This article by Fen Montagne appeared in Yale’s Environment 360. It is accompanied by an impressive photo gallery.
The enduring image of Cuba is of a country locked in a time warp, with 1950s American sedans cruising the streets, colonial-era buildings in disrepair, and six decades of strict state control over the economy and a U.S. embargo keeping development at bay.
This frozen-in-amber quality also applies to many of the marine ecosystems surrounding the Caribbean’s largest island, with tremendous benefits for Cuba’s aquatic life. While coral reef cover has declined by 50 percent throughout the Caribbean in recent decades, Cuba has managed to retain some of the most pristine and biodiverse coral reef environments on earth. A lack of coastal development, limited tourism, relatively small amounts of runoff flowing into the sea, tight controls on commercial fishing, and the establishment of extensive marine protected areas have…
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Lia Nicholson, is a Project Coordinator at the Environment Division, Antigua & Barbuda. She has always been interested in the environment, and started at an early age with outdoor adventures along the coasts of Antigua. After starting college in the biology track, Lia soon transitioned from research to an environmental policy major with a focus on applied studies. Environmental management is, after all, about managing people and behaviors. In 2012, Lia enrolled in a Masters programme at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, where she studied the effects of climate change, focusing on impacts to coastal zones, with a view to applying this…