by Kari Grenade, PhD, Caribbean Economist and Macroeconomic Advisor
Each year, representatives from countries that are signatories to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) — an environmental treaty addressing climate change, meet at the global level in their annual Conference of the Parties, commonly referred to as COP.
This year’s COP will be the 27th such conference, hence the acronym COP27. It will take place over the 2-week period 6-18 November in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. The first COP was held in Berlin, Germany, in 1995.
COP27 will bring together world leaders, politicians, experts, activists, and other interested persons to discuss the climate crisis and climate solutions. Specifically, governments worldwide will present and discuss their concrete plans to reduce carbon emissions to address the climate crisis. This year’s COP will focus on critical climate-relevant topics, including Adaptation and Agriculture, Decarbonisation, Water, Energy, Biodiversity, Youth and Future Generations, Finance, and Gender, among other topics.
COP27 is an important one against the backdrop of unprecedented climatic events such as flooding in Pakistan and elsewhere at near apocalyptic scale, heat waves, droughts, fires, and powerful tropical storms in recent months across the world. Governments at COP27 must, therefore, firmly commit to taking bold actions and delivering on past commitments and promises to frontally address the climate crisis and its devastating and in some cases, its deadly impacts.
The outcomes of COP27 are particularly significant for the people of the Caribbean because we are directly on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Financing, capacity building, and loss and damage are critical issues for the region.
Accordingly, we expect to see significantly scaled-up financing (largely grants or ultra-concessional) for adaptation that is directly aligned to Caribbean countries’ climate resilience needs and, importantly, financing that is easy to deploy and access.
We also expect that technical assistance and capacity-building support will be ramped up to Caribbean countries in the areas of climate change mitigation and adaptation. Technical and financial support is crucial to help Caribbean countries develop new climate-positive industries that will not only supercharge their economies but also contribute to reducing the world’s overall carbon emissions. The Circular Economy is a new economic frontier that is positive both for the economy and for nature. Caribbean countries need support to develop the Circular Economy, the core of which involves reusing, reducing, and recycling in contrast to the prevailing linear extractive model of producing, consuming, and disposing, which is unsustainable. A Circular Economy can deliver benefits such as reducing stress on the environment; improving the constancy and security of the supply of raw materials; boosting economic diversification and competitiveness; increasing innovation and value-creation; providing new, decent, sustainable jobs; and fostering skills development.
We also expect that the region’s demand for a loss and damage financing facility will finally be met and that there will be collective agreement on a process for its timely implementation. There must be a global mechanism to compensate countries such as those in the Caribbean for damages caused by catastrophic climatic events. Asking Caribbean countries to assume liability for destruction that they did not cause is like asking someone to pay for damages incurred in a vehicular accident that they witnessed from their verandah! Indeed, it is morally just and fair that the large emitter countries whose activities are contributing the most to climate change make payouts to countries such as those in the Caribbean that contribute the least to greenhouse gas emissions but which are disproportionately affected by the effects of climate change. It is called justice — climate justice!
We in the Caribbean are hopeful that bold and tangible actions will be taken at COP27 to adequately respond to the climate crisis as well as to the needs of Caribbean people in communities across the region who suffer from the consequences of failures of past COPs to deliver on promises and meet commitments to frontally confront the greatest existential threat to life and livelihoods in the Caribbean.
Unfortunately the unelected bureaucrats at the UN have zero credibility and zero authority to do anything meaningful about the so-called climate crisis. If they care anything about the issue they can start by working to reign in the T7. What is that you may ask? Nations which use false-flag terrorism, weather warfare, and media disinformation to manipulate their populations into a globalist agenda, the United States being foremost among them. Start by enforcing existing global bans on weather control technology such as EMF and aerosols and we just might see the “climate crisis” evaporate into climate stability.
What exactly are the damages in the Caribbean caused by so-called catastrophic climatic events. and what precisely will any compensation for non-events be wasted on. The taxpayers in the wealthy west knows this to be a con, and simply the transfer of wealth to non-wealthy and will try to stop it any way they can as it is an unjust demand.