in the short and long terms (Rasmussen 2004; Loayza et al. 2012). The most vulnerable countries are Small Island Developing States (SIDS), including Caribbean island states, which often experience growth collapse as a result of climatic events and find it difficult to recover immediately. This is due to the impact of shocks on their macroeconomic indicators, which includes the deterioration of fiscal and trade balances (Heger, Julca and Paddison 2008).

Natural habitats, such as coral reefs, seagrasses, and mangroves, can protect coastal communities against the impacts of waves and storms. In particular, mangroves are a form of natural infrastructure that protects coasts from storm surge and flooding in tropical regions (Blankespoor, Dasgupta and Lange 2016). Multiple studies have shown that mangroves—areas of forest and other wooded land with mangrove vegetation (FAO 2010)—can attenuate wave energy (Brinkman et al. 1997; Mazda et al. 1997; Massel, Furukawa and Brinkman 1999; Quartel et al. 2007; Barbier et al. 2008; Gedan et al. 2010; McIvor et al. 2012; Pinsky, Guannel and Arkema 2013). The width of mangrove greenbelt and cross-shore distance are major factors in wave height decline (Bao 2011); other factors include shore slope, root diameter, spectral characteristics of incident waves, and tidal stage on forest entry (Alongi 2008).

Mangroves are spread along the coasts of 13 sovereign Caribbean states and 17 dependent territories, from The Bahamas in the north to Trinidad and Tobago in the south. Bermuda’s low-island mangroves are among the northernmost in the world (32o20’N). But as a result of high population pressure in coastal areas, many mangrove areas have been converted to other uses, including urbanization, industrialization, aquaculture, and tourism. These disturbances are taking place at increasing spatial and temporal scales, and require increasing recovery time (Tuholske et al. 2017; Polidoro et al. 2010; FAO 2007; Duke, Pinzon and Prada 1997; Ellison and Farnsworth 1996). Overall, the region is losing mangrove forest at a rate of 1 percent per year; and this is happening much faster on the mainland (1.7 percent) than on the islands (0.2 percent) (Ellison and Farnsworth 1996). After the Indo-Malay Philippine Archipelago, the Caribbean has the world’s second highest mangrove area loss, losing approximately 24 percent of its total mangrove area over the past quarter-century (FAO 2007).

Del Valle et al. (2020) suggest that mangroves also can mitigate the impact of hurricanes on local economic activity. They show that within Central America’s coastal lowlands, nightlight intensity, as a proxy of GDP, decreases by up to 24 percent in areas that are unprotected by mangroves and is fully mitigated in areas protected by mangrove belts of 1 kilometer or more. This study follows this line, providing a regional perspective on how mangroves can act as natural barriers to mitigate the negative impact of hurricane windstorm in the Caribbean on a particular set of social and economic outcomes. In a region where more than half the population lives within 1.5 kilometers of the shoreline, hurricanes might pose serious socioeconomic risks (Waite et al. 2014).

This paper finds robust evidence that hurricanes significantly affect the intensity of nightlight. In locations hit by a Category 3 hurricane (wind speed of 203 kilometers per hour or kph), we estimate a 2.9 percent reduction in nightlight intensity, using the average intensity level for 2000. The effect is even greater in storm surge-prone, low-elevation coastal zones, where Category 3 hurricane winds are associated with a 16.1 percent decrease in nightlight. But where mangrove forests are a natural defense, a mangrove width of just 0.25 kilometer reduces nightlight intensity to 4.7–5.1 percent above and below the median. Where the mangrove width is greater than 1.26 kilometers and has an average width of 2.3 kilometers, nightlight reduction falls to 1–6.5 percent.

The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 describes the nightlight data used in this study, and the frequency of hurricane damages in the Caribbean. It also presents detailed mangrove forest data 3