Earth Today | ‘Climate change is beyond urgent’

HURRICANE BERYL has barreled across the Caribbean over recent days, leaving in its wake billions of dollars in damage, death and devastation; together with a powerful reminder that small island developing states (SIDS) are living climate change.

“As a SIDS scientist, when you read the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports, what you are really reading is about the unprecedented becoming inescapable for small islands. What we are going through now is exactly that – yet another thing we are calling unprecedented, happening in our lifetimes,” said Prof Michael Taylor, physicist and dean of the Faculty of Science and Technology at The University of the West Indies, Mona.

A celebrated Jamaican and Caribbean climate scientist, Taylor has also served on the IPCC, including as a lead author for the special report on 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming.

He has explained that ‘the unprecedented’ dates back to 2017 when category four and five storms, Irma and Maria, made landfall in the Caribbean. That was followed by Dorian in 2019 – fearsome for its super storm nature; and then 2020, when the Greek alphabet had to be used to name Atlantic Tropical Storms after the regular list of 21 names was exhausted with Tropical Storm Wilfred.

“And here we are again calling 2024 unprecedented” – this time because Beryl is the first hurricane in history to reach category 5 strength in the Atlantic Ocean.

This, Taylor said, is on top of last year being unprecedented in terms of heat – with rising temperatures another climate change impact, in addition to extreme hurricane and other weather events, coastal erosion and sea level rise, among other things.

“We are living climate change now,” Taylor insisted.

He noted that after years of warning and pleas – by SIDS and other developing countries – for scaled-up adaptation and mitigation efforts to restrain global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and the associated threats, the situation is now beyond urgent.

“The time for action has almost past. We are dealing with one manifestation of climate change here, which is the intense storm. But when this storm has passed, we are going to deal with another manifestation, which is the intense heat and we are going to have less resources to deal with,” Professor Taylor said.

‘Both you and I had to find resources today to prepare for Beryl – resources we didn’t really have, but we had to figure it out. And we will have to find resources again after,” he added.

“Climate change is not stopping because it gave us this latest event. We are right into the next manifestation. We therefore have to learn all the strategies to become resilient in a world where we will have to live through unprecedented events,” Taylor said further.

MONEY

A key response consideration, Taylor noted, is the mobilisation of resources – including through the Loss and Damage Fund, which should not only be adequately resourced but also readily accessible by vulnerable countries.

“There are some things we need to stop talking about as urgent and realise we are past the point of urgent and at the point of immediacy,” he told The Gleaner.

That includes “the talk about mitigation and increased ambition to keep greenhouse gas emissions down so we can have a livable future; and it depends on how you define a livable future”, he said.

For Taylor, as well as for others from Caribbean and other SIDS, that means pulling out the stops to get to a no more than 1.5 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures above pre-industrial levels – as provided for in the Paris Agreement, a global pact made by countries to address climate change.

“It has to be reflected in the COP (global climate negotiations) this year and in the COP next year which is when everybody will report on their raised Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Whatever is raised next year is what we are locking in for our future and those ambitions have to be able to enable a world that at least has the possibility of being livable in the future,” he said.

NDCs, which are at the heart of the Paris Agreement, reflect country commitments to implement actions to reduce national emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

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