James Hospedales | Private sector obstructing action to planetary health

Ambassador Byron Blake pulled no punches in his article “Death of SIDS: Death to planet Earth” in In Focus, The Sunday Gleaner of December 8. I wish to add the urgent need to reduce the undue influence of the private sector which is obstructing action on the three major threats to planetary health – climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.

Recently, I asked some friends, “Would you put an arms dealer in charge of arms control talks?” They answered, “