Cuba Climate Change: What's Communist Nation's Stance and Policies on Global Warming?

With climate change affecting nearly every region on the planet, an increasing number of countries are clarifying their stances on global warming and creating policies to address the potential danger. Cuba is no exception. The Caribbean nation has already had to deal with some of the obstacles it might face if the situation worsens and significantly affects Cuba's climate, Slate noted.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1991, Cuba no longer received chemicals, equipment and other resources needed for agriculture it had previously purchased from that region. Inclement weather and an inability to work much of its land created shortages. The country had to find alternative agricultural techniques, something that persists to this day.

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To remedy the crisis, the Cuban government worked with its farmers, giving them tracts of land that it owned. When the farmers needed more assistance, they enlisted the help of the country's scientists to develop new ways to work the land without relying on the fossil fuels it could no longer import. United Nations University reports that today's Cuban farmers are still searching for and developing ways to protect crops against climate change.

For example, they plant according to the weather, choosing certain crops for dry spells and others for rainy periods, according to United Nations University's Our World. And the Cuban government is involved in improving overall agriculture. In 2007, the government began focusing on ways to boost its own production of food and decrease its reliance on importing food from other countries.

The Cuban government has launched other initiatives as well. When researchers discovered a climate change-related threat to the country's coastal areas, the country began plans to restore as much of the coast as it could by tearing down many of the manmade structures that had been built there, The Huffington Post reported. Jorge Alvarez, director of Cuba's government-run Center for Environmental Control and Inspection, said "protecting the coasts is a matter of national security." The country already had a law designed to protect the coastline. Passed in 2000, it requires a buffer zone between construction projects and dunes, and bans building on areas of sand.

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