Editorial | Minister Charles and climate change

Even if he might be doing things, Pearnel Charles Jr is one those government ministers from whom relatively little is heard, or heard about, and whose actions excite even less. Across his sprawling ministry, covering housing, urban renewal, the environment and climate change, the latter is perhaps the area on which Mr Charles has engaged Jamaicans the least.

If he did not appreciate it before, Mr Charles has profound reasons for asserting his climate change mandate. He is now being offered a new platform from which to do so.

This week, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its sixth assessment report on the state of Earth’s climate. It reinforced all that we knew – just worse. Human activity has been warming the planet faster than we hoped, and some of the adverse effects of climate change may already be irreversible. The planet will be hotter, regardless.

For example, under the 2015 Paris Climate accord, the hope was to hold the rise in Earth’s temperature to around 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. But having already advanced the mercury by around 1.1 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level, Earth, within two decades, will be 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than it was in the mid-19th century. That is largely because of the emissions that humans have released into the atmosphere by burning coal, oil and gas for energy, and other uses.

“Global surface temperature will continue to increase until at least the mid-century under all emissions scenarios considered,” the scientists, including Jamaica’s Tannecia Stephenson, said in the report. “Global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius and two degrees Celsius will be exceeded during the 21st century unless deep reductions in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades.”

They reminded, too, that “changes in the climate system become larger in direct relation to increasing global warming”. These changes include “increases in the frequency and intensity of hot extremes, marine heatwaves, and heavy precipitation, agricultural and ecological droughts in some regions, and proportion of intense tropical cyclones, as well as reductions in Arctic sea ice, snow cover and permafrost”. All of these have potential consequences for a small island nation like Jamaica and others in the Caribbean.

Jamaica, and the Caribbean, already experiences more frequent and violent hurricanes, increased droughts and extreme floods. Higher sea levels, which will be exacerbated by melting ice caps, are perilous to the region’s coastal cities and tourism-dependent economies, for which the Caribbean’s white-sand beaches are critical components.

António Guterres, the UN secretary general, called the report “a ‘code red’ for humanity”.

“The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: Greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk,” he said. “Global heating is affecting every region on earth, with many of the changes becoming irreversible. This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels before they destroy our planet.”

That is a call for urgent global action, at a pace much faster than the long-since-redundant commitments from Paris. Jamaica, the other countries of the Caribbean, and most developing nations are not the big emitters of greenhouse gases that have created this global peril. But they must live with its consequences. They have an obligation, first to themselves, but also as part of humanity, to contribute to the fix.

TWO LEVELS

Participation should be on two levels. Jamaica and other small emitters must maintain and accelerate domestic efforts to reduce their use of hydrocarbons, which require structuring their economies to take advantage of emerging green technologies, as well as a broader protection of their environment. The preservation of forests, for instance, is important. That requires not just declaration of intent, but also supportive policies which are clearly articulated.

At the international level, Jamaica and others must be clarion voices for the logic of combatting climate change and global warming. At the CoP26 (Conference of the Parties) in Glasgow in November, Jamaica and its partners in the Caribbean and the Pacific must not leave the discussion to the big players. They must make themselves the conscience of the discourse, with sound, science-based and economic arguments of why, for us, climate change is an existential crisis and why fixing the problem is to the benefit of mankind.

It is the various strands of the argument, domestic and international, we have long hoped to hear from Mr Charles. The IPCC report will perhaps galvanise him into action – with passion.