Just transition questions

Today’s packed public affairs agenda can have the impact of shattering the desire for unifocal attention. At the top resides continued parliamentary consideration, via the Senate this time, and public commentary on the contentious Special Operations Bill.

Yet, the timeline for this submission and its publication today undermines a desire to be thorough and to capture a vast and growing variety of perspectives.

These include my concerns about the secure practice of journalism, and the impact on the creative sector by less than thoughtful application of constitutional derogations. More, next week. I promise.

Alongside this, there is at least one other significant event. Our Prime Minister and her delegation are currently in New York attending the 81^st Session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

The Prime Minister’s meeting with Venezuela’s acting President, Delcy Rodríguez, should provide a nice photo-op and produce the usual bland foreign ministry communiqué, while avoiding mention of the Venezuelan map showing claimed Guyanese territory that she wore as a pin when she arrived in New York. The PM, based on her prior utterances, should take public note of this.

We should also be minded that while special attention justifiably turns to the General Debate – which began yesterday – there are, typically, several other concurrent events with the potential to sharpen focus on the platitudes of the main stage.

UNGA 2026

We would do well, for example, to regard today’s UNGA’s High-Level Meeting (HLM) on Climate Action and the Just Transition as one of the more important events.

Its significance lies in the opportunity to move beyond broad declarations and confront a difficult question: How can developing countries reconcile climate obligations with the equally urgent demands of economic development?

That precise question was explored by Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar in her address to the 80th UNGA last year. I believe her rather contentious pronouncements on the “force-feeding” of the climate agenda and “blackmail” by the developed world did not attract the critical dissection they deserved.

Later on, at COP30 in Belém last November, Planning Minister Kennedy Swaratsingh was not exactly on message (as per UNGA 80) when he argued that “ambition alone is not enough” and that the transition to a low-carbon future (my words) must take centre stage.

He called for predictable, accessible, and adequate climate finance to bridge the gap between ambition and implementation.

The Prime Minister’s more combative, and therefore instructive argument had been that national climate policies must balance development and poverty eradication with environmental protection.

She also maintained that fossil fuels remain essential to contemporary economies. The PM may as well have been referencing the dilemmas of not only T&T, but the energy market’s regional newcomers, Suriname and Guyana.

For, though their economic circumstances are different they too confront the complicated interface involving hydrocarbons, development, and the international drive towards decarbonisation.

The HLM thus provides an opportunity to turn that dilemma into a more substantive Caribbean conversation. I hope Monday’s meeting of the Caricom Council for Foreign and Community Relations (COFCOR) did not leave this subject abegging, even if geopolitical neglect dominated.

The Concept Note on the HLM acknowledges that initial ambitions aimed at containing global emissions to below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels are more likely to be “overshot” with a trajectory tending in the direction of 2°C.

At the global level, if we subscribe to scientifically supported “anthropogenic” human triggers (some flat earthers even here in T&T do not), this calls for accelerated execution, adaptation, resilience, increased renewable energy (not idle solar farms), and substantially greater access to affordable finance.

But implementation is precisely where the argument becomes complicated. Swaratsingh had pointed to measures being pursued by T&T, including electric vehicles in the public sector, solar water heating, exploration of green hydrogen, and emerging carbon markets.

He had stressed that the transition must be fair and just, while protecting workers and vulnerable communities and creating new economic opportunities.

Taken together, these positions suggest that the Caribbean debate need not be framed as climate action versus development.

The more useful question is what a genuinely “just transition” means for economies whose development has been or is about to be closely connected to fossil fuels.

How quickly can such economies diversify without jeopardising employment, government revenues, and energy security? How can they finance the transition when capital remains expensive? And who should bear the costs when developing countries are being asked to transform their economies?

These are not arguments against climate action. They are questions about the conditions under which climate action in our neck of the woods can realistically succeed.