Across the Southeast and U.S. Caribbean, the future is projected to have challenges for natural habitats, ecological processes, and ecosystem services and regional efforts to mitigate or adapt to these impacts will be extremely important. Conditions in the Southeast may change dramatically in the future (USGCRP, 2018 & 2023), with increasing frequency, intensity, and duration of heatwaves, increasing wildfire risk, and rising sea levels.
Like the rest of the Southeast, USVI is predicted to experience a number of impacts like extreme heat, extreme precipitation events, drought, sea-level rise, and tropical cyclones—although the magnitude of change often varies by emissions scenario and future timeframe. Indeed many of these impacts are already being felt in the USVI. The USVI is unique in that the islands that comprise the territory are characterized by a larger coastline area relative to the total inland area, which means that much of the coastal infrastructure, economy, and population are vulnerable to sea level rise, more frequent and more intense precipitation events, and flooding.
Many factors impacting the Caribbean landscape—like sea-level rise, changing weather patterns, and habitat loss—are often too pervasive for any one agency to address independently. While USVI must evaluate the impact of landscape level stressors and threats within its own boundaries, management efforts must also be coordinated on a regional scale. The AFWA 2022 (2nd Edition) Voluntary Guidance for States to Incorporate Adaptation into State Wildlife Action Plans provides recommended steps for developing and implementing adaptation strategies. Much of the guidance includes taking a broader, regional approach to incorporating adaptation into wildlife action plans.
However, the US Caribbean continues to face unique challenges including geographic constraints as islands, reliance on imports, critical dependence on local natural resources (e.g., freshwater, fisheries), and differential vulnerabilities to drought, sea level rise, and natural disasters. These distinct compounding factors present unique challenges that are different from those of the rest of the Southeast region. Additionally, the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) has often been excluded from weather data collection efforts, even compared to Puerto Rico, due to administrative structures (Méndez-Lazaro et al. 2023). These structures, combined with the lack of data, have resulted in capacity challenges that continue to create gaps in a wide range of sectors (e.g., health, natural resources, education, agriculture, food security, imports, and housing).
Some have weather and ocean circulation models have transformations like downscaling to improve spatial resolutions for smaller areas in order to make management decisions at a local scale.
Many tools developed by the U.S. Geological Survey allow for visualizations of natural disaster impacts, such as days of extreme heat under projects of degree warming days (Alder and Hostetler, 2013). Information pertaining to sea-level rise impacting habitats and infrastructure, as well as easy-to-understand state-level summaries, are available from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) via their Sea-level Rise Technical Reports and Sea-level Rise Viewer Tool website (Runkle and Kunkel et al., 2022; Sweet et al., 2022).
For more information on Drought and Flooding effects on SGCN and habitats in the USVI, follow the links below