Cayman has now put its name to two international declarations to protect the Sargasso Sea, and has yet to approve a plan for the sargassum that rots on its own south and east coasts every summer. The second signature came on 19 October 2026, when Wayne Panton MP, the Parliamentary Secretary responsible for Health, Environment and Sustainability, signed the Hamilton II Declaration for the Cayman Islands in Bermuda. Two weeks earlier his minister, Katherine Ebanks-Wilks MP, told Parliament that the National Sargassum Response Plan for Cayman's own beaches is still unapproved, with a timetable to come in November. In June 2025 she had promised it would go to Cabinet "in the next few weeks."

The signature took a day. The plan for Cayman's own beaches was promised in writing in July 2022 and does not exist. In the four years since, a Year 13 student has written a business plan for the seaweed, Little Cayman's resorts have proposed and costed a barrier, Mexico has committed its navy and 2,000 million pesos to catching it at sea, and the United Kingdom has paid for sargassum management work in three of its other Caribbean territories, not including Cayman. The two records, what Cayman has signed abroad and what it has done at home, are set out below.

What Cayman signed abroad

Hamilton II is a modest document. Signed by Uma Kumaran MP, the UK Minister for the Overseas Territories, and Jaché Adams, Bermuda's Minister of Public Works and Environment, it is a voluntary, non-binding statement that, in their joint statement of 20 October, "is designed to begin the process for States Party to the BBNJ Agreement to adopt legally binding measures to protect the Sargasso Sea." The BBNJ Agreement, the High Seas Treaty, came into force in January 2026; the UK ratified it on 10 July. The parties meet in New York in January 2027. The joint statement did not name Cayman's signatory. The Caymanian Journal (TCJ) reported on 23 October that it was Panton.

The Government confirmed it on 6 November, 18 days after the signing, in a press release from the Ministry of Health, Environment and Sustainability. Panton said: "The Cayman Islands is proud to have been among the first to sign the Hamilton Declaration II. The Sargasso Sea is a unique floating habitat, and while it may be hundreds of miles away from Cayman, it sustains rich marine biodiversity for hundreds of species that are a major part of our natural heritage and conservation focus." He added that "while the Declaration is non-binding, it represents an important commitment to working alongside international partners to advance the long-term health of our oceans." Ebanks-Wilks said the sea "is central to our culture, heritage and economy" and that Cayman valued "the continued partnership with the Sargasso Sea Commission and the United Kingdom." The release says signing "does not itself establish a marine protected area or introduce new legal requirements," and that signatories agree to "support the process of development of a collective proposal to establish area-based management tools in the Sargasso Sea." It notes that the seaweed landing on Cayman is a different bloom from the Sargasso Sea's. It does not mention the National Sargassum Response Plan, Cabinet, the cost of the trip or whether Cayman will attend in January.

It was Cayman's second such signature. Kurt Tibbetts signed the original 2014 Hamilton Declaration for Cayman on 3 January 2017, a fact the 6 November release also records. In March 2019 Bermuda's then Minister of Home Affairs, Walter Roban, told a Sargasso Sea Commission workshop that the signatories had doubled and "all except the Cayman Islands is represented here today." The Commission's website says each signatory "has a focal point contact," an official who acts as a champion to bring forward proposals for the sea. On 3 November its page of focal points showed a name for every government but one. Under the Cayman Islands flag there was no name.

What Cayman has done at home

On 30 July 2022 the Government said the then Premier, Wayne Panton, and his Ministry of Sustainability and Climate Resiliency "has committed to complete a national response plan to mitigate the Sargassum arriving in our waters and on our shores." Panton said: "Although the previous administration established a task force to tackle this issue, there was no national plan or strategy produced."

On 27 June 2025 Dwayne Seymour MP asked whether a plan was in place. Ebanks-Wilks answered in writing: "there is no approved Sargassum plan in place. That is concerning, because up to 31 October 2024 when I was the responsible minister, there was a draft a Sargassum Plan which evidently was not advanced or approved in the intervening 6 months." She added that "the draft plan will be reviewed, updated and submitted to Cabinet in the next few weeks."

