Meanwhile, the Bermuda Hotel Association (BHA) announced that hotel staff not vaccinated against COVID-19 will have to get tested for the coronavirus every seven days from next Tuesday.

The BHA said the policy would apply in all its member hotels.

“The purpose of the policy is to ensure that all non-immunized hotel employees are aware of their health status as a means of protecting themselves, their co-workers, family members, visitors and guests, as well as all members of the wider community,” a BHA spokesperson said.

“The hotel industry as a key employer wishes to ensure that we exercise a heightened level of care for the safety of everyone as we seek to successfully achieve the reopening of our tourism economy.”

The policy is in line with the government’s controversial mandatory quarantine restrictions for non-immunized travelers, which is expected to come into force on June 24, the measure having originally been due to come into place on June 6 but twice put back.

Seven hotel properties — including the Fairmont Southampton which is undergoing renovations and is not open to the public — will be used as quarantine centers.

Travelers must pick one of the locations, cover the cost of the stay themselves and book before arrival in Bermuda.

A fresh batch of 4,680 doses of the Pfizer vaccine sent by the British government is due to arrive on June 24 from London, Government House has announced.

Britain has already sent around 80,000 doses of the vaccine to the island, a British Overseas Territory. In all, Bermuda has carried out almost 300,000 COVID-19 tests, resulting in 2,499 positive cases.

Dr Carika Weldon, head of the diagnostic laboratory, confirmed that there had been no cases of the virulent Indian – or Delta – variant in Bermuda, where 33 people have died, including five in May.

CMC

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Management of the St. Christopher Air & Sea Ports Authority, (SCASPA), wishes to advise, that as of today, 17 June, 2021, four (4) employees have tested positive for Coronavirus. These persons are currently in Isolation and SCASPA is assisting the Health Authorities and the COVID 19 Task Force with contact tracing.

As per the Covid-19 protocols, exposed employees were asked to self-quarantine pending contact tracing by the Health Officials. To date, thirty-one (31) employees have been quarantined, seventeen (17) of which have been released.

Additionally, at present, 63.596 of SCASPA staff have been vaccinated with the first dose and we are continuing our efforts to get most of our staff members vaccinated.

We wish to remind you, however, that as stakeholders operating on the Ports, you are susceptible to contracting and spreading the Coronavirus. Given this, you are strongly encouraged to vaccinate, if medically cleared, and to take all required actions that would protect you and limit the spread of COVID-19.

Moreover, we wish to allay any concerns associated with the positive cases and give the assurance that paramount in our efforts will be the health and safety of all employees and users of our air and seaports.
SCASPA Management

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By Kate Chappell

KINGSTON, June 14 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – As a child, Sophie Grizzle Roumel remembers swimming in the warm turquoise waters near a beach surrounded by mangroves outside her small village on Jamaica’s west end.

Today, the white sand beach is crowded with heavy trucks and around it the land is denuded of trees as diggers level part of the mangrove forest to make way for a new $550 million resort project.

“It is a beautiful property. It is heartbreaking to see what is being done,” said Grizzle Roumel, a director of the beach resort town of Negril’s Chamber of Commerce.

“I’m devastated at the destruction and the long-term effects it will have.”

Located just past Jamaica’s famed stretch of all-inclusive resorts on the north coast, the project is a stark example of the twin challenges the country faces: how to bring in visitors and boost jobs in the wake of COVID-19 while also keeping its commitment to slowing global warming.

Across the Caribbean, one of the world’s most tourism-dependent regions, states are struggling to balance protecting the environment and stoking their economies, said Mark Bynoe, assistant executive director of the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC).

“Governments are often caught in a position of wanting to do what is right, but the rest of the population is agitating to see changes and those are often measured in very discrete terms,” including in jobs and poverty rates, he said.

The new more than 2,000-room resort will be one of the largest in Jamaica, according to Spanish developer Princess Hotels and Resorts, which started preparatory work on the project two years ago.

Rafael Millan, country manager for Princess Hotels and Resorts, said the completed resort could welcome up to 4,070 visitors per day and will create 3,500 jobs.

The company is focused on minimizing the project’s environmental damage, he added. “Every single action that we take has compensation measures,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview.

That includes replanting any mangroves, seagrass and coral that are removed during construction.

“We know that preserving the mangroves is a sign of the identity of our resort,” Millan said. “There is a way to keep sustainable tourism within an existing natural area which is subject to tourism activity.”

