Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor-News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

In the Caribbean’s quest for cli­mate jus­tice and in­ter­na­tion­al aware­ness, Dr James Fletch­er has long been a key voice for this re­gion. With­in the cli­mate cir­cles, the St Lu­cian is a pop­u­lar fig­ure in T&T and one whose knowl­edge is sec­ond to none.

This past week, as the Fourth In­ter­na­tion­al Con­fer­ence on Small Is­land De­vel­op­ing States (SIDS4) took place in An­tigua and Bar­bu­da, Dr Fletch­er re­flect­ed on the last decade. Ten years ago, he was part of the third SIDS meet­ing in Samoa which pre­sent­ed the Samoa Path­way. “It was a beau­ti­ful doc­u­ment,” he re­count­ed dur­ing a con­ver­sa­tion on CNC3’s The Big In­ter­view. “Here we are ten years lat­er, and if we are to look back on what we were able to achieve from the Samoa Path­way–that very com­pre­hen­sive doc­u­ment on how SIDS, as they called it, ac­cel­er­at­ed modal­i­ties of ac­tion–we haven’t achieved any­where near what we set out to and what we were op­ti­mistic about achiev­ing in Samoa. That has very lit­tle to do with SIDS.”

In­stead, he said it has a lot to do with the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty and the sup­port that is ex­pect­ed to be pro­vid­ed af­ter the SIDS con­fer­ences.

The cost of in­ac­tion

Dr Fletch­er is a for­mer St Lu­cia min­is­ter with re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for Pub­lic Ser­vice, Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment, En­er­gy, Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy. In be­tween the SIDS meet­ings in Samoa and An­tigua and Bar­bu­da, the weath­er pat­terns across the Caribbean have be­come more rad­i­cal. Over the last year, many parts of the re­gion faced harsh dry sea­sons and droughts. Oth­er parts such as An­tigua and Bar­bu­da and St Kitts were un­der reg­u­lar flood warn­ings.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia in May, Dr Fletch­er called it the “va­garies of the weath­er” and how it can in­ten­si­fy oth­er­wise la­tent is­sues. He said the ex­treme weath­er con­di­tions that are af­fect­ing the Caribbean at present “is the cost of in­ac­tion.”

Dr Fletch­er said, “This is the cost of ten years of missed op­por­tu­ni­ties. We adopt­ed the Paris Agree­ment in De­cem­ber 2015. We came out of there very op­ti­mistic that we fi­nal­ly have a plan and a very am­bi­tious agree­ment to save our plan­et. This is not a desk­top sim­u­la­tion. We are in the mid­dle of a full-blown cli­mate cri­sis. I don’t like to re­fer to it as cli­mate change any­more be­cause cli­mate change gives you the com­fort that this is grad­ual and we have time. We don’t have time.”

He said pay­ing at­ten­tion to the needs of SIDS is not some­thing that can on­ly be done every ten years. In call­ing for a spe­cial fo­cus on SIDS, he said there must be mon­ey com­mit­ted to the An­tigua and Bar­bu­da agen­da for small is­lands across the Caribbean and oth­er parts of the world like the Pa­cif­ic. “There must be a com­mit­ment by the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty to help­ing SIDS nav­i­gate these chal­lenges that are in front of them,” Dr Fletch­er said.

He went fur­ther in adding that Caribbean lead­ers need to el­e­vate this dis­cus­sion “to the point where we are not on­ly speak­ing cli­mate change around a COP (Con­fer­ence of Par­ties).”

Small is­lands are

stronger to­geth­er

Giv­en the lack of ac­tion from the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty to the plight of SIDS, Dr Fletch­er said unit­ed small is­lands can achieve much more than in­di­vid­u­al­ly. He said, “As a group of 30-plus na­tions, we have to get to­geth­er and use that voice and those num­bers that we have with­in the Unit­ed Na­tions sys­tem and in every sin­gle ne­go­ti­at­ing the­atre that we find our­selves to lob­by for what we need. We have to say if you want our sup­port for some­thing like a seat on the Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil, there are cer­tain things we need in re­turn. We have to use that strength.”

Fur­ther to that, Dr Fletch­er, who chaired the Cari­com Task Force on Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment and the Re­gion­al Co­or­di­nat­ing Com­mit­tee on Cli­mate Change, said lead­ers from around the re­gion need to add their voice to the cli­mate cri­sis on what­ev­er plat­form they have, and this goes be­yond prime min­is­ters.

He said, “Every sin­gle meet­ing that any leader from the SIDS com­mu­ni­ty at­tends, any min­is­ter from the SIDS com­mu­ni­ty, it could be tourism be­cause cli­mate change is im­pact­ing tourism, it could be health be­cause there are so many ways cli­mate change is im­pact­ing phys­i­cal and men­tal health, wa­ter, agri­cul­ture, we have to force this cli­mate change dis­cus­sion.”

