Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor - News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

The much-an­tic­i­pat­ed cli­mate change doc­u­men­tary, ‘Is­land Ac­tion, Glob­al Goals: Can the Glob­al Stock­take Change the Caribbean’s Cli­mate Fu­ture?’ is set to pre­miere on CNC3 on Sun­day at 8 pm.

The hour-long pro­gramme show­cas­es com­mu­ni­ties across dif­fer­ent Caribbean is­lands as they work to mit­i­gate and adapt to wors­en­ing cli­mate change im­pacts. CNC3 has part­nered with pro­duc­ers, Cli­mate An­a­lyt­ics Caribbean (CAC) for the pre­miere. Ahead of the pre­miere, CAC Di­rec­tor Ruean­na Haynes will of­fer a short pre­lude.

The doc­u­men­tary shows how peo­ple are striv­ing to ful­fil the goals of the Paris Agree­ment and bet­ter en­hance re­gion­al con­tri­bu­tions to ad­dress cli­mate change, in the con­text of the Glob­al Stock­take. The film demon­strates that Caribbean lead­er­ship ex­ists at all lev­els in the fight to en­sure the glob­al com­mu­ni­ty lim­its warm­ing to a 1.5°C in­crease above pre-in­dus­tri­al lev­els.

In T&T, the Bras­so Seco com­mu­ni­ty is pro­filed for its ef­forts to safe­guard agro­tourism, and the Na­tion­al Trust shared its ‘Keep­ing His­to­ry Above Wa­ter’ project to pro­tect her­itage sites from cli­mate change im­pacts such as sea lev­el rise.

In St Lu­cia, the film il­lus­trates how women ben­e­fit from the guid­ance of the He­len’s Daugh­ters or­gan­i­sa­tion on build­ing cli­mate re­silience. Young peo­ple from the At­las or­gan­i­sa­tion demon­strate an in­spir­ing de­gree of ser­vice with their ef­forts to boost wa­ter sup­ply in com­mu­ni­ties which have seen wa­ter lev­els di­min­ished by cli­mate change.

The film al­so takes view­ers on a jour­ney to Do­mini­ca where the Chief of the Kali­na­go in­dige­nous tribe de­scribes how Hur­ri­cane Maria dev­as­tat­ed the is­land and how his peo­ple aim to pro­tect them­selves and the land from wors­en­ing cli­mate change im­pacts.

Speak­ing ahead of the pre­miere of the film, Haynes told the Sun­day Guardian, “This is im­por­tant be­cause these are our sto­ries told by us as Caribbean peo­ple. I think we’re all aware that some­thing is dif­fer­ent with the cli­mate. Com­ing out of the Car­ni­val sea­son, I’ve heard so many peo­ple say­ing the heat was dif­fer­ent and we may need to change things so I think there is a gen­er­al aware­ness that the way we have to re­late to the cli­mate now is dif­fer­ent than it used to be.”

The film cen­tres around the Glob­al Stock­take, the first of which took place at COP28 in Dubai last De­cem­ber. The Glob­al Stock­take looks at every­thing re­lat­ed to where the world stands on cli­mate ac­tion and sup­port, iden­ti­fy­ing the gaps, and work­ing to­geth­er to agree on so­lu­tions path­ways to 2030 and be­yond.

She went fur­ther in ex­plain­ing why the doc­u­men­tary cen­tres around this, say­ing: “The Glob­al Stock­take is that mech­a­nism put in place to make sure that we are on track for meet­ing those goals and the mech­a­nism for us to un­der­stand if we are off track, how off track we are and to help us get back on track so all of that hap­pened last year at COP28 and this is the con­text against which we’ve done this doc­u­men­tary.”

Haynes is hop­ing the doc­u­men­tary in­forms both peo­ple and pol­i­cy­mak­ers. She added: “I hope peo­ple take away from this a sense of ac­tu­al hope, that not all is lost. We hear a lot on the news about the doom and gloom as­so­ci­at­ed with cli­mate change and the cli­mate cri­sis and it is some­thing we need to take very se­ri­ous­ly but there are ac­tions that can be tak­en by us as in­di­vid­u­als and by gov­ern­ments. But, even the small­est ac­tions will count.”