On 6 March 2026 Ebanks-Wilks told Parliament: "at this time the Government does not yet have a formally approved National Sargassum Management Plan in place," and that existing protocols "focus on coordination and management once sargassum reaches the shoreline." On 5 October, by the Government's summary, she said a plan was still being developed, that barriers and collection vessels were being explored, and that a timeline would come in November. As of 9 November no timetable had been published on gov.ky, and the Ministry's release on the Bermuda signature did not refer to one.

So between July 2022 and November 2026 one ministry under three ministers produced one written commitment, one unapproved plan that lapsed, one promise of Cabinet within weeks, and one unapproved plan in progress. The published record contains no approved plan, no contract for a barrier or vessel, and no budget line for either. The same Government signed for the Sargasso Sea twice in that period.

What sargassum is, and why it comes

Sargassum is a brown seaweed that lives its whole life afloat, held at the surface by small gas-filled bladders. At sea it shelters juvenile fish, crabs and turtle hatchlings, and the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic is named after it. Until 2011 it reached Caribbean beaches only in small patches. That year a separate bloom formed in the tropical Atlantic between Brazil and West Africa and has returned every summer since, carried west by the trade winds. University of South Florida scientists identified it from satellite data in a 2019 paper in the journal Science and named it the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt. It is not the Sargasso Sea drifting south, a distinction the Government's own 6 November release draws, so the pledges signed in Bermuda do not address the seaweed landing in Cayman. Chuanmin Hu, who led the study, said then: "Based on the last 20 years of data, I can say that the belt is very likely to be a new normal."

Which mats land on Cayman depends, the Department of Environment said in 2022, on winds and nearshore currents that are hard to predict, which is why the south and east coasts and North Sound take the seaweed while Seven Mile Beach is usually spared. Within about 48 hours of stranding it rots, releasing hydrogen sulphide, the gas that smells of bad eggs. The USF laboratory's 2026 bulletins record record-high Caribbean sargassum every month from January to June, and 2026 as "the second largest Sargassum year, only second to 2025."

What it does to people

In a Government statement of 27 March 2023 the Chief Medical Officer, Dr Nick Gent, said stranded sargassum does not represent a significant risk to human health. "Like all decomposing biomass, it will produce gasses, such as hydrogen sulfide, which can have an unpleasant smell, even producing feelings of nausea. However, being outdoors, such gasses usually disperse rapidly and do not cause injury or illness," he said. The same statement said that where the gases do not disperse quickly, low residual concentrations of hydrogen sulphide can irritate the eyes, nose and throat, and that direct contact with degrading seaweed may cause skin rashes. In 2018 critical-care doctors in Martinique and Paris wrote in The Lancet that acute inhalation of the gas from rotting sargassum "may result in potentially fatal hypoxic cardiac, respiratory and neurological failure," and called for monitoring on affected beaches. In Guadeloupe, authorities advised vulnerable residents to leave one village in April 2023 after measuring the gas, the news agency AFP reported, and a beach-bar owner there told AFP: "We make a living from tourism, but we're forced to close several months a year." Cayman's strandings are lighter, and no monitoring data for Cayman is public. The Government has published no hydrogen-sulphide readings for the south coast for 2025 or 2026.

The nuisance is not in dispute. The DoE's rule each season is that hand raking needs no permission but any machine on a beach needs its approval, because the seaweed feeds the sand and a loader on a nesting beach can take more beach than weed. The effect is that the cost falls on resorts and homeowners, and the advice is often to leave it.

Who is pressing for action

The loudest voice this season is Osbourne Bodden, a former Minister for Health, Community Affairs, Sports, Culture and Youth, who owns the Grape Tree Café on the beach at Bodden Town and in October posted a video to Facebook calling for action on the seaweed from East End to South Sound. In 2023 Little Cayman resort owners proposed a three-mile floating barrier across South Hole Sound as a pilot for all three islands and asked Government to share the cost; it was not built. In Parliament the pressure has come from Dwayne Seymour MP and Kenneth Bryan MP, both of whom sat in Cabinets that promised a plan.