PROTECTED AREAS CONSTRUCTION

An assessment published by the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) in January 2020 noted that the Princess resort is being built in an area that includes four environmentally protected areas, including a fish sanctuary.

Once finished, the 84-acre (34-hectare) development will have removed more than 10 acres of mangroves and 10,000 square metres (107,600 square feet) of seagrass, as well as hard coral, according to estimations in the report.

Scientists say mangrove forests are invaluable to fighting both the causes and effects of climate change.

They absorb planet-heating carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and protect coastlines against storms, flooding and erosion.

The trees also provide habitat for wildlife, including the fish and crabs that locals harvest to earn a living.

As part of the permit-granting process, Princess Hotels agreed to rigorous adaptation and compensation measures, but Diana McCaulay, founder of the Jamaica Environment Trust, a non-profit, said they are not enough.

“You still lose the ecosystem functions of the mangroves in the area from which you are taking them. Even if you manage to restore them or create them in (another) part of the coast, you still leave an impact on this part of the coast,” she said.

“Even if they survive in the new area, you still have to wait 20 or 30 years for them to grow. And it may fail.”

The NEPA and Jamaica’s environment ministry did not reply to requests for comment.

POST-PANDEMIC RECOVERY

Jamaica has been lauded by the international community for its commitments to addressing the climate crisis.

By 2030, the country has promised to plant three million trees, restore its mangrove forests, reduce carbon emissions by at least 25% from business as usual levels, and shift to cleaner energy sources like wind and solar power.

According to estimates in a 2019 government report, Jamaica has lost more than 770 hectares of mangroves over the past two decades for a variety of reasons, mainly coastal development.

Carlos Fuller, Belize’s ambassador to the United Nations and a former officer with the CCCCC, said balancing economic development with protecting the environment is possible but not easy.

“It is a challenge. (Belize) also really depends on establishing (economic) resources. But with hotels, we have gone much more toward small scale as opposed to the mega resorts,” Fuller said over the phone.

“At the end of the day, you may want to rush to get a quick return. But in five years, you will degrade the environment and you will lose your market.”

Figures from the Tourism Ministry show that before the pandemic, tourism accounted for nearly 10% of Jamaica’s gross domestic product.

But last year, border closures and cruise cancellations due to the pandemic caused visitor arrivals to the country to fall by nearly three-quarters.

The economy is expected to contract between 10% and 12% in the fiscal year 2020/21, according to the Bank of Jamaica.

Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett told Parliament in April that Jamaica is relying on tourism to jump-start its post-COVID-19 recovery, with 7,000 hotel rooms due to be built over the next two years, including the Princess Hotels development.

Bartlett told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that protecting the local environment, particularly coastal areas, is the government’s primary concern.

But Sophia Frazer-Binns, a critic from the People’s National Party, the country’s main political opposition party, said the development represents a failure of the government to match words with actions.

Instead, she said, authorities should focus on smaller-scale community tourism.

“It is just one of the instances where we are seeing the government has not really shown a real commitment to environmental protection,” she said.

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BRASILIA, June 16 (Reuters) – Several hundred indigenous Brazilians protested outside the Congress building in Brasilia on Wednesday against a bill backed by the country’s farm sector that would limit recognition of reservation lands.

Protesters wearing feathered headdresses and body paint later tried to invade a downtown building to demand the ouster of the head of the government’s indigenous affairs agency Funai for not defending their interests.

Riot police fired pepper spray to contain the crowd, and some arrows were shot at the glass windows of the building.

“This bill PL 490 is harmful not just to us, but to humanity,” Sonia Guajajara, head of Brazil’s largest indigenous umbrella organization APIB, told Reuters.

The legislation, first tabled in 2007, would fix 1988 as the cut-off date for the demarcation of reservation lands if they were not occupied at that time. The lower house is expected to vote on the bill in committee next week.

Brazil’s Supreme Court must rule on a case that would set jurisprudence in the issue and is expected to uphold indigenous arguments that fixing the 1988 date violates constitutional guarantees to ancestral lands.

“The bill was rejected by the human rights commission in 2009. This is an unacceptable setback for indigenous rights and a constitutional absurdity,” Brazil’s only indigenous lawmaker Joenia Wapichana said in a congressional committee session.

The bill would open up protected indigenous lands to commercial agriculture and mining, and is backed by far-right President Jair Bolsonaro who advocates developing the Amazon region by tapping mineral resources on reservations.

Guajajara said the campaign to stop passage of the bill comes at a time of increased attacks on indigenous communities by wildcat gold miners who have illegally invaded indigenous lands.

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