVI Beacon, RCI Group Guadeloupe, América Futura, El País América, Television Jamaica and the Virgin Islands Daily News, is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now. Reporters Rafael René Díaz Torres (Centro de Periodismo Investigativo), and Mariela Mejía (Diario Libre) 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.

Joe Biden has vowed that US commitment to defend Israel against Iran was “ironclad” as concerns rose in Washington that a “significant” Iranian strike could happen within days, in retaliation for the bombing of an Iranian consular building in Damascus.

US and allied officials fear that a strike is imminent and could come in the form of a direct missile launch from Iran, rather than an attack through a proxy like Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel has vowed to respond in kind to such a direct strike, raising the prospect of a regional war, which US officials now believe is more likely than at any point since the beginning of the Gaza conflict on 7 October.

Biden’s pledge of support to Israel at the White House, intended as a deterrent, came a few hours after Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, repeated a threat to strike back against Israel over the Damascus bombing that killed 12 people, including Gen Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior figure in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and six other guard members.

“When they attacked our consulate area, it was like they attacked our territory,” Khamenei said, in remarks broadcast by Iranian state TV. “The evil regime must be punished, and it will be punished.”

Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, responded in a post on the X social media platform, vowing that: “If Iran attacks from its territory, Israel will respond and attack in Iran.”

Israel has not formally taken responsibility for the 1 April bombing, but Israeli and US officials have made clear it carried out the strike.

Israel and Iran have been trading blows in Lebanon and Syria for months, but Biden administration officials fear that the 1 April Damascus bombing on an Iranian diplomatic building, which Tehran considers its own territory, has significantly raised the threat of the Gaza war widening into a broader conflict.

Since the Damascus bombing, Tehran has sent Washington messages attributing ultimate blame for the attack on the US and warning the US to stay out of its confrontation with Israel.

Biden’s pledge to Israel on the White House lawn, in a joint appearance with the Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, appeared to be a response to that warning, insisting the US would not stay on the sidelines.

“We also want to address the Iranian threat to launch a significant – they’re threatening to launch a significant attack in Israel,” Biden said. “As I told Prime Minister Netanyahu, our commitment to Israel’s security against these threats from Iran and its proxies is ironclad. Let me say it again, ironclad. We’re gonna do all we can to protect Israel’s security.”

The Biden administration is seeking to head off a direct Iranian attack by messaging that Tehran cannot assume that US forces in the region, reinforced significantly since the start of the Gaza war, would stay out of a conflict with Israel.

“We’ve been clear that we do not want this conflict to escalate or spread further in the region. We’ll continue to undertake diplomatic efforts to ensure that remains the case,” the spokesperson said. “We also retain a military presence in the region to deter those who seek to take advantage of the conflict.”

Secretary of state Antony Blinken reiterated that message on Wednesday in a call with Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant, in which he made clear the US would stand with Israel against any threats by Iran, the state department said.

Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat and adviser to prime ministers Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres, said: “The prevailing conventional wisdom is that because the attack in Damascus was directly against Iran, then that means that Iran will have to respond to retaliate directly, rather than via a proxy.

“From what I’m hearing here, the most telling sign is that Khamenei has mentioned the need to retaliate twice in the last week in his sermons or whatever,” Pinkas said. “Usually, they don’t do that. Usually they are much more opaque and only commit to a response one day at the right moment and in the right place.”

Among the possible targets are Israeli embassies around the world, and they have been taking extra security precautions in the wake of the Damascus bombing, but US officials also believe that a direct strike on military or government targets on Israeli territory is also a significant possibility.

The US and Israeli militaries and intelligence agencies are in constant contact about the threat. Axios reported that the head of US Central Command, Gen Erik Kurilla, is due in Israel on Thursday to discuss coordination with his Israeli counterparts and the defence minister, Yoav Gallant.

The ability of the Biden administration to rein in an Israeli response to an Iranian attack would very much depend on the specifics. If Iranian retaliation comes in the form of an assault on an Israeli embassy, or if an incoming Iranian missile or drone is intercepted, it may be possible to prevent escalation, officials said, but if an Iranian strike caused multiple casualties inside Israel, it would be very much harder.

The world’s coal power capacity grew for the first time since 2019 last year, despite warnings that coal plants need to close at a rate of at least 6% each year to avoid a climate emergency.

A report by Global Energy Monitor found that coal power capacity grew by 2% last year, driven by an increase in new coal plants across China and a slowdown of plant closures in Europe and the US.

About 69.5 gigawatts (GW) of coal plant capacity came online last year, of which two-thirds were built in China, according to the report. There were also plants built in Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Japan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, South Korea, Greece and Zimbabwe.

Meanwhile, a slowdown in coal plant shutdowns in the US and Europe led to more than 21GW retiring last year. This resulted in a net annual increase of almost 48.5GW for the year, the highest since 2016.

The authors of the report said coal plants needed to shut at a faster pace, and that China needed to adopt stricter controls on its expansion of capacity.

Flora Champenois, a Global Energy Monitor analyst, said: “Otherwise we can forget about meeting our goals in the Paris agreement and reaping the benefits that a swift transition to clean energy will bring,.”

Climate scientists have said all coal plants should be shut by 2040 – unless they are fitted with effective carbon-removal technology – if governments hope to limit global heating to within 1.5C of pre-industrialised levels.

This would require an average of 126GW of coal plants to retire from the current fleet of 2,130GW every year for the next 17 years, according to the report, or the equivalent of about two plants a week.

Champenois described last year’s coal plant expansion as an “anomaly” as more signs point to it “reversing course”. “But countries that have coal plants to retire need to do so more quickly, and countries that have plans for new coal plants must make sure these are never built.”

