While Guyana pours billions of dollars into highways, bridges, housing schemes and other headline-grabbing projects, technology, education and economics columnist Dr. Karen Abrams says the country’s most important investment remains dangerously undervalued: the sea defences that protect the narrow coastal strip where almost the entire nation lives and works.
Abrams, co-founder of STEMGuyanaand thePathway Online Academy,argues that Guyana’s unprecedented oil revenues have created a once-in-a-generation opportunity to secure the country’s future—but warns that failing to strengthen coastal defences could place decades of economic progress at risk.
Guyana is among the world’s most vulnerable countries to rising sea levels. Approximately 90 percent of the population lives on the low-lying coastal plain, much of it lying between half a metre and one metre below sea level at high tide. For more than three centuries, an intricate network of seawalls, earthen embankments, kokers, canals, conservancies and pumps has held back the Atlantic Ocean, protecting homes, farms, businesses and critical infrastructure. Nearly three-quarters of the country’s economic activity is concentrated on this same coastal strip, making its sea defences arguably the nation’s single most important piece of infrastructure.
In her July 5 Kaieteur News column, “Managing Risks to the Economy on the Coast,” Abrams argues that successive governments and the private sector have failed to fully appreciate the economic value of those defences.
“Every conversation about Guyana’s economic future eventually arrives at a wall,” Abrams wrote. “I want to write about that wall as an economic asset, because I do not think we talk about it that way nearly enough.”
Her warning comes at a time when Guyana is experiencing one of the fastest rates of economic growth in the world, fuelled by offshore oil production that began in December 2019. Oil revenues have transformed the country’s finances, financing record national budgets and a wave of infrastructure development.
Abrams contends, however, that no investment—not a new bridge, highway, port or power plant—will matter if the systems protecting the coast fail.
“The most important piece of economic infrastructure in Guyana is not a port, a highway or a power plant,” she said. “It is the system of sea defences, kokers, drains, canals, conservancies and pumps that makes everything else possible.“
She argues that every business plan prepared in Georgetown, every housing scheme, farm, hotel and shopping complex along the coast rests on a single assumption: that the Atlantic Ocean remains outside the sea wall and floodwaters can be drained away efficiently.
History, she notes, demonstrates the devastating consequences when that assumption fails.
Government and World Bank assessments estimated that the catastrophic floods of January and February 2005 caused approximately US$465 million in damage—equivalent to almost 59 percent of Guyana’s Gross Domestic Product at the time. More recently, widespread flooding in 2021 again exposed the country’s vulnerability to extreme rainfall and drainage failures.
Abrams warns that climate change is steadily increasing those risks.
Citing projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), she notes that sea levels are expected to continue rising throughout this century, placing Guyana among the most climate-vulnerable nations in the Caribbean and South America because so much of its population and economy depend entirely on engineered coastal protection.
Rather than viewing rising sea levels as a distant threat, Abrams urges policymakers to confront what they would mean in practical terms.
Already, spring tides and periods of heavy rainfall regularly send seawater across sections of the East Coast Demerara Public Road, disrupting businesses, damaging property and forcing residents to move vehicles and possessions to higher ground.
At two metres of sea-level rise, she said, many existing sea defences would require substantial redesign or replacement, drainage systems would struggle to discharge water into a higher Atlantic Ocean, saltwater intrusion into agricultural lands would intensify and insurance costs could rise significantly.
At three metres, she cautions, Guyana would no longer be confronting occasional flooding.
“We are discussing the possibility of a fundamentally different Guyana,” Abrams wrote, warning that communities, major transportation corridors, public buildings and other critical infrastructure could eventually require relocation.
She argues that investments in sea defences and drainage should be viewed not as expenditure, but as economic protection.
“Strengthened defences and modern drainage do not simply prevent disasters,” she wrote. “They lower the risk premium on every other investment in the country. They are the foundation underneath the boom, and foundations are exactly what windfalls are for.”
Abrams also urges Guyana to take advantage of emerging international financing mechanisms—including climate-resilient debt clauses, adaptation financing, resilience bonds and regional catastrophe insurance—to modernise sea defences, expand pumping capacity, strengthen drainage infrastructure and improve flood forecasting and early warning systems.
She further calls for an integrated national coastal resilience strategy involving the Central Government, the Georgetown Mayor and City Council and local democratic organs to guide long-term planning, maintenance and investment.
“The sea does not recognise municipal boundaries, political jurisdictions or party colours,” she wrote. “Floodwaters do not stop at the edge of Georgetown or the limits of an NDC.“
Abrams argues that Guyana stands at a defining moment in its history. Never before has the country possessed the financial resources now available through its oil revenues to confront one of its oldest and greatest vulnerabilities. Whether those resources are invested in safeguarding the coast, she suggests, will determine not only the resilience of future generations but also the long-term sustainability of the country’s economic transformation.
“The oil window gives us, for the first time, the financial means to secure the coast properly for the century ahead,” Abrams wrote. “Few line items in any budget will ever matter more. The sea is patient. Our advantage is that, for this one decade, we do not have to be.“
Her message is that Guyana’s greatest economic asset may ultimately depend on protecting its greatest physical vulnerability. Without resilient sea defences, modern drainage infrastructure and a coordinated national strategy for coastal resilience, the prosperity generated by the country’s oil wealth could one day be overtaken by the very waters the nation has spent more than three centuries holding back.
