Climate Change, Sustainable Development of Caribbean Sea

From:  Anguilla News - October 23, 2008

Read Full Article: CLIMATE CHANGE, SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF CARIBBEAN SEA 

Countries of the Caribbean region are headed for "hard and difficult times" unless they took steps, with the cooperation and support of the international community, to forestall the impending adverse effects of climate change, according to representatives of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS). Much of the Caribbean region is heavily dependent on tourism and fisheries industries -- both severely vulnerable to global warming and weather anomalies, according to the Association's delegation, which painted a dire picture of the damage that could be wrought by changes in sea surface temperatures and sea levels, which could, among others, result in flooding and erosion in low-lying coastal areas. The Associations members have been meeting in New York to raise awareness among United Nations Member States of a number of resolutions of the Association planned shortly to put before the General Assembly's Second Committee (Economic and Financial), including one that had been around for a few years seeking to have the Caribbean Sea area designated as a special area within the context of sustainable development.

Dr. John Agard of Trinidad & Tobago, one of the Nobel Prize-winning scientists on the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told reporters that the Caribbean was already recording enormous amounts of rainfall, and available scientific evidence revealed the increased intensity of hurricanes. Rising temperatures were causing hurricanes. Rising temperatures were causing hurricanes to last longer, become stornger and more destructive. Projections for the future were that the frequency of hurricanes and tropical storms was likely to increase rather than diminish, he added.

Current Chair of the Association's Caribbean Sea Commission, Donville Innis, said the Commission had put a lot of time and effort in the resolution on declaring the Caribbean Sea a special area for sustainable development, and considered the work extremely important to the 25 nations that formed the association -- the islands of the Caribbean and the Central American states. He said the Association's delegation had "zeroed in" on climate change and its impact on the region, by including in its delegation to the Second Committee a panel of technical experts who had been at the forefront of research on ecosystems in the Caribbean and Central American region. The panel had come up with ample evidence of the damage that was currently being done and potential harm to the ecosystem.