If both the climate crisis and the pandemic have taught us one thing it is that we are mistaken if we believe, as Barbados PM Mia Mottley put it, that “national solutions can solve global problems.”
In other words, the best advice is to avoid self-delusion, after
having conceded that there indeed exists an existential threat to our survival as
a sovereign small island state. We cannot do this alone. A long view of history
would speak of the decimation, through a variety of different circumstances, of
grand empires occupying infinitely larger geographical spaces than ours.
Unfortunately, there are those who walk among us who don’t
share such a belief. They emerge from the swamp of ignorance from time to time.
This pandemic period is one example. But climate change scepticism is of more
durable vintage and at the core is a lack of belief in science.
I have seen, for instance, social media challenges to the
value of a T&T presence in Glasgow alongside key AOSIS and Small Island
Developing States (SIDS) allies on the grounds of some kind of retreat from
domestic reality.
Such doubt also exists in the pregnant silence of opinion-leaders
fresh from campaigns of COVID denial, resistance to pandemic measures and tacit
promotion of vaccine hesitancy. To them, climate change scepticism is not that
remote a concept.
We would also do well to recognise unequal international status,
whatever our grandiose self-assessment. The fact is, at the root of much of the
discussions and negotiations in Glasgow today, are the disproportionate levels
of victimisation involving the wealthy and powerful, as opposed to the small
and the under-resourced.
These important differentials lie at the heart of some
important but highly problematic instruments designed by the global community
to mitigate further damage and deterioration in areas such as the Caribbean.
For example, access to climate financing is now linked,
since the Paris Agreement of 2015, to nationally determined contributions
(NDCs) to fighting climate change. Following a programme of serious work, an
indicative version of this has been prepared by T&T and others for the
current conference.
The G20 Leaders’ Summit in Rome ahead of Monday’s COP26 inaugural
session however side-stepped key issues including a clear deadline for net zero
carbon emissions, and basically agreed (having previously failed to do so) to
raise US$100 billion to help fund mitigation efforts in countries such as ours.
PM Mottley thinks this is far less than what is required or even possible.
The problem is continued delays in prompt action belie the
fact that the processes of nature set in train, now undeniably through human
activity, are already considered to be irreversible. The urgent goal of capping
the rise in global temperatures to no more than 1.5% over current levels in
order to “stay alive” is an increasingly unreachable target.
The existence of an Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) however
indicates acceptance of the fact that we cannot do this on our own, and that
there are fellow travellers in whom there exist key commonalities.
As co-author of a Caribbean journalism handbook on “the
climate crisis”, I have also been warned of the “alarmist” impact of employment
of the word “crisis.” Well, dear friends, if climate change does not constitute
an unfolding crisis for countries that are small, surrounded by the ocean, and still
engaged in finding feet of their own in the development process, then what is?
T&T/Jamaica scientist Dr Rebekah Shirley has offered a
menu of subjects for consideration by the AOSIS community. On the front burner,
she proposes, ought to be political efforts to prioritise negotiations on
adaptation, loss, and damage; commitments for blended forms of adaptation
finance; and consensus on a carbon market mechanism.
Countries such as ours also have a vested interest in moving
the developed world from elaborately expressed commitment to action. However, there
were mixed reviews out of Rome regarding the prospects for realisation of such
goals. This made the working sessions in Glasgow far more worthy of attention
than the impressive speeches.
My friend and ACM science advisor, Steve Maximay, often
advises against deployment of the “we go dead” approach. But the science may
well conclude that as small island states faltering in our aspirations for true
sovereignty, extinction is actually not a figuratively remote scenario.
