Live Updates: Hurricane Melissa Batters the Caribbean, Killing About 20 in Haiti

Desmond McKenzie, a minister who has been coordinating the emergency response for the government in Jamaica, said it “was not in a position to speak about any deaths because we have not had any reports of deaths so far.” The priority, he said, was to begin restoring power and telecommunication services across the island, and clearing roads to reach communities cut off since the storm.

“We know that it’s western Jamaica that has the brunt of the impact,” Jamaica’s information minister, Dana Morris Dixon, said at a morning news conference, adding that central Jamaica, too, had “a lot of damage, a lot of flooding.”

The hurricane weakened somewhat before making landfall overnight in Cuba, and had been downgraded to a Category 2 storm by the time it completed its pass across that island on Wednesday morning. But it still brought sustained winds of 100 m.p.h. and the strength to do more damage: Parts of eastern Cuba were forecast to receive more than 20 inches of rain, and the southeastern Bahamas were expected to receive up to 10 inches as the storm advanced throughout the day.

Melissa was also bringing the risk of “catastrophic flash flooding and landslides” to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the National Hurricane Center said, and it was expected to cause dangerous storm surges in the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos on Wednesday.

Here’s what else to know:

• Internet outages: The storm knocked out power to more than half a million people and reduced internet connectivity to 30 percent of normal levels in Jamaica.

• U.S. response: The United States will deploy disaster response teams to Caribbean countries impacted by Melissa, the State Department announced. The State Department also positioned supplies in six warehouses ahead of the storm, but it was unclear where they were. In previous years, the U.S. Agency for International Development has taken the lead on disaster response efforts around hurricanes in the Caribbean, but the Trump administration shuttered the agency earlier this year.

  Read the latest updates in Spanish.

Two tourists suffered “minor lacerations” from falling debris and another suffered a stroke, but “the medical condition of everybody is in good order,” he said.

Mr. Bartlett said that he expected Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston would open on Wednesday for relief flights and humanitarian aid. On Thursday, flights should be able to land to evacuate guests who wish to leave, he added.

The minister intended to visit Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay on Wednesday to assess the damage, and said that he hoped it would open in the next two days to allow regular commercial flights to restart.

Mr. Barlett said that Hurricane Melissa hit hardest along the country’s west coast, in the St. Elizabeth, Westmoreland, St. James and Trelawny Parishes. During the storm, all tourists at hotel complexes were consolidated into one or two buildings on each property, he said, where food and water were provided to them. Every hotel had a doctor on call or a nurse on the property, Mr. Bartlett added.

As Jamaica continued to assess the damage wrought by the hurricane, the minister said he remained optimistic about the country’s recovery.

The findings are another sign that global efforts to tackle climate change have noticeably flagged. President Trump is withdrawing the United States from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, in which virtually every country agreed to limit the emissions that are rapidly heating the planet.

While other world leaders are still planning to meet without Mr. Trump next month in Belém, Brazil, for the annual U.N. summit on climate change, those talks are already getting off to a rocky start.

Only about one-third of the countries have met a deadline to update their national plans to curb emissions, the United Nations said in a separate report on Tuesday.

“The overall sluggish progress should send shock waves through every citizen,” said Ilana Seid, an ambassador from Palau who chairs the Alliance of Small Island States, an influential negotiating bloc of vulnerable countries at the U.N. climate talks.

The reports arrived as Hurricane Melissa, a Category 5 storm, slammed into Jamaica on Tuesday, causing widespread devastation.

“At this very moment, people from small island developing states are enduring the devastating effects of an unprecedented hurricane season, knowing they have limited resources to recover and will face an arduous process to access the necessary finance,” Ms. Seid said.

Under the Paris agreement, countries pledged to limit the rise in average global temperatures to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 Fahrenheit, compared to preindustrial levels. (The world has already warmed about 1.3 degrees Celsius.) Countries agreed to submit voluntary plans to reduce emissions and update them every five years.

Based on current pledges, the world is headed for global warming of somewhere around 2.7 degrees Celsius, or 4.9 degrees Fahrenheit. While that may sound like a small difference, scientists have said that every fraction of a degree brings greater risks from heat waves, wildfires, drought, storms and species extinction.

As countries have struggled to cut emissions, the U.N. talks have increasingly focused on the need for communities to protect themselves against impacts of a warmer planet that are now unavoidable.

Climate adaptation can include planting drought-resistant crops, elevating buildings to avoid floods or relocating communities away from coastlines. It might also include broader improvements to roads, power plants, hospitals and other facilities to help them withstand a range of disasters.

“Much of what countries need to address climate risk aren’t places where the private sector can get a clear return on their investment,” said Henry Neufeldt, a lead author of the U.N.’s adaptation report. “To raise the kind of finance needed, much of it has to come from the public sector.”

The report estimates that developing countries will need between $310 billion and $365 billion annually by 2035 to adapt to rising temperatures.

The question of how much rich countries should contribute has been a sticking point in international negotiations for years. Industrialized countries like the United States and European nations have historically pumped the most heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the air by burning coal, oil and gas, while developing countries in Africa and elsewhere have contributed little to the problem but suffer the most from climate disasters.

Four years ago, wealthy countries agreed to double the amount they gave for adaptation, to at least $40 billion annually by 2025. But the U.N. report finds that nations are likely to fall short. Adaptation aid from wealthy nations and development banks fell from $28 billion in 2022 to $26 billion in 2023, and there are few signs of a turnaround.