Research by Capital Economics suggests China’s appetite for coal power may reduce as low-carbon options accelerate.

The report found that a resurgence in hydropower this year, combined with China’s expansion of wind, solar and nuclear power, could mark the start of a steady decline in its coal demand.

Coal plant retirements were expected to pick up speed across Europe and the US this year, and fewer countries were beginning construction of new plants, Champenois said.

The report found that construction started on less than 4GW of new projects outside China last year, a quarter of the annual average between 2015 and 2022 for the same set of countries.

Concern that the Great Barrier Reef may be suffering the most severe mass coral bleaching event on record has escalated after a conservation group released footage showing damage up to 18 metres below the surface.

Dr Selina Ward, a marine biologist and former academic director of the University of Queensland’s Heron Island Research Station, said it was the worst bleaching she had seen in 30 years working on the reef, and that some coral was starting to die.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority last week said aerial surveys of more than 1,000 individual reefs revealed more than half were rated as having high or very high levels of bleaching, and a smaller number in the south – less than 10% of the total – had extreme bleaching. Only about a quarter were relatively unaffected.

It confirmed the 2,300-kilometre reef system was experiencing its fifth mass bleaching event in eight years. The authority said sea surface temperatures had been between 0.5C and 1.5C hotter than expected for this time of year.

The Australian Marine Conservation Society on Thursday released video and photos that it said showed bleaching on the southern part of the reef extended to greater depths than had been previously reported this year.

Ward said the impact of bleaching had been extensive across 16 sites that she visited in the reef’s southern section, affecting coral species that had usually been resistant to bleaching. Some coral had started to die, a process that usually takes weeks or months after bleaching occurs.

“I feel devastated,” she said. “I’ve been working on the reef since 1992 but this [event], I’m really struggling with.”

Quick Guide

What is coral bleaching?

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Coral bleaching describes a process where the coral animal expels the algae that live in their tissues and give them their colour and much of their nutrients.

Without their algae, a coral’s white skeleton can be seen through their translucent flesh, giving a bleached appearance.

Mass coral bleaching over large areas, first noticed in the 1980s around the Caribbean, is caused by rising ocean temperatures.

Some corals also display fluorescent colours under stress when they release a pigment that filters light. Sunlight also plays a role in triggering bleaching.

Corals can survive bleaching if temperatures are not too extreme or prolonged.  But extreme marine heatwaves can kill corals outright.

Coral bleaching can also have sub-lethal effects, including increased susceptibility to disease and reduced rates of growth and reproduction.

Scientists say the gaps between bleaching events are becoming too short to allow reefs to recover.

Coral reefs are considered one of the planet’s ecosystems most at risk from global heating. Reefs support fisheries that feed hundreds of millions of people, as well as supporting major tourism industries.

The world’s biggest coral reef system – Australia’s Great Barrier Reef – has suffered seven mass bleaching events since 1998, of which five were in the past decade. 

Ward said sea temperatures at two of the sites she visited were the same at the surface and 20 metres below the surface. This was “very unusual”, and reinforced the need for rapid action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, she said.

“What are we doing to stop the reef from being lost?” Ward said. “We cannot expect to save the Great Barrier Reef and be opening new fossil fuel developments. It’s time to act and there are no more excuses.”

Coral bleaching occurs when the coral becomes heat stressed and ejects the tiny marine algae, known as zooxanthellae, that live in its tissue and give most of its colour and energy. With the zooxanthellae gone, the coral starves and its bone-white calcium skeleton becomes visible.

If the elevated temperature doesn’t last long, the coral can recover. Otherwise, it starts to die. In the most severe cases, the bleaching is skipped and the coral dies almost immediately, usually turning a dirty brown.

Terry Hughes, an emeritus professor at James Cook University and longtime reef bleaching researcher, said the aerial surveys showed “the most widespread and most severe mass bleaching and mortality event ever recorded on the Great Barrier Reef”.

He said the scale of the damage was comparable to 2016, the worst previous year experienced, but there were now fewer individual reefs untouched by bleaching between southern Queensland and the Torres Strait. He said the area south of Townsville had been particularly badly hit this year.

“We’re already seeing extensive loss of corals at the time of peak bleaching,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking to see damage as severe as this as soon as this.”

Hughes said every part of the reef system had now bleached at least once since 1998. Some reefs had bleached three or four times. He said the cumulative damage made it harder for reefs to recover and more likely they would succumb.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2018 found that most tropical coral reefs would be lost if global heating was limited to an average of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels and 99% were likely to be lost of heating reached 2C. They found they would be at high risk at 1.2C, a level that may have already been reached.

Dr Lissa Schindler, an ecologist and the reef campaign manager with the Australian Marine Conservation Society, called on the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority to release maps showing the extent and severity of the bleaching so the public had a true picture of the scale of the impact.

Schindler also urged the authority, which she described as the reef’s custodian, to play a greater role in advocating for stronger action on emissions.

She said in the past the authority had called for “strong and fast national action” to deal with the climate crisis, but a more recent climate statement it issued focused on global action and did not say anything about Australia needing to increase what it was doing.

“If the Albanese government is serious about its commitment to Unesco to protect the reef then it must commit to net zero emissions by 2035 and stop approving new fossil fuel projects,” she said.

Scientists have said the government’s emissions reduction targets – a 43% cut compared with 2005 levels and net zero by 2050 – are consistent with global action that could lead to 2C of global heating.

Interviewed on ABC’s Radio National on Wednesday, the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, said the government was “very concerned about the bleaching that we see at the moment, sadly, not just on the Great Barrier Reef, but right around the world”.

She said the government was doing “whatever we can” to get to net zero emissions. “We need to protect the reef because it’s … unique in the world and also 64,000 people rely on it for their work,” she said.