Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley has challenged the United Nations on climate change, telling the world that enough loss of life has occurred in recent decades.
Speaking in New York earlier this week on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States, she declared: “The science is clear and the evidence is even clearer, that the lives of our people have been lost and properties abandoned, and these tell the story far better than any speech we can make in this great hall.”
Mottley said the Alliance has to keep temperature increases in that global community to less than 1.5 degrees annually to stay alive.
“In other words, two degrees needs to be taken off the table once and for all,” she added.
The Prime Minister suggested that an increase by one degree in temperature had already brought small island states to where there were today, accompanied by unacceptably high levels of catastrophic damage and loss of life.
“Within less than a decade or two, it will be virtually impossible to contain the temperature increases to 1.5 degrees unless we act now, and with absolute dispatch. Make no mistake, there will be mass migration by climate refugees that will destabilise the countries of the world that are not on the front line of this climate crisis.
“No country can stand up to it alone. For us, our best practice traditionally was to share the risks before disaster strikes. And just over a decade ago, we established a Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility. But the devastation of Hurricane Dorian this month marks a new chapter for us.”
The Barbadian leader told UN delegates that the current mechanisms to reduce climate change had not worked.
“We have as well to look at how best we can blend our public resources and to that extent, our country has introduced natural disaster clauses in our bonds as have other countries in the region. For interested leaders at the national and state levels of independent nations and dependent territories, we need to confront what we believe will be a growing crisis with respect to the affordability of insurance in our countries. We believe that the real solution is for us not to keep asking people to make commitments that are small in the hope that we reach there.”
She said the global community must accept that it “is within our power to halt and reverse climate change. If the world can make it possible to have driverless cars, then we surely can find it possible to be able to find the technology to halt and reverse this climate crisis”.
Mottley, in her three-minute address, revealed that each Alliance member had committed to submitting aggressive indices by 2020, and also to the long-term goal of net zero emissions by 2050.
“We are fully, and have always been, committed to the Paris Agreement. In our own case in Barbados, we will lead by example. First, we have set the goal of becoming a fossil fuel-free country by 2030. We have to change all of our transport systems and how we generate electricity. But this is a mammoth undertaking because the cost of electric buses is almost more than double what the costs of diesel buses are.”
She also said the transition to clean renewable energy for electricity would require significant investments in solar and wind which Barbados was planning. (BA)
