PHILIPSBURG — Climate change. Again? Yes sir, because St. Maarten is, like many small island states, in the line of fire when rising sea levels become a reality. It is not a matter of if, but a matter of when. Handling this challenge requires something that is alien to most of our politicians: long term thinking. The good thing is that we are not alone and that we do not have to re-invent the wheel because others have understood that something needs to be done and that it needs to be done now.
St. Maarten is in a rather unique situation in the sense that the island is divided between two jurisdictions: France and the Netherlands. One could well ague that it makes little sense to take measures on the Dutch side, if the French side does nothing at all. And make no mistake, defending our island against the sea is going to be an extremely costly affair. It is about more than building a seawall here and there in an attempt to protect a beach.
The options towards a sustainable solution are manifold, but for the scope of this article, we will limit our outlook to two examples that we found in the Netherlands and in Singapore.
The Dutch coast is under constant threat from the waters of the North Sea. The country learned a hard lesson in February 1953, when a combination of high spring tide with a heavy storm from the northwest destroyed dykes at more than 150 spots in the provinces of Zeeland, South Holland and North Brabant. An astonishing 1,836 people died. The event went into the country’s history books as the largest natural disaster of the twentieth century.
The Dutch reacted to this disaster with an ambitious plan, known as the Delta Works. Construction began in 1954 and lasted until 1997. The project consists of dams, sluices, locks, dykes, levees and storm surge barriers. The cost at completion: 8.2 billion guilders, or roughly 3.7 billion euros ($4.3 billion).
The Delta Commission, charged with studying future events, wrote in a report that the country should plan for a rise in sea levels of 1.3 meters by 2100 and of 4 meters by the year 2200.
While the Netherlands has so far not experienced a equally dramatic disaster, its coastline remains under threat of the waters in the North Sea. This inspired the creation of a project dubbed the Sand Engine. This project has created an artificial peninsula of 128 hectare near the coast of Kijkduin (near The Hague). Sand Engine deposited 21.5 million cubic meters of sand into the sea. Wind, waves and currents distribute the sand in a natural way. For comparison: 1 cubic meter of sand weighs between 1,500 and 1,800 kilos.
All this to say that the Dutch were on top of things after the 1953 disaster hit them.
Comparing St. Maarten with the situation in Singapore is not entirely realistic, even though the challenges posed by rising sea water are quite similar. In 1965, Singapore’s size was comparable with the Dutch Noordoostpolder (around 594 square kilometers) but since that time it has increased its land since by 24 percent to 719 square kilometers. The objective is to increase it further to 770 square kilometers. The Dutch side of St. Maarten is just 34 square kilometers. And there is another significant difference: Singapore is rich, while St. Maarten is struggling with its public finances.
According to the Strait Times, Singapore estimates the costs of its defense against rising sea levels to be $100 billion over the next one hundred years. That is on average $1 billion per year. St. Maarten’s budgeted expenditures for 2025 are not even a third of that number: $322.3 million. That is a fair indication that our island will be unable to fight the effect of climate change on its own.
Singapore’s population of around 6 million dwarfs the population of St. Maarten, yet there remain remarkable similarities. Both jurisdictions have limited option of moving its population away from the coast to higher ground.
Tuvalu, an island with a population of around 100,000 is situated between Hawaii and Australia. While the government is building seawalls ad reclaiming land in its fight against rising sea levels, many inhabitants have used a unique climate visa to flee to Australia.
That is not a real solution, says Bryce Rudyk, a legal advisor to the chair of the Alliance of Small Island States: “I think that the inhabitants of small islands would prefer not to move elsewhere.”
That may be so, but if sea levels rise between 2 and 4 meters in the future – a frightening perspective – it would drag down the whole economy.
In 2019, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in his National Day rally speech: “Coastal defenses are as existential for the country as its armed forces These are life and death matters.”
Singapore is not waiting for the seemingly inevitable disaster; it has invested serious money in widening drains, the construction of underground tanks for holding storm water and studying the development of sea level rise at each corner of its coast line.
With all this in mind, St. Maarten cannot sit round and do nothing. Knowing that the country will be unable to bear the cost of any sensible solution, there seems to be only one way out: change its constitutional status to that of a Dutch public entity, after the example of the BES-islands. With all the pros and cons of such a move, its would at least (theoretically) give our island access to the necessary funding it needs to ensure its continued existence.
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