Bonaire

In 1499, seven years after Columbus made landfall in the present-day Bahamas, a Spanish ship carrying Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512) landed on Bonaire (Haviser and Hofman 2015, 37). Over the next two decades, hundreds of Amerindians were abducted from the island by the Spanish and sold to the operators of copper mines in Hispaniola (Stelten and Antczak 2023, 3). In 1636, the Dutch seized Bonaire from the Spanish, and it has been under Dutch rule ever since (apart from a brief period in the early nineteenth century when the British wrested control of the island). Following the abolition of slavery in 1863, Bonaire became increasingly dependent on solar salt production, and in 1997 the American corporation Cargill opened a 3,700-hectare salt-production facility at the southern end of the island. Today, Bonaire is a popular destination for holidaymakers, especially SCUBA divers drawn to the reefs hugging its western coastline. The low-lying island is at the frontlines of climate change and is expected to “suffer excessively” from the unfolding ecological crisis (Van Beukering 2022 et al., 7). Unlike the nearby islands of Aruba and Curaçao, Bonaire is a special municipality of the Netherlands and subject to the authority of the Dutch central government. In 2026, the Hague District Court ruled that the Netherlands was not doing enough to help islanders prepare for rising sea levels and mandated that it devise a new climate adaptation plan not only for the island but for the entire kingdom.

C.S.H.