A year after record-breaking Hurricane Beryl, the Caribbean is still reeling – but on one island, defiant traditions are fuelling its climate resilience.

In the predawn darkness, the streets are still damp from the night before as thousands gather, ready to parade through of St George's, the capital of the Caribbean nation of Grenada. Chains scrape against the asphalt and horns jut from helmets pointing skyward.

A conch shell sounds, the rallying call that heralds J'Ouvert morning, the official start of carnival, called Spicemas. As dawn breaks, people flood the streets with their bodies blackened with oil and charcoal.

This is Jab Jab, one of Grenada's oldest carnival traditions, born of emancipation, resilience and resistance. These masqueraders raise chains as symbols of liberation and dress this way to embody the very figures that oppressors of the past once used to demonise them – using mockery and satire to turn insult into power. Its unruliness is deliberate, a rejection of the order once imposed by colonial rule.

That same spirit of defiance is what Grenadians are leaning on today in the face of deep challenges brought by extreme weather. In July 2024, Grenada was left badly damaged when Hurricane Beryl swept over the island and those around it. Fuelled by hot seas, the strongest storms, like Beryl, have arrived earlier and intensified explosively.

As a second-generation British-Grenadian returning to join these carnival celebrations a year after Hurricane Beryl, I wanted to take the temperature of the island's climate resilience. How is Grenada building back after the storm, and where is the country in its longer-term pursuit of climate justice?

David A Farrell, principal of the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology, says Hurricane Beryl was unlike anything the region had seen. "It became the earliest category five storm on record in the Atlantic, developing when people were still preparing for the season."

For Farrell, it's a signal that things are shifting. "This suggests that the baseline for the start of the hurricane season may be shifting to earlier in the year and the season getting longer."

Ageing infrastructure, highly erodible soils, steep terrain and wide stretches of low-lying coastline all magnify the impacts of storms. "These factors combine to make the impacts of stronger storms far more severe in the region." (Read more on how Caribbean islands are bolstering their soils from extreme storms.)

In Grenada, and on its tiny sister isles of Carriacou and Petite Martinique, Hurricane Beryl flattened homes, tore up crops, shuttered schools and left clinics struggling to reopen. Recovery is ongoing, but the financial burden has been immense and the psychological toll on residents is huge.

When it comes to richer nations stepping up to offer financial support for hurricane recovery, "there is a lot of talk and no action", says Tevin Andrews, minister for Carriacou and Petite Martinique affairs and local government.

Andrews and other politicians in Grenada warn that outside finance still lags far behind what's needed. Global promises often stall in bureaucracy, leaving countries like Grenada to rely on debt or insurance schemes that cannot cover the true scale of loss, he says. The question, experts argue, is not only how to rebuild stronger and with limited resources, but how an island adapts when storms themselves are changing faster than the systems designed to withstand them.

The world's oceans are not only warming, but the rate of warming has more than quadrupled since the 1980s, according to the World Meteorological Organization. And this heat is fuel for hurricanes. (Read more about how warmer oceans mean more extreme weather.) This extra ocean heat........

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