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Friday, February 28, 2025

T&T 2nd worldwide for CO2 emissions 

by

1849 days ago
20200207

Ac­cord­ing to the World Bank’s Glob­al Car­bon Project 2019, the lat­est fig­ures for car­bon diox­ide emis­sions put T&T in sec­ond place world­wide.

Da­ta re­leased from the project on Jan­u­ary 30 gives sta­tis­tics for 2018 and shows that for T&T’s 1.4 mil­lion pop­u­la­tion, each per­son con­tributes 31.28 tonnes of CO2 emis­sions an­nu­al­ly.

The World Bank project mea­sures on­ly CO2 emis­sions and does not in­clude any emis­sions from land use or oth­er green­house gas­es.

Al­though those num­bers are alarm­ing, T&T has con­sis­tent­ly placed with­in the top ten con­trib­u­tors of CO2 over the last decade.

The top con­trib­u­tor for 2018 was Qatar- pro­duc­ing 37.97 tonnes per per­son.

CO2 emis­sions are re­spon­si­ble for glob­al warm­ing and cli­mate change.

Ac­cord­ing to NASA, glob­al warm­ing is the long-term heat­ing of Earth’s cli­mate sys­tem ob­served since the pre-in­dus­tri­al pe­ri­od (be­tween 1850 and 1900) due to hu­man ac­tiv­i­ties, pri­mar­i­ly fos­sil fu­el burn­ing, which in­creas­es heat-trap­ping green­house gas lev­els in Earth’s at­mos­phere.

NASA de­fines cli­mate change as the long-term change in the av­er­age weath­er pat­terns that have come to de­fine Earth’s lo­cal, re­gion­al and glob­al cli­mates.

Over the last sev­er­al years, T&T has been reel­ing from the ef­fects of cli­mate change, with more in­tense rain­fall lead­ing to more se­ri­ous flood­ing events, hot­ter tem­per­a­tures caus­ing bush fires to burn more in­tense­ly for longer pe­ri­ods of time, de­stroy­ing pre­cious for­est and ris­ing sea lev­els lead­ing to the de­struc­tion of our coast­lines.

Guardian Me­dia sat down with man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of IAMove­ment, Jonathan Bar­cant to dis­cuss the sta­tis­tics and what can be done to lessen T&T’s im­pact on the glob­al en­vi­ron­ment.

Bar­cant com­pared T&T”s emis­sions to that of oth­er coun­tries with oth­ers in the re­gion and those with much larg­er pop­u­la­tions.

“We emit about 40 mil­lion tonnes of CO2 an­nu­al­ly, that’s about 200 times the amount that Do­mini­ca emits or 30 times as much as Bar­ba­dos emits. Look at larg­er coun­tries like Kenya, T&T is emit­ting the same amount as about 115 mil­lion peo­ple in Kenya, but Kenya is on­ly 50 mil­lion peo­ple so we are emit­ting the same amount as two and a quar­ter Kenya’s,” Bar­cant said.

He ac­knowl­edged that the Gov­ern­ment has been try­ing to get on board with the glob­al ef­fort to stop glob­al warm­ing by launch­ing its Knowl­edge Man­age­ment Sys­tem (KMS) for the Mon­i­tor­ing, Re­port­ing and Ver­i­fi­ca­tion (MRV) sys­tem launched in 2019. The two sys­tems were in­tro­duced as part of ef­forts to meet the re­quire­ments of the Unit­ed Na­tions Paris agree­ment on cli­mate change. The Paris Agree­ment, adopt­ed by the UN in 2015 and signed by a num­ber of mem­ber states since then, stip­u­lates that coun­tries must con­trib­ute to the glob­al re­duc­tion of an­thro­pogenic (man-made) green­house gas­es that cause glob­al warm­ing.

The Paris Agree­ment seeks to re­strict glob­al tem­per­a­ture rise to 2 de­grees Cel­sius above pre-in­dus­tri­al lev­els with as­pi­ra­tions to fur­ther re­strict it to 1.5 de­grees Cel­sius.

T&T signed on to the agree­ment in 2018.


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