RYAN BA­CHOO

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

Prime Min­is­ter of An­tigua and Bar­bu­da and Cari­com chair­man Gas­ton Browne has urged Caribbean lead­ers in­clud­ing Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley to let go of the fear of reper­cus­sions and pur­sue a le­gal path to cli­mate change fund­ing. Browne made the call dur­ing the fi­nal show of COP26 - Now or Nev­er on CNC3 on Fri­day night.

His gov­ern­ment has formed a com­mis­sion on cli­mate change based on in­ter­na­tion­al law seek­ing to in­tro­duce a le­gal path­way to com­ple­ment the vol­un­tary ef­forts of large pol­lut­ing coun­tries to be­come legal­ly re­spon­si­ble for their emis­sions. Tu­valu, an in­de­pen­dent is­land in the South Pa­cif­ic, was one of the ear­ly signees but the An­tigua prime min­is­ter called for sup­port clos­er to home.

“We do not be­lieve we can de­pend ex­clu­sive­ly on their ran­dom acts of char­i­ty when­ev­er our coun­tries suf­fer the ad­verse ef­fects of cli­mate. They must be made to pay,” he said of high pol­lut­ing na­tions.

In his ad­dress at the COP26 Sum­mit in Glas­gow on No­vem­ber 1, Browne told the world: “The dif­fer­ence be­tween small is­land de­vel­op­ing states and in­dus­tri­alised na­tions is the ca­pac­i­ty to re­spond. It takes a sin­gle storm a few hours to de­stroy the econ­o­my and in­fra­struc­ture of an en­tire small is­land state which lacks the nec­es­sary fi­nan­cial and oth­er re­sources to re­bound and re­build.”

Browne said re­gion­al lead­ers must take a stand and not act out of fear that the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty will vic­timise them.

He ex­plained: “I have to tell you that I’m a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ed that none of my col­leagues with­in the Cari­com re­gion would have vol­un­teered so far to join but I re­main hope­ful that they will be­cause if we do not have this type of har­monised ap­proach in de­fend­ing our in­ter­ests and to utilise all the tools avail­able to us, in­clud­ing the le­gal tools, in or­der to ag­i­tate for change, then ob­vi­ous­ly we will be over­looked and the large pol­luters will ig­nore in­ter­est.

“They will con­tin­ue to prej­u­dice our de­vel­op­ment and leave us on the mar­gins of glob­al de­vel­op­ment. We can­not af­ford to be lead­ers who are in­ac­tive, and who may be afraid of our own shad­ow, and who may be afraid of pos­si­ble reper­cus­sions.”

Browne said it is not on­ly an is­sue of moral­i­ty but of law in which they should be made legal­ly to pay as the Caribbean can’t “re­ly ex­clu­sive­ly on these vol­un­tary ef­forts”.

He added: “If we are go­ing to re­ly ex­clu­sive­ly on these vol­un­tary ef­forts, we are pret­ty sure we will not achieve the ob­jec­tive of 1.5, and if we don’t achieve that goal then our own civil­i­sa­tion will be in per­il.”

While the economies of T&T, Guyana and Suri­name are heav­i­ly de­pen­dent on oil and gas, the car­bon foot­print of small is­land de­vel­op­ing states ac­counts for one per cent of the world’s green­house gas emis­sions. T&T is one of the high­est emit­ters of CO2 per capi­ta and was sec­ond glob­al­ly in 2019 ac­cord­ing to the World Bank’s Glob­al Car­bon Project.

Browne chair­man has urged heads of these gov­ern­ments to take ad­van­tage of the fos­sil fu­el era while it lasts.

Asked what he would tell lead­ers of these coun­tries, Browne re­spond­ed: “Max­imise your prof­its now that there’s a win­dow that they can con­tin­ue to burn their fos­sil fu­el en­er­gy and use those pro­ceeds to di­ver­si­fy their economies as soon as pos­si­ble... We know that they’ll be around for at least an­oth­er three decades and that’s suf­fi­cient time for them to de­vel­op suf­fi­cient sur­plus­es that they can di­ver­si­fy in­to oth­er sec­tors in­clud­ing tourism.”

With ris­ing sea lev­els threat­en­ing beach­es and coast­lines across the re­gion, Browne ad­mit­ted the Caribbean needs to start re­think­ing how it does tourism.

“When you look at the lack of ad­e­quate com­mit­ments, we may well have to fo­cus on adap­ta­tion to try and adapt to these ef­fects, but again, adap­ta­tion meth­ods will take a sig­nif­i­cant amount of fi­nanc­ing,” he said.

The mul­ti­mil­lion-dol­lar in­dus­try will come un­der enor­mous strain as glob­al tem­per­a­tures soar with coast­lines erod­ing and warm­ing wa­ters be­com­ing less of a home for many of the re­gion’s species.

Browne added: “There is now a need for us to di­ver­si­fy our tourism prod­uct and to make the ex­ist­ing prod­uct more re­silient. Most of our prop­er­ties are on the beach but we may have to look at tak­ing some of these prop­er­ties in the fu­ture in­land so that we don’t find our­selves in a sit­u­a­tion where all our beach prop­er­ties are even­tu­al­ly made in­vi­able and we can­not sus­tain a tourism prod­uct.”

He fur­ther stat­ed that the Caribbean will have to re­think how it builds hous­es and oth­er build­ings to pro­tect against ris­ing sea lev­els and vi­o­lent storms. Elec­tric ca­bles will now have to go un­der­ground.

Browne wants to see a to­tal Caribbean ap­proach as op­posed to in­di­vid­ual is­lands mov­ing for­ward while oth­ers are left be­hind. He was hap­py the mes­sag­ing from Cari­com lead­ers at COP26 car­ried a sim­i­lar tone.

“I would say for COP26 we achieved a har­monised mes­sag­ing. In fact, all of the heads spoke about these com­mon themes about achiev­ing 1.5 for large emit­ters to cut their emis­sions, to re­move fos­sil fu­el sub­si­dies then at the same time to ac­cel­er­ate the tran­si­tion in­to green en­er­gy ap­pli­ca­tions as well as pro­vid­ing ad­e­quate fund­ing to fa­cil­i­tate the tran­si­tion in­to green en­er­gy,” he said.

He ad­mit­ted it wasn’t by chance that be­fore the con­fer­ence in Glas­gow, Cari­com held a meet­ing of heads to form a com­mon mes­sage as op­posed to pre­vi­ous con­fer­ences when they went their sep­a­rate ways.