🏳 BZ — Investment Hypothesis

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados — Governments, businesses, farmers and households across the Caribbean are being urged to step up preparations for potentially severe climate extremes as El Niño strengthens and threatens to intensify the hot and dry conditions already affecting parts of the region. In a news release on Tuesday, the Caribbean Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology (CIMH) and the University of the West Indies Climate Studies Group Mona (UWI CSGM) warned that the region should remain particularly vigilant as August to October marks the peak of the Caribbean’s heat season. The unusually dry conditions are also raising concern because the region is expected to enter its climatological dry season around November.

The Maya continue to involuntarily shape the appearance of tropical forests in Central America more than a thousand years after their cities were abandoned, according to a new study published in Scientific Reports. A team of scientists from the University of Exeter and the University of Texas at Austin analyzed laser scanning data (lidar) over old-growth forest in northwestern Belize and found that the structure of the modern forest still bears the imprint of ancient Maya infrastructure. The authors of the work studied the territory of the protected Rio Bravo zone covering 47 km², where human activity has been virtually absent over the last thousand years.