On 21 October Damoya Fearon, a Year 13 student at Cayman Prep and High School, won the CI$2,500 first prize in the Government's own Youth Pitch Competition for SargaPower, a plan to turn sargassum from Cayman's beaches and nearshore waters into biogas and fertiliser, the Government announced on 26 October. The Government that awarded the prize has no approved plan to collect the seaweed she would process.

Where Cayman stands among its neighbours

A January 2025 study in the journal Phycology by the University of Southampton and the University of the West Indies compared every sargassum policy produced by 32 Caribbean islands between 2011 and 2021. For Cayman it found one document, the DoE's 2015 removal guidelines, with opportunities and barriers "not discussed." Jamaica had a strategy by 2015, Trinidad and Tobago a plan by 2016, Grenada and Saint Lucia by 2017, Dominica by 2019, Barbados a funded adaptive strategy by 2021.

The UK has paid for that kind of work. Its Darwin Plus fund gave £228,595 between 2021 and 2024 for sargassum monitoring, early warning and management in Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands and Montserrat. Cayman was not a partner. The same fund has paid Cayman's Department of Environment for coral disease and habitat mapping; it has not paid for sargassum, and no Cayman application for sargassum funding appears in its published project list.

For comparison on time, France's environment minister, Nicolas Hulot, told the National Assembly on 23 May 2018 that the seaweed "is one more disaster for the West Indies, one which we here probably haven't fully taken into account," in AFP's translation, and that a national plan would be finalised by mid-June; it was published on 3 October 2018, and a third plan is now in preparation, according to the French government's answers to its parliament.

What works, and what it costs

The method Ebanks-Wilks described, barriers offshore and a vessel to collect what they trap, is the region's. In Puerto Morelos, Mexico, hoteliers installed netting and a boat and said by May 2019 that 13 of 18 kilometres of beach had been spared, AFP reported; on 30 July 2026 Mexico's President announced 2,000 million pesos, about US$115 million, for navy vessels and barriers along the Quintana Roo coast. Most sargassum products, from fertiliser to biogas, need seaweed caught at sea, so a barrier is the gateway to any local industry.

The DoE's case for restraint is on the record: turtle nests, sand loss and, in the Minister's 6 March answer, heavy metals that "can leach into the soil, water table, or marine environment." Those are reasons for a plan with sites chosen by the DoE; on the Minister's own account they are not reasons for the plan not to exist.

The Government has not said what the Bermuda trip cost or whether a Cayman delegate will attend in January. It has not published what it spends clearing sargassum, and has attached no cost to the system it intends to procure. No ministry has published a figure for either.

Who decides, and what happens next

Under section 55(1)(b) of the Constitution the Governor is responsible for external affairs, subject to delegation. Asked by telephone on 21 October whether Panton had signed, a Governor's Office staff member told TCJ, "I think you need to ask his office," and the office had not answered TCJ's written questions when that report was published. The Government's 6 November release does not say whether Cabinet approved the signature, and neither the Governor's Office nor the Ministry has said so since.

Kumaran said on 20 October that the declaration "builds on more than a decade of leadership and commitment from the Sargasso Sea Commission, governments, scientists, conservation organisations and civil society partners." Bermuda's Adams said: "The Sargasso Sea is one of the world's great ocean ecosystems, and its conservation depends on the willingness of nations and partners to work together toward a common purpose." Cayman's own release commits it to supporting a collective proposal; it names no Cayman contribution, no official and no budget.

In November the Minister has promised Parliament a timetable, and in January the treaty parties meet in New York. Cayman will arrive at the second with two signatures to its name, and unless the first is kept it will arrive with no plan for its own beaches. Her own written answer of 6 March already states what the timetable must deliver: "prevention and early intervention measures must form part of the broader national response." On the published forecast the seaweed will be back in the Caribbean in volume by January, before either date.