Abandoning a prepared speech which she could not read because of extensive floods back home, Barbados’ Prime Minister, Mia Amor Mottley has made an impassioned appeal to the United Nations to aid the world’s small states deal with the worst effects climate change.
“Events have happened in the last 24 hours in the world in which we live that cannot be ignored,” said Mottley at the General Assembly on Friday.
“Whether in my own country, the passage of a tropical storm that we thought had passed us, only to have floods in too many of our communities overnight or for it to hit our sister country St Lucia; whether an earthquake off the shore of Martinique and Guadeloupe and Dominica this morning , not affecting land but destabilising; whether an earthquake off Indonesia earlier today or a tsunami or whether a typhoon that is about to deal with the people of Japan, these events are of concern because the world in which we live is a very different world.”
Mottley reminded the UN during its open debate that just last year Dominica’s head of government had taken to the UN podium “within days of the passage of a category five hurricane” that left billions of dollars in damage across the Caribbean in its wake.
The “reality” confronting the world now, she said, was that the issues of climate change were very serious for people everywhere, placing the inhabitants of several regions, including the coral islands of the Caribbean “at risk” largely because of an inability by the international community to act decisively.
“For us it is about saving lives. For others it is about saving profits,” Mottley said. “We have reached the stage where we ask the global community to recognise what is at stake is simply not an academic debate; it is simply not the profits of multi-national corporations. But the evidence is clear and decisive that it is the lives and it is the living of our people.”
Mottley, who was scheduled to go to Europe for discussions on key financial issues confronting the country, has cut short her travels to return home to survey the flood damage and to see how people’s lives could be returned to a state of normalcy.
She said “time was running out” for the international community to take decisive action to protect the lives and the environment of countries and regions around the world.
What was needed, Mottley said in her first speech as Prime Minister was funding to stop the “worst aspects of climate change”. (TB)