The Biden administration sought to deliver $3.1 billion in adaptation aid in 2023. But Mr. Trump, who has largely ignored global warming, has dismantled most climate aid programs.

The report did find some positive signs: At least 172 countries now have at least one national climate adaptation plan in place. Many nations have reduced the risk from weather disasters by adopting flood barriers, air-conditioning or early-warning systems for tropical cyclones. As a result, the number of global deaths from extreme weather events like floods, droughts and heat waves fell by roughly two-thirds between 1970 and 2021, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

Yet experts have warned that many nations are still adapting in reactive ways — such as by upgrading flood defenses after a fierce rainstorm — rather than pursuing far-reaching plans to prepare for hotter temperatures.

“The reality is simple,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program. “If we do not invest in adaptation now, we will face escalating costs every year.”

Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, had warned residents to brace for a “very difficult night” as Hurricane Melissa made landfall early Wednesday.

In the early morning hours, Cuba’s meteorological institute recorded about five inches of rain at the Contramaestre weather station in Santiago de Cuba, the country’s second-largest city and a major port on the southeast coast.

Guantánamo Bay, home to a U.S. military base, was also in the storm’s path. Over the weekend, the military hired four charter flights and sent a C-17 cargo plane that evacuated about 1,000 residents to Florida, some with their pets. About 3,000 residents remained at the base.

Mr. Díaz-Canel said on Tuesday night on social media that more than 735,000 people had been evacuated ahead of the storm’s arrival,

The storm is threatening to overwhelm the fragile infrastructure of Cuba, a nation that has battled a deepening economic crisis.

Power failures have frequently plunged the island into darkness in times without hurricanes. Blackouts were already occurring on Tuesday morning ahead of the storm’s arrival, according to Union Electrica, the national electricity company. On Tuesday afternoon, three provinces in the nation’s east, Granma, Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo, were disconnected from the national power grid, it said.

Eastern Cuba could still receive up to 20 inches of rain through Wednesday, with 25 inches expected in mountainous areas, forecasters said, warning of potentially catastrophic floods. The southeast coast could also see a life-threatening storm surge, of up to 12 feet, an abnormal rise in sea level above the predicted tides that is caused by the storm’s winds pushing water.

Unlike in Jamaica, where officials said far fewer people were in government shelters than the number they expected to be displaced, Cubans have evacuated en masse. In some rural lowland areas that are vulnerable to flooding, like Valle de Caujerí, Hatibonico and San Antonio del Sur, almost the entire population has fled.

Melissa will not hit Cuba as strongly as it did Jamaica, where it made landfall as one of the strongest Category 5 storms on record in the Atlantic. It weakened as it crossed over Jamaica but was regaining strength late Tuesday as it barreled toward Cuba and still producing 130 m.p.h. winds, forecasters said.

Carol Rosenberg and Adeel Hassan contributed reporting.

“We’re hoping to be able to do an assessment tomorrow, but as of right now, the reports that are coming in are catastrophic,” Daryl Vaz, the energy and transport minister, said in an interview with Sky News on Tuesday. “Not very much survives a Category 5 hurricane, in terms of infrastructure.”

The winds knocked down power and telecommunications lines, reducing internet connectivity in Jamaica to 30 percent of ordinary levels, according to Netblocks, which tracks network data.

Eastern parts of the island, including the capital, Kingston, were mostly undamaged by the storm’s strong winds and heavy rains, Mr. Vaz said.

In St. Elizabeth, the southwestern parish where Hurricane Melissa first struck the island, villages were decimated. Floyd Green, the agricultural minister and a member of Parliament for St. Elizabeth South Western, described the situation as a “complete disaster.”

“Entire buildings have collapsed,” he said, adding that he had heard reports of villages where “every single house is without a roof.”

Among them was a community in Malvern, a village where one woman said the roof had been entirely stripped from her brother’s home. The house had only just been fully repaired from Hurricane Beryl, which had ripped half the roof off last year.

The woman, who gave her name as Michelle, said she feared for the safety of her only child, who works as a nurse in Black River Hospital, along the coast. That hospital lost power during the hurricane, Health and Wellness Minister Dr. Christopher Tufton said in an interview with Radio Jamaica 94 FM.

Norman Manley International Airport, which serves Kingston, will probably be able to receive emergency relief flights as soon as Thursday, Mr. Vaz said in a news briefing on Tuesday.

But Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay, on the north side of the island, may have suffered “potential disabling impact,” he said, without providing details. The airports are central to the economy of the nation of two million, which depends on tourism for a third of its annual revenue. Many vacationers have been stranded in Jamaica since airports were closed in the days leading up to the storm.

The authorities are considering using the smaller Ian Fleming International Airport, east of Montego Bay, to bring in relief goods bound for the north, Mr. Vaz added.

Three bridges were flooded and several roads were impassable, according to the National Works Agency. More than 51,000 people were without electricity, mostly in the western and central regions, Mr. Vaz said in a briefing on Tuesday.

Starlink, the satellite internet provider owned by Elon Musk, will provide free service in Jamaica until November, Mr. Vaz said.

Prime Minister Andrew Holness declared a disaster on the island on Tuesday. At least three people died during preparations for the hurricane’s arrival, but so far, the authorities have not confirmed any additional casualties.

Camille Williams contributed reporting from Kingston, Jamaica.