By: Staff Writer
August 19, 2022
The Caribbean Regional Heads of Government Meeting in preparation for COP27, held on August 17-18 in The Bahamas, highlighted the need to focus on decarbonisation and get the “culprits” or high carbon outputs to somehow stop.
Prime Minister of The Bahamas, Philip Davis, QC, said at the closing press conference for the meeting that apart of the advocacy part of the meeting and that: “our region and at the conference, decarbonisation is key and our contribution to carbon is very minimal. And so it is for us to get the culprits in the high countries and the corporations that are emitting greenhouse gases into the air to stop somehow.
He added: “Right now there’s this issue with carbon credits and people offsetting their emissions by buying credits. But, the answer to all of that is we have to ensure that they still live up to their commitment to lower their carbon footprints and seek that to set it off.”
These comments came in the run up to the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, more commonly referred to as COP27 that will be the 27th United Nations Climate Change conference, to be held from 6 to 18 November 2022 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.
Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, also said that some things takes money and nothing can be done until financing has been set aside properly to deal with the mitigating factors that Caribbean countries face.
She also said: “The issuance of the Special Drawing Rights at the IMF that we’ve been talking about, and as I spoke about at Glasgow, ought to be made available, not in the exact way in which it is allocated, because the majority of those SDRs actually go to the developed world.
“But the countries that need it are in the developing world and therefore, the US Congress has been one of those entities that has not come to the issue of SDRs willingly.
“If we’re going to see an expansion of funding available, both to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and World Bank, whose original name also was the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. But where are we? Bahamas, and Barbados got to beg to be able to borrow for climate from the World Bank, because we’ve been graduated technically.”
Also at the press conference was the Prime Minister of Grenada, Dickon Mitchell and the Prime Minister of Dominica, Roosevelt Skerrit.
Mr Skerrit said: “Everyone our country is working on utilizing one form of renewable energy in Dominica. In this case, we are focusing heavily on geothermal and we don’t only have the capacity to supply our entire country with geothermal energy, but we can export as well. We have a capacity to build a three 400 megawatt plants that we could export to neighboring countries.”
Prime Minister Mitchell added: “When we talk about renewables or I call it alternative energy, which is of particular importance and relates back to the question of climate change. Even if you wanted to do solar panels, for example, these solar panels would be on rooftops and these rooftops can’t survive the hurricanes. That means you still face the same problem. So it means you have to get solar panels that are hurricane proof and assuming you could achieve that it means they will be more expensive than solar panels that would come in an environment that doesn’t have to worry about hurricanes.”
