The View from Europe
  By David Jessop
   
  “We are experiencing dangerous human disruption of the global climate and we are going to experience more. What this means is that we need to treat climate change not as a long-term threat to our environment but as an immediate threat to our security and prosperity”
   
  This stark warning comes not from some obscure organisation or individual, but from the President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Professor John Holdern, a distinguished physicist and environmentalist. 
   
  His remarks echo other reports from leading scientists across the world.  
   
  It is a message that will redefine the nature of all international dialogue in much the same way that the willingness of nations to work together against terrorism after 9/11 became the measure of each nation’s commitment to the global consensus.
   
  Climate change is now at the forefront of the international agenda. 
   
  The UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, speaking in Kenya on November 15 at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, told delegates: "A few diehard skeptics continue trying to sow doubt. They should be seen for what they are; out of step, out of arguments and out of time. In fact, the scientific consensus is becoming not only more complete, but also more alarming. Many scientists long known for their caution are now saying that global warming trends are perilously close to a point of no return." 
   
  The problem is that many nations including the U.S. and Australia have not ratified the Kyoto Protocol which seeks to cut global emissions of carbon dioxide to 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The US administration has rejected the treaty on the basis that it would become a prohibitive cost to businesses and result in a loss of American competitiveness.
   
   Among issues discussed at the Kenya conference were creating a fund to help developing countries defend themselves against the effects of climate change, sharing technology that promotes low emissions and finding a way to create a ‘Kyoto II’ that all nations can accept after 2012. 
   
  But finding agreement on these and other issues after ten days of talking is proving elusive (the conference is still continuing as this is being written). Achieving a consensus has many of the same fault lines between the developed and developing world that brought stalemate earlier this year to the Doha Round on trade liberalisation. 
   
  Many countries, developed and developing, to say nothing of industries, are not prepared to agree to measures that may slow growth or competitiveness until there is a global mechanism that ensures that there are substantial transfers of financial resources from all the world’s wealthiest nations and other major greenhouse gas emitters such as China. 
   
  None of these developments should come as a surprise to the Caribbean and its business community given the regions absolute dependence on climatic stability for its economic development whether it be in relation to tourism, agriculture or natural disasters. 
   
  At its most obvious the increasingly unpredictable incidence of hurricanes,  observable beach erosion, terminal damage to reefs caused by a rise in sea temperatures, breaches to flood defences in Guyana and Suriname in the face of tidal surges and a general levelling of the weather across the seasons, all suggest in a Caribbean context, the veracity of the scientists’ message.
   
  Climate change is an issue unlike any other in as much as it can not be fudged or set aside in the hope that what might come later will be better or is negotiable.
   
   John Ashton the UK’s climate change envoy made this clear in a recent interview with the BBC. “We need to see a stable climate as a public good without which it will become increasingly difficult to deliver the other public goods that citizens rightly expect from those who govern them”. Mr Ashton went on to say the cost of not securing a low carbon global economy poses a real challenge for traditional politics. “Governments have traditionally invested in …hard power… as a backstop against the consequences of political and diplomatic failure…You can not use military force to make everyone else on the planet reduce their carbon emissions. There is no backstop”.
   
  In other words there is a view that unless agreements can be negotiated, new technologies developed and a global consensus emerges, there is a real danger of conflict and catastrophe.
   
  The region seems not yet to have grasped that here is an issue that offers the opportunity to redefine its place in the world in a manner that makes smallness and vulnerability a virtue. 
   
  If the Caribbean can move fast enough, climate change is an issue that could change the nature of it dialogue with the rest of the world, result in new development credits based not on aid but on carbon trading, secure a long-term marketing advantage for its tourism industry and emerge as a positive but independent partner to the developed world. 
   
  The region is also far from ready for the economic impact of global warming on business. The region’s insurance sector, tourism, agriculture, fisheries, transport are all likely to be touched in different ways by new global policies designed to reduce carbon emissions. 
   
  For instance there is a growing movement in Europe that sees air travel as environmentally damaging and if undertaken at all, as an activity to be highly taxed or restricted and a trend to legislate to bring supermarkets, hotels, and large emitters of greenhouse gases into the carbon trading system. 
   
  For all these reasons the region ought to determine rapidly where it will position itself in the global debate on climate change and how it intends to take advantage of the global carbon credits trading system that is likely to emerge. Obtaining credits, as Guyana and Belize hope for the planting or replanting forests is a start, but who for instance will ensure that any new tax on airlines finds its way back to the Caribbean to the benefit of the tourism sector?
   
  History was not kind to King Canute. Popular opinion had him trying to command the sea to retreat in recognition of his power. In reality he was attempting to demonstrate the reverse: that he had no command over the power of nature and that there were forces at work that were much greater than him. The Caribbean does not have this luxury. It can not Canute-like sit and watch as the tide of global warming quite literally rolls in. It requires a clear policy agenda and a strategy to address this man made phenomena.
   
  David Jessop is the Director of the Caribbean Council and can be contacted at [log in to unmask]
  Previous columns can be found at www.caribbean-council.org
  November 17th, 2006
   

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