By: Staff Writer
June 11, 2021
A University of the West Indies (UWI) lecturer in international business said that the “new model” for businesses coming out of the COVID-19 lockdowns must be climate change focused.
Ayanna Young-Marshall, professor in international business at UWI, Cave Hill, speaking on a panel hosted by the Caribbean Literary Conference (CARICON) said that despite being a professor in business at the UWI, she became interested in climate change after having endured Tropical Storm Thomas in October, 2009 where she said “the roof of my house was removed by the storm.”
She also said:“So from there because of my work in entrepreneurship, we have tried to emphasize that resilience must be at the heart of business endeavours that are conceptualized and expanded and so forth. So it was a personal and informing a professional experience,” for her in gearing her focus on climate change matters.
She added that lessons learned from the COVID-19 lockdowns have impressed upon her the need to focus on the “new model” for expansion and start-ups now that economies around the region have been “decimated” by the COVID-19 pandemic and that is climate change focused.
She also said that she loves now that the younger generation live in an environment where they constantly have to respond to these climate issues and this would make them more in tune with the seriousness of the matter. Unlike her generation where they reacted in wide spaces and time, the information and impact on climate change is right in front of young people now despite them being “scary considerations.”
Not so scary a consideration anymore is the Sargassum that Ms Young-Marshall says can be transformed into a health benefit as it can be used for medicines and also beauty treatments.
The Sargassum seaweed is a recurring problem in the Atlantic-Caribbean since 2011. That year, enormous mats of the algae started brewing farther south, in the central Atlantic, eventually washing onto beaches on the eastern and southern coasts of many Caribbean islands.
By 2018, the mats had grown into the largest macroalgae bloom in recorded history, an 8,850 km long mass extending from the central Atlantic and Caribbean Sea to West Africa and the Gulf of Mexico. Chunks of Sargassum, circulated by ocean currents, now regularly wash ashore in the Caribbean, where they rot on the beaches, giving off a strong, sulfurous stench.
Diana McCauley, award winning author and environmentalist,) on the other hand said that she became interested in climate change matters and the environment in general when she saw some of the things she knew as a young woman in Jamaica slowly eroding. She said from that point on she made it a point to champion environmental causes.
Jamaican born climate champion, Dainalyn Swaby, a communications specialist by profession, said she was able to transition full time into climate change matters after having worked on a USAID funded project in Jamaica that “operated across several sectors in Jamaica.”
She added that we must blend culture with climate change so that young people can have an appreciation for the seriousness of the environment at hand.
Judith Falloon-Reid, author and explorer along with being the first Jamaican woman to explore Antarctica, said that the film she produced about her Antarctic trip made her “beliefs” in the climate change fight “even stronger,” as she always had an affection for the environment, through her being an outdoors type of person growing up on the beach in Montego Bay.