Climate emergency!

TWO YEARS ago the world was talking about climate change being an exception but since then, the conversation has changed drastically.

Speaking with The Gleaner last week Wednesday, the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, head of the UNDP’s Disaster Risk Reduction, Recovery for Building Resilience Team in Switzerland, Ronald Jackson, says the situation has now escalated to a climate emergency.

“We’ve escalated from climate change being a concern to climate change being a climate emergency and if we fail to address the underlying drivers, then we are going to face a climate disaster,” Jackson declared.

He went on: “I think we need to engage our society in a conversation where we recognise that the drivers are known to us. The drivers are things that we have control over and we don’t have control over the natural events. I’m talking about the collective because there are responsibilities along the chain. From government to individuals in our society, so it’s a shared responsibility around the way we tackle these drivers but they are known to us.”

Also known to us is the fact that these hazards or shocks will come but over time steps to ensure that they do not have the same debilitating effect on the society and individuals, as in previous years.

“The Japan experience is one where you have to look at the culture and one of the big antecedent conditions we have to tackle is the culture of our people, which is building by ensuring that we are educating our population significantly on how we contribute to restoration, we are socially constructing and Japan does that.

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“If you visit Japan on a given day you will see little basic schoolchildren with different colour helmets going out on field trips with their teachers and they teach them the issues like hazard stress and what have you. They are inculcating certain value systems into the society around how they conceive of risks, how they manage risks and how they recover from risks.”

Sadly, policymakers at the regional level continue to talk the need for the required behaviour change but have been able to accomplish very little in this regard. This is despite the evidence of worsening impacts from what some see as seasonal events.

Demystifying the issue of climate change would be a significant first step but this must be accompanied by concrete steps such as upgrading building codes and and raising our building standards, while at the same time modernising land use plans, development ordinance and development practices.

On the question of whether the regional is hurling towards a climate disaster because of the collective failure to act decisively, Jackson said the COVID-19 pandemic is now compounding the already tenuous climate situation.

“We are now pushing past the planetary boundaries, individually and as states, but also collectively as a planet.”