The year for Climate Change

The year for Climate Change
Guyana Chronicle Editorial, 19 January 2008
Last year saw a phenomenal surge in the popularity of climate change
issues, on the local as well as global levels. After years of fighting
an uphill battle to get their message out, those who have been sounding
the alarms over climate change can virtually just sit back and let the
weather speak for itself. The most significant victory of course was
the Nobel Prize awarded to former US Vice President Al Gore and the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Locally, the Jagdeo Initiative on Climate Change – with its generous
offer of Guyana's standing rainforests as a sort of global warming
insurance policy – underscored some bold initiatives on the local
front, one example being the formation of a National Climate Change
Committee.

Local commitment to fighting the effects of global warming cannot be
overstressed in a country, the majority of which population exists
along a coastal belt barely protected by an often porous stone wall;
and a significant portion of which economy is built on agricultural
activity on the coast as well.And while the effects of climate change
may be felt most profoundly on the coast, global warming has serious
implications for our inland areas as well – there truly is no safe zone
when every single factor is considered.

Regionally also, Guyana is increasingly tying its economic activities
into a framework – the CARICOM Single Market Economy – in which the
majority of the other members are small island developing states (SIDS)
vulnerable to the ravages of an increasingly hostile planet.The
devastation visited upon Grenada by Hurricane Ivan in 2004 is proof
enough of the effect that climate change can have on the region.The
generosity of Guyana's response, along with that of the rest of
CARICOM, in the wake of that disaster was indeed admirable but is not
something that can be sustained if global warming continues unabated.
We simply do not possess the sort of resources to be engaged in
constantly rebuilding.Indeed no one does, as the economic hardship
caused by Katrina's impact on the America city of New Orleans proves.

It is not simply a matter of throwing money at the problem.While the
amount of dollars available for disaster management and reconstruction
may be a factor in mitigating the effects of the devastation caused by
floods and hurricanes and whatever other way Nature manifests its
wrath, if the CO2 emissions which are the root causes of climate change
continue unchecked, there is going to come a time when humanity's
ability to deal with the effects of global warming will be overwhelmed
to the point where money is irrelevant.If the current patterns are
anything to judge by, that time may come sooner than later.