Ba­hamas Prime Min­is­ter Phillip Davis has called for ur­gent glob­al ac­tion to deal with the im­pact of cli­mate change, telling the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty “time has run out”.

In a state­ment to the Unit­ed Na­tions Cli­mate Change Con­fer­ence (COP 28) here, Davis said that while he was grate­ful that the record-high tem­per­a­tures ex­pe­ri­enced ear­li­er this year in his coun­try “ did not trans­late in­to a cat­a­stroph­ic hur­ri­cane sea­son,” trop­i­cal storms and de­pres­sions still hit the arch­i­pel­ago.

“They caused high lev­els of rain, ex­treme winds, wide­spread flood­ing, in­ter­rupt­ed our pow­er sup­ply and re­sult­ed in sig­nif­i­cant costs and lost rev­enue. Over the com­ing six months, be­fore the next ‘Hur­ri­cane Sea­son’ be­gins, we can use the time to strength­en our Na­tion­al Youth Guard.

“We can build more homes out of the ground-break­ing, car­bon-neg­a­tive, ocean-re­sis­tant con­crete pi­o­neered by a Ba­hami­an com­pa­ny, Par­tan­na, head­ed by en­tre­pre­neur Rick Fox.

We can al­so raise more fi­nance us­ing our Blue Car­bon Cred­its, backed by our ex­ten­sive un­der­wa­ter fields of sea­grass­es, which ab­sorb more car­bon than the Ama­zon Rain­for­est.”

Prime Min­is­ter Davis said that while these ac­tiv­i­ties will put “be­yond doubt and de­bate, that the prin­ci­ple has now been set­tled: “the pol­luter pays”, it has tak­en 30 years to agree that there should be a fund for ‘Loss and Dam­age’”.

He said in the 13 years since the pledge was made “we have not yet hit the orig­i­nal pledge goal of US$100 bil­lion per year.

“How long must we now wait to have this new fund cap­i­tal­ized? And how long must we wait be­fore we can ac­cess the funds? Time is a lux­u­ry we do not have. And so we are left won­der­ing how we should in­ter­pret the pledges of this COP."

“So lit­tle pledged, giv­en what is need­ed. So late in the day, giv­en what is fore­cast. Is the ef­fort here more to re­duce the ‘noise pol­lu­tion’ gen­er­at­ed by our ad­vo­ca­cy, rather than to ad­dress the ‘car­bon re­duc­tion and ‘cli­mate fi­nanc­ing’ so ur­gent­ly need­ed? Are we ex­pect­ed to re­main qui­et­ly grate­ful?"

“Frankly, we do not un­der­stand why every­one does not share our sense of ur­gency. Do­ing what is need­ed to help us, al­so helps you. Will you not act ur­gent­ly to save your­selves?”

Prime Min­is­ter Davis not­ed that the Ro­man Catholic Pope Fran­cis, re­cent­ly ex­hort­ed lead­ers to “demon­strate the no­bil­i­ty of pol­i­tics and not its shame”.

“But our truths re­main in­con­ve­nient and, to my mind, shame­ful. We still live in a world where fi­nanc­ing al­ways seems im­me­di­ate­ly avail­able for the bul­lets and the bombs. This is a choice."

“We still live in a world where nar­row eco­nom­ic in­ter­ests con­tin­ue to dri­ve an in­crease in the burn­ing of fos­sil fu­els. This is al­so a choice."

“But we have no choice. Our plight is not seen in the im­ages of women and chil­dren bleed­ing in the streets. Our plight is most­ly in­vis­i­ble: the slow­ly-warm­ing sea­wa­ter, slow­ly ris­ing up through our porous lime­stone is­lands. The slow­ly dy­ing coral, no longer able to sup­port the slow­ly-dy­ing fish."

“By the time our plight is made vis­i­ble for all to see, our luck will have run out. It will be too late. The storm will have passed. We can on­ly pray that there is some­thing left to see,” Prime Min­is­ter Davis told the del­e­gates, adding “friends: we sim­ply want to live”.

DUBAI, Dec 3, CMC – 

CMC/ad/nhb/2023