Caribbean: Q&A: Caught up in the opportunities of climate change and less so with adaptation
By Desmond Brown
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Inter Press Service (IPS): What is the state of early warning systems in the Caribbean?
Ronald Jackson (RJ) [Executive Director of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency]: We are trying to implement interventions around an integrated early warning systems agenda in all our 18 states by 2024, which is the sort of end cycle of this particular strategy. We’ve broken that up into bite size amounts from the point of view of how we are going to try to attract investments at a specific juncture over the life of that strategy, but by 2024 certainly to address the needs of the 18 [Caribbean Community] CARICOM member states as it relates to integrated people-centred early warning systems.
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IPS: What, if anything, would you like to see countries do differently?
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You can reduce the cost of energy, allowing you to release additional resources into areas of resilience building—one of which is early warning. But the area which is categorised as adaptation in climate change, which is where you will see people use the language more around risk reduction and prevention, is an area that has not gotten the same level of focus as the climate mitigation aspect which is where you look at clean energy, reductions of emissions and so on. That for us is where the greatest threat is. The human security element of climate change is where we should be focusing heavily because we’re talking about people being displaced. You’re talking about floods, you’re talking about the loss of livelihoods. That’s where the greatest threat for Caribbean Small Island Developing States (SIDS), and in fact any developing island nation, lies. They have to face the challenge of having limited land masses and resources and having that constantly being impacted by the changing climatic conditions—sea level rise, saline intrusion, water scarcity, flood conditions and other environmental and health related issues—all aligned to climate change.
IPS: Given the challenges Caribbean countries have been facing, could it be that there still exist some misconception regarding adaptation?
RJ: As it relates to adaptation, we seem to think a lot of the interventions required are new. They are not new, we’ve been grappling with those things that are packaged under the theme of adaptation for some time. These are largely programme areas at national level which if you look at the analysis they have never, in my mind, in the last 20 years or decade or so received very strong budget allocations. That’s what the analysis is showing us. There could be a lot of questions or reasoning around that. It could be how countries determine what are the main priorities of the day given the limited resources and the fiscally strangling environment in which they are operating.
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