The New Capital can be a low-carbon showpiece

Aug 20, 2008 Letters

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Dear Editor,
The snap reaction of many Guyanese to building “A New Capital” is bound to be that we can not afford such an expensive project. I refer of course to your editorial of 14 August, 2008.

However, the question we ought to be asking is, can we afford not to build a new capital? Given the stark realities of Global Warming and Climate Change, as mentioned briefly in your editorial, Georgetown as we know it today has a shelf life which we hope is as much as another 50 years.

The pre-feasibility study on the road to Brazil has recently been completed and before long a full feasibility will be carried out on this 340 mile link to Brazil.

This North/South highway will run from Georgetown through Linden to Lethem, passing through geographical locations much higher than Georgetown and well above sea-level. Surely this feasibility could include in its terms of reference the scoping out of a suitable site for a new capital to be built sometime in the foreseeable future.

In fact the new capital can be built agglutinatively over a period of 15-20 years.
Construction of the RCI’s (Ivory Coast’s) new political and administrative capital Yamoussoukro started in 1964/5.

By 2005 it had a total population in the region of 200,000 people which is roughly twice the population of Georgetown proper. Between 1980 and 1985 I visited Yamoussoukro several times.

This new capital was built over 1,351 sq miles on rolling hills and plains some 120 miles from Abidjan, the country’s commercial capital. It struck me as an elegant, modern city without being garish or cramped.

Surely it makes sense to have the proximate feasibility study for the Brazil road identify a clutch of possible locations for the new capital. Rockstone, Arisaru Mountain (40 Mile), Mabura Hill, Kurupukari and Iwokrama (the road bisects the Iwokrama forest area) may all be possibilities.

Were this to be done, site selection can be achieved by mid next year. The design and layout could come next and could involve a team of town planners, a wide range of engineers, surveyors, architects, economists, environmental experts and social scientists culled from the Diaspora and our local (Guyana-based) pool of relevant professionals and as you put it “experts in the field”.

A separate, stand-alone feasibility can then be commissioned to deal with the essential technical, environmental, social, economic and indigenous studies required of a project of this magnitude and potential impact.

The new capital can be a low-carbon showpiece and Guyana’s eco-tourism cachet. To achieve this it should be built strictly along energy-efficient and green lines and managed in a similar eco-friendly way. I refer here to the capital’s energy, transport (private and public), municipal services and all the capital’s living systems.

With visionary financial and marketing leadership, it may be possible for Guyana to bring on board a consortium of international finance, construction and engineering companies interested in an ambitious scheme that will allow them to “offset” their own carbon footprints and to build on their eco­-friendly credentials, corporate track record and green image.

Furthermore land along the Brazil road route could certainly make those inaccessible regions open to agricultural technology that could, in time, feasibly turn it into the bread basket of the Caribbean.  At the very least it may provide a viable alternative to the coastal belt so prone to flooding.

Capital planning should not ignore the editorial’s “colonial power” concept “about linking the said new capital to some projected railway to the Brazil border.”

Given that it is possible to move one ton of freight 436 miles with only one gallon of fuel, it follows that it will not only be cheaper to move agriculture produce, agri-products, equipment, machinery, other farm inputs and people along this North/South highway but also it will be far more environmentally friendly by reducing the bread basket’s carbon footprint significantly.

Such mega-projects would give Guyana’s economy the boost it so badly needs and put us firmly on the road to becoming an emerging economy if not a quasi-developed country.

It is customary when planning mega-projects of this nature to calculate costs and benefits and to carefully assess the economic as well as financial IRR.

As a layman I have no idea how one calculates the return on investment (ROI) of building a new capital city or even how relevant it may be. I am certain however, that we must not fail to plan early in anticipation of Georgetown going under the Atlantic Ocean a few decades from now.

And my finger-in- the-wind calculation leads me to believe that the penalty for such a failure may well be death by drowning.

The task is therefore to use the upcoming Brazil road feasibility to take our first giant step towards creating a new green capital.

F. Hamley Case

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