Guyana needs $400M to curb climate change effects – President Jagdeo

Mar 01, 2009 News

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…“Climate change threatens life itself”

By Nadia Guyadeen

President Bharrat Jagdeo has said that a study carried out by McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm, showed that Guyana needs some $400M to protect itself from rising sea levels and excessive rainfall by building up the conservancy dam.
The President was at the time addressing a gathering at the third regional meeting of the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly which was held on Wednesday and Thursday at the Guyana International Conference Centre, Liliendaal, Greater Georgetown.

According to the Head of State, the study has also shown that Guyana can generate money from the alternative use of the forest.
He added that by cutting the trees and converting it to land for soya bean production and ranching and maybe mining Guyana can earn between $400 and $2B a year.

According to President Jagdeo’s Avoided Deforestation Paper which was launched in December, Guyana faces many of the challenges and opportunities that must be addressed in all forested countries to reduce deforestation.
It added that the country has a strong track record in sustainable forestry practices, with FAO statistics demonstrating no net loss of forest cover between 1990 and 2005. However, economic pressures to increase value from forest resources in Guyana are growing. The great majority of Guyana’s forests is suitable for timber extraction.

There are large sub-surface mineral deposits within the forest, and rising agricultural commodity prices increase the potential returns to alternative forms of land use, all increasing the opportunity cost of leaving the forest alone. These challenges will intensify as infrastructure links between Northern Brazil and Guyana advance, thus increasing development opportunities in the interior of Guyana.

Guyana also faces potentially massive climate change adaptation costs, given the need to protect low-lying areas from the risk of flooding (90 percent of Guyana’s population and all of its economic base exist on a narrow strip of coastal land that lies below sea level, rendering it vulnerable to sea-level rise and inland flooding). Moreover, its citizens expect continuously better social and economic services as the country develops.

If long-term economic incentives to protect the forest are weak, future Governments may well find it necessary to meet these needs using revenues from unsustainable resource extraction.
These pressures bring into sharp focus the need to create meaningful incentives for forest conservation and make Guyana an important case study in the economics of deforestation.

President Jagdeo stated that climate change threatens life itself. “If we feel that this crisis (the global financial crisis) threatens our way of life, and to some extent our economic well-being, then climate change threatens life itself, and over time it is a bigger challenge, and we must never allow the economic crisis to divert our attention away from this very important challenge that we have to confront,” the President said.
The President added that there needs to be a more fact-based approach to the whole issue of climate change.

He added that all must be engaged. According to him, the ACP countries to a large extent do not participate enough, which may be contributed to the fact that they do not see the dangers immediately, and Guyana faces the same thing.
“Today climate change is not just about environment, it is an economic issue. It is one of development. Societies have to find the large sums of money needed – hundreds of billions of dollars  – for adaptation and mitigation purposes in the future.”

“Sometimes we struggle to get this issue on the agenda even at CARICOM levels. It’s not taken as seriously as it should be. So we need to do that because we have to reverse the deficiencies of the Kyoto Protocol to ensure that when the Copenhagen Agreement is signed there is adequate money for adaptation, there is adequate money for mitigation, that there is adequate money to get China and India to adopt cleaner technology in their legitimate need for more energy, because the technology transfer would be critical as those two countries are key to the achievement of an agreement, but they have to be helped because their per capita emissions are way below that of the developed world.”

In Guyana’s case, President Jagdeo added, he feels Guyana can make a contribution.
He also said that Members of Parliament can sponsor motions in their respective countries to get the debate fit in their respective parliaments, and then try to create a perspective that is balanced and one that looks at safeguarding the region’s interest.
“…If we don’t act as a block of countries we may not get the type of agreement we want. We’ll have another Kyoto Protocol which will create a market which generates $100B per year by trading carbon, but most of the money stays in the developed world. Very little comes to the developing – We don’t want that so we have to be very vigilant.”

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