PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior mul­ti­me­dia re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Trinidad and To­ba­go is in dan­ger of fac­ing in­creased ex­port costs to the Unit­ed King­dom as a re­sult of the pend­ing im­ple­men­ta­tion of the UK Car­bon Ad­just­ment Mech­a­nism (CBAM).

On Thurs­day, a re­port en­ti­tled ‘UK Car­bon Ad­just­ment Mech­a­nism: Im­pli­ca­tions for Trinidad and To­ba­go’ was of­fi­cial­ly launched at the res­i­dence of the British High Com­mis­sion­er in Mar­aval.

British High Com­mis­sion­er to Trinidad and To­ba­go, Jon Dean, said the move was not meant to be harm­ful to T&T or any of the UK’s trade part­ners, but it was a nec­es­sary step to­wards ad­dress­ing car­bon emis­sions around the world.

“This is a re­port that speaks to the fu­ture, not just of trade, but of cli­mate ac­tion, the fu­ture of part­ner­ship and the fu­ture of shared re­spon­si­bil­i­ty as we move for­ward in our cli­mate jour­ney to­geth­er. One of the tools we are ex­plor­ing is the car­bon bor­der ad­just­ment mech­a­nism, or CBAM,” said the High Com­mis­sion­er. “This mech­a­nism is de­signed to en­sure that our cli­mate goals are re­flect­ed in the way we trade by align­ing car­bon costs across bor­ders and pre­vent­ing car­bon leak­age. It’s a step to­wards more sus­tain­able glob­al econ­o­my. We recog­nise that poli­cies like the se­cret may have broad­er im­pli­ca­tions, and in par­tic­u­lar for close part­ners such as Trinidad and To­ba­go.”

The re­port not­ed that T&T’s ex­port pro­file fea­tures sev­er­al items, such as iron and steel, fer­tilis­ers and in­or­gan­ic chem­i­cals, which fall un­der the scope of the mech­a­nism giv­en the car­bon emis­sions re­lat­ed to those in­dus­tries.

Dr Preeya Mo­han, who is one of the co-au­thors of the re­port, not­ed that T&T is al­ready im­pact­ed by a CBAM im­posed by the Eu­ro­pean Union, but she stat­ed there are dif­fer­ences be­tween the UK CBAM and the EU CBAM in terms of prod­uct scope and car­bon-con­tent cal­cu­la­tion.

She said, “We’re go­ing to face in­creased costs from both CBAMs. So our im­ports are go­ing to be more cost­ly as we ex­port to the UK and the EU, based on the car­bon con­tent of our prod­ucts. It’s go­ing to af­fect the tax that we face if our ex­ports are go­ing to be more ex­pen­sive.”

She ex­plained that apart from the in­creased ex­port costs, T&T would in­cur ad­min­is­tra­tive costs re­quired for the record­ing of emis­sions, which would be manda­to­ry un­der the arrange­ment, but she said there could be co­op­er­a­tion with the UK to help mit­i­gate the im­pact.

“En­gage with the UK so that there is di­rect and hon­est com­mu­ni­ca­tion, there is the shar­ing of tech­ni­cal ca­pac­i­ty, the shar­ing of fi­nan­cial re­sources so we are able to de­car­bonise, we are able to im­ple­ment our MRV (Mea­sure­ment, Re­port­ing, and Ver­i­fi­ca­tion) sys­tems and so we can re­duce the bur­den of the UK CBAM and CBAMs in gen­er­al but re­al­ly de­car­bonise our sec­tors,” said Mo­han.

The British High Com­mis­sion pro­vid­ed fund­ing for the re­port, which al­so re­vealed sug­gest­ed mea­sures to min­imise the im­pact of the pol­i­cy through col­lab­o­ra­tive ef­forts.