It was Dr Fletch­er who pro­vid­ed the lead­er­ship that re­sult­ed in the de­vel­op­ment of the Caribbean’s ‘1.5 to Stay Alive’ civ­il so­ci­ety cam­paign in 2015, which built mo­men­tum in the lead-up to COP21. At the Paris COP, he was a mem­ber of a small group of min­is­ters cho­sen to help achieve con­sen­sus on the Paris Agree­ment, co-chair­ing the team that worked on the am­bi­tion and long-term tem­per­a­ture goal el­e­ments of the Paris Agree­ment.’

In 2020, he launched The Caribbean Cli­mate Jus­tice Project–an ini­tia­tive aimed at in­creas­ing civ­il so­ci­ety aware­ness of the im­pacts of cli­mate change and en­sur­ing that there are ap­pro­pri­ate re­spons­es at the na­tion­al, re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al lev­els to is­sues of cli­mate jus­tice and just tran­si­tions.

Dr Fletch­er in­sist­ed the voic­es of young peo­ple must not be left out of any dis­cus­sion sur­round­ing cli­mate change. He said, “Youths have to hold our feet to the fire and say we want to be part of these dis­cus­sions and ne­go­ti­a­tions be­cause you can’t be mak­ing de­ci­sions on our be­half. That’s what sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment is about–de­vel­op­ment that meets the needs of the present with­out com­pro­mis­ing the abil­i­ty of fu­ture gen­er­a­tions to meet their own needs. That is what we are do­ing. We are com­pro­mis­ing the abil­i­ty of fu­ture gen­er­a­tions to meet their own needs.”

‘This is not a wake-up call, it’s prob­a­bly the last call’

Af­ter a crip­pling dry sea­son, much of which saw com­mu­ni­ties across T&T be placed on wa­ter sched­ules to lim­it the use of wa­ter amid low­er­ing reser­voir lev­els, the rainy sea­son promis­es to be an event­ful one. This re­gion is look­ing at 23 pos­si­ble storms with around sev­en of those de­vel­op­ing as ma­jor hur­ri­canes. Dr Fletch­er main­tained that we in the Caribbean need to be aware of the im­pact of cli­mate change par­tic­u­lar­ly as it re­gards to fish­er­folk and farm­ers and their abil­i­ty to sup­ple­ment our needs.

“There are so many el­e­ments of sea lev­el rise, coastal ero­sion and cli­mate change that I don’t be­lieve we are not pay­ing any at­ten­tion to, not even suf­fi­cient at­ten­tion to. Cli­mate change is al­ready im­pact­ing every sin­gle sec­tor in the Caribbean and every as­pect of our lives in the Caribbean,” he said.

He be­lieves sea lev­el rise is gross­ly un­der­es­ti­mat­ed. “I don’t think we know what the lev­el of sea lev­el rise will be if these things con­tin­ue unchecked,” he said. Hav­ing au­thored the book, Gov­ern­ing in a Small Caribbean Is­land State, he al­so wrote a book on the Re­gion­al Strate­gic Ac­tion Plan for Gov­er­nance and Build­ing Cli­mate Re­silience in the Wa­ter Sec­tor in the Caribbean. Dr Fletch­er said while there are oil and gas-based economies in the re­gion such as T&T, Guyana and Suri­name, they ac­count for less than 0.2 per cent of glob­al green­house gas emis­sions, but it shouldn’t stop nor slow their en­er­gy tran­si­tion.

He in­sist­ed, “This SIDS con­fer­ence–I can’t even call it a wake-up call–it is prob­a­bly the last call we will have to do some­thing be­cause by the time the next SIDS con­fer­ence comes around in 2034, we won’t have the lux­u­ry of time any­more. The crises would have cas­cad­ed.”

As one of the peo­ple who played a crit­i­cal role in draft­ing the Paris Agree­ment, Dr Fletch­er is one of the au­thors of the Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Press book ‘Ne­go­ti­at­ing the Paris Agree­ment: The In­sid­er Sto­ries”. He has likened the warm­ing of the plan­et to a per­son who has a fever, “This plan­et is a bi­o­log­i­cal sys­tem. It’s not some­thing you can pre­dict with a desk­top with the strongest com­put­ing sys­tem that you have. If you are run­ning a fever in your body; if it runs for too long unchecked, or­gans start shut­ting down, and your kid­ney and liv­er and oth­er parts of your body start hav­ing all sorts of prob­lems. The plan­et is the same way. We have been run­ning a fever for a while, that fever is get­ting worse and as a re­sult of that fever we are see­ing dam­age to ter­res­tri­al and ecosys­tems and our weath­er sys­tems.”