FIRING LINE: Climate dangers looming

I had the opportunity last week to attend a regional meeting on sustainable development for Small Island Developing States (SIDS). It is a mouthful but basically it was about formulating a plan for dealing with the impact of the damage that we have done to the environment. 
At the meeting, we heard that some countries will lose as much as ten per cent of their land mass; and that the Caribbean will suffer increased temperatures, decreased rainfall, increased hurricane intensity, and lose billions of dollars in Gross Domestic Product. In essence, imagine the sun getting much hotter than it is now, increased water outages, greater hurricane damage and more economic losses to add to already growing budget deficits. Depressing indeed!
For Barbados, the actual dollar figure will run into the billions of dollars from losses in tourism, agriculture and infrastructure repair.
Most of us already know some of the basics of what is happening even if we do not know all the fancy terms and scientific names used. You cannot go anywhere without someone complaining about how hot the sun is and how unseasonal the rain is falling. If you are a farmer, you would also notice that crops are growing out of season, yields are becoming smaller, natural water supplies are drying up, and rainfall is becoming more and more unpredictable. The fancy name for all that is climate change.
I do understand that for most of us, appreciating the air we breathe, water we drink and land we live off hardly factors into the hustle and bustle of our daily lives. After all, it is hard to stop and smell the roses if you do not even notice them. Why should we? It is apparently the Barbados Water Authority which is responsible for making sure we have water, the National Conservation Commission for taking care of the beaches, and the Ministry of Agriculture and the supermarkets for making sure we have food. Why should we worry?  All we have to do when something goes wrong is to blame one of them and call in on the talk shows and complain – problem solved. 
Well, guess what? We are all wrong. We are running out of water, the earth’s atmosphere is being eroded and if we are not careful, all the beaches we like to run to on bank holidays will soon look completely unattractive – if we have any at all.  
What is perhaps scary for me is that I do not know how all the information we currently have in the region about what is coming will have any impact.
My impression is that at the regional level everyone is caught up trying to deal with what they see as urgent economic and political problems. Issues like these do not take precedence.
At the national level, we talk a good game as usual. All of the right things are in speeches, but they seem doomed to be buried in the coffin of inertia that currently pervades. 
In our households we are only concerned in so much as someone can tell us how we can save a dollar. So there are some of us who would make the long-term investment to reduce energy costs because that has a direct impact on our electricity bill. The rest of us remain content to continue our daily lives in oblivion, happy for it all to be someone else’s problem.  
I am not sure how we create attention at any of these levels to what is happening and what is to come. I do not know if shock and awe will work. Perhaps we need pictures of Barbados being burnt up by the sun or sliding into the ocean. More importantly, I am not sure who cares enough to even begin to have the discussion. What we have now is a number of disjointed discussions about energy conservation, and a few ads on television about saving water and proper garbage disposal to avoid leptospirosis. In between, there are a few interesting discussions which unfortunately still fail to capture the attention of the Barbadian public.
I am sacred, I have no shame in saying. There is no place to run on this rock and no shelter sufficient to address the impacts. All of the people who are following these developments suggest that our best efforts should be focused on adaptation, learning how best to live with what is coming and trying to build our capacity as much as possible to respond. 
I’m not sure how that will work if many of us actually are not aware and perhaps do not care too much about what is happening. In August, when Barbados will host a major inter-regional conference of all countries like us which face similar problems. The challenge is, how do we move these processes from conversations between people who all know the problems to action agendas at the regional, national and household levels. I fear perhaps time is running out.         
• Shantal Munro-Knight is a development specialist and executive coordinator at the Caribbean Policy Development Centre.