Hurricane Beryl thrashed Jamaica with heavy winds and rain on Wednesday, killing at least one person after forging a destructive, water-soaked path across smaller Caribbean islands over the past couple of days.

The death toll from the powerful Category 4 hurricane climbed to at least 10, but it is widely expected to rise further as communications come back online across drenched islands damaged by flooding and deadly winds, Reuters reported.

In Jamaica, Beryl’s eyewall skirted the island’s southern coast, pummeling communities as emergency groups rushed to evacuate people from flood-prone areas.

“It’s terrible. Everything’s gone. I’m in my house and scared,” said Amoy Wellington, a 51-year-old cashier who lives in Top Hill, a rural farming community in Jamaica’s southern St. Elizabeth parish. “It’s a disaster.”

A man walks near damaged vehicles after devastating floods swept through the town after Hurricane Beryl passed off the Venezuelan coast, in Cumanacoa, Venezuela. Photo: REUTERS

A woman died in Jamaica’s Hanover parish after a tree fell on her home, Richard Thompson, acting director general at Jamaica’s disaster agency said in an interview on local news.

Nearly a thousand Jamaicans were in shelters by Wednesday evening, Thompson added.

The island’s main airports were closed and streets were mostly empty after Prime Minister Andrew Holness issued a nationwide curfew for Wednesday.

“We can do as much as we can do, as (is) humanly possible, and we leave the rest in the hands of God,” Holness said earlier on Wednesday, urging residents in vulnerable areas to evacuate.

The loss of life and damage wrought by Beryl underscores the consequences of a warmer Atlantic Ocean, which scientists cite as a telltale sign of human-caused climate change fueling extreme weather that differs from past experience.

Ralph Gonsalves, prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, one of the hardest-hit areas in the eastern Caribbean, said in a radio interview that the country’s Union Island was “flattened” by Beryl.

“Everybody is homeless … It is going to be a Herculean effort to rebuild.”

Scattered debris and houses with missing roofs are seen in a drone photograph after Hurricane Beryl passed the island of Petite Martinique, Grenada. Photo: REUTERS

Speaking to state media, Nerissa Gittens-McMillan, permanent secretary at St. Vincent and the Grenadines’ agriculture ministry, warned of possible food shortages after 50% of the country’s plantain and banana crops were lost, with significant losses also to root crops and vegetables, Reuters reported.

Power outages were widespread across Jamaica, while some roads near the coast were washed out.

By Wednesday evening, the eye of the spiraling hurricane was located about 161 km west of Kingston, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC), as the storm’s core headed toward the Cayman Islands, where hurricane conditions were expected late tonight.

Beryl is packing maximum sustained winds of over 200 kilometers per hour.

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Setting aside an additional 1.2% of the world’s land as nature preserves would prevent the majority of predicted plant and animal extinctions and cost about $263 billion, according to a study published on Tuesday.

The world is racing to meet a goal to protect 30% of the world by 2030 to protect wildlife that is being decimated by climate change, pollution and habitat destruction.

Global policymakers will meet at a United Nations summit in Colombia in October to discuss plans for reaching that goal.

The study in the journal Frontiers in Science aimed to identify the highest value areas in hope that they be included in those protection plans, said Carlos Peres, a study co-author and conservation ecology expert at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.

“Most countries do not actually have a strategy,” Peres said.

“The 30-by-30 targets still lack a lot of details because it doesn’t actually say what 30 percent should be protected.”

The study’s proposed protections would cover an additional 1.6 million square km (633,000 square miles) – an area about a fifth the size of the United States – across 16,825 sites globally that are home to rare and threatened species.

That’s on top of the nearly 16% of the world that already have some level of protection.

The study estimated the $263 billion bill is how much it would cost to acquire the new areas, many of which include private property, at current value over the next five years.

“Time is not on our side because it will become increasingly more expensive and more difficult to set aside additional protected areas,” Peres said.

Land acquisition makes up most of the cost of creating protected areas, and the study did not consider the upkeep costs for policing the reserves.

About three-quarters of the sites are tropical forests, as those are the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems. The Phillipines, Brazil and Indonesia are home to more than half of the high-value sites.

Russia is the single country with the most high-valued area ripe for conservation with 138,436 square km identified in the study, an area the size of Greece.

Several African countries also topped the list with Madagascar having the fourth-highest number of sites overall while the Democratic Republic of Congo had the largest area targeted for conservation on the continent.

The United States is the only developed nation among the top 30 countries in the analysis, with 0.6% of the sites or an area twice the size of Delaware.

The researchers only considered land and freshwater ecosystems but not oceans or marine protected areas. Researchers did not include invertebrates in the study, as the geographical distributions insects and other such animals are not well mapped.

Kuwait has announced temporary power cuts in some parts of the country during peak consumption hours, saying it is struggling to meet increased demand spurred by extreme summer heat.

In a statement on Wednesday, Kuwait’s Ministry of Electricity, Water and Renewable Energy said the scheduled cuts would occur for up to two hours a day, in the first such step for the OPEC member state as climate change causes temperatures to rise, AFP reported.

It blamed the cuts on “the inability of power plants to meet increased demand” during peak hours amid “a rise in temperatures compared to the same period in previous years.”

On Thursday, the ministry published a schedule of expected cuts across several parts of the country, after urging residents to ration consumption to ease the load on power plants.

Kuwait, one of the largest crude producers in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), is considered one of the world’s hottest desert countries.

In recent years, climate change has made summer peaks hotter and longer.

The extreme heat raises reliance on energy-guzzling air conditioners which are ubiquitous in Kuwait during the summer months.

Temperatures neared 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) on Thursday, according to Kuwait’s Meteorological Department.

“What we are experiencing today is the result of climate change,” said Kuwaiti astronomer and scientist Adel Al-Saadoun, noting that temperatures are expected to climb above the 50 degree Celsius mark in the coming days.

Last month, Kuwait signed short-term contracts to buy 500 megawatts of electricity, including 300 MW from Oman and 200 MW from Qatar, during the summer months. The contracts would last from June 1 to August 31.

Kamel Harami, a Kuwaiti energy expert, said that the Gulf state needed to revamp its energy infrastructure.

“The available energy is not sufficient, and instead of relying on oil and gas, we must go towards nuclear, solar and wind energy,” he told AFP.

“This is only the beginning of the crisis, and the programmed cuts of electricity will continue in the coming years if we do not accelerate the construction of power stations.”

Umm Mohammed, a Kuwaiti woman in her sixties, said she was left without power for two hours on Wednesday.

“We weren’t severely affected,” she told AFP, noting that the house remained cool during the brief outage.

“Some turn their homes into refrigerators, even when they are not inside, and this raises the load” on power plants, she said.