Author: Keith Nichols
The last decade should have been a wake-up call for the entire world, with temperatures extending their boundaries beyond both ends of the mercury scale and record highs on an ever surprising but not unanticipated upward trajectory. The mantra of 1.5˚C to stay alive is now possibly relegated to the annals of climate change. Why, you may ask? An article by Siladitya Ray (Feb 8th, 2024 Forbes Business) quotes the Deputy Director of the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) as saying “Earth just experienced 12 months of Global Temperatures above the critical 1.5°C Climate Threshold.” The significance of this statement is grounded in the revelation that according to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), on November 17, 2023, the average global temperature exceeded 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, as set by the Paris Agreement. To crown this all off, records indicate that January 2024 was the hottest January on record ever, “continuing the dire streak of record global temperatures after 2023 was confirmed to be the hottest year ever by climate scientists from the European Union. This grim picture only gets worse after researchers from the University of Western Australia Oceans Institute in a new paper suggest that “the world might have blown past that threshold four years ago.”
This is the stage on which the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) drives resilience-building ambitions across the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) landscape, an unenviable stage by any means. At the same time, obtaining timely financing to strengthen economies requires navigating slow and bureaucratic systems that prioritize thoroughness over practicality. Unfortunately, this often means that urgent requests for support in building resilience are not addressed in a timely manner. Yet the CCCCC has and continues to be innovative in navigating the climate financing landscape focusing on capacity-building pursuits and real-time investments in hard and soft transformative projects and programmes across the CARICOM space.
The emphasis of the Water Sector Resilience Nexus for Sustainability (WSRN-S) and the R’s (Reduce, Reuse and Recycle) for Climate Resilience Wastewater Systems, both in Barbados, and valued at close to one hundred million US dollars represent the magnitude of the investments and approaches that must be secured if the region is to adapt to the ravages of a rapidly changing planet. Water remains the most critical component of our existence and with impending drier conditions in the projections for the region, much greater emphasis must be placed on the management of these resources. The call for multi-million, multi-year projects at scale is the only solution to addressing the climate threats to the existence of the small and fragile economies of the region. The guidance provided by CARICOM Heads in its vision for a sustainable future issued in the Liliendaal Declaration on Climate Change and Development (2009), its Strategy – the Revised Regional Framework for Achieving Development Resilient to Climate Change and its Implementation Plan (2024), together with the CCCCC’s fit-for-purpose Strategic and Implementation Plan (SIP), go a long way towards framing the resilience building aspirations for the region. Those expectations and ambitions, however, must be fueled by the appropriate volume of finances in the short and long term if we are to survive into the next decade, at the rate the world is changing.
