By: Staff Writer
November 5, 2021
A United Nations Ambassador has called out the international community for their failure to heed the call of small island developing states from 1989 on the dangers of sea level rise and wider climate change matters.
Walton Webson, Antigua and Barbuda’s permanent representative to the UN, speaking on a panel at the COP26 Summit, said: “The small island states made this plea many years ago. The first affirmative call for climate action was made by the small islands at the conference on sea level rise back in 1989.
“It drew the world’s attention to the fact that global temperatures could rise by 1.2 degrees by 2030. Emphasizing the need for global action, we called at that time upon all states to take immediate and effective measures to control limit and reduce greenhouse emissions and to consider ways and means of protecting the small states of the world that were most vulnerable.”
The call remains the same for small island states and it has intensified said Ambassador Webson, who urged the audience to intensify the state of urgency in the face of the international community’s failure to address the pressing issue of climate change in the last three decades since making the initial call to do so.
The report, “AR6 Climate Change 2021:The Physical Science Basis,” produced by the UN back in August, was the forerunner to this year’s COP26 conference. The report, hailed as the single most important climate change report, laid out the consequences for inaction on climate change and detailed how and why humans are at fault for the rise in temperatures now and linked it directly to carbon emissions.
That report noted that agricultural and ecological drought events as highly likely within the next 10 to 50 years for the Caribbean and Central American countries in addition to the global temperature rising to 1.5 degrees C by the year 2040 if action is not taken today.
Juan Pablo Bonilla, manager of the IDB’s Climate Change and Sustainable Development Sector, added: “I think the priority is to integrate management of climate risk and disasters with the agenda of adaptation and resiliency.”
He added: “How can we innovate from our financing mechanisms, our lending and other instruments to integrate climate disaster, with the role of biodiversity and nature, as part of the resiliency that we need to be at the national level, at the sub national level.”
Integrating the new economic model built around renewable energy is the largest problem to changing behaviour on fossil fuel consumption. Most renewable energy technology is just not ready for mass use in terms of powering small suburban towns, let alone the mega cities of today.
In addition, most of the technological expertise in producing energy works for the large fossil fuel companies who have a very strong lobby in almost all countries. Anything that jeopardizes the way in which energy is produced will be strongly attacked and depressed.
The gospel of integration and adaptation is not lost on them, however as large companies like BP and Shell have already begun to diversify their business models to incorporate renewable energy technologies to embrace a new and cleaner world.
Clearly this is not enough as the world is in desperate need for more action right now. Every year the hurricanes in the Tropics get stronger and stronger and one year in the not so distant future we expect some of our islands to be underwater.
What will it take for the large corporations and the major governments that support them to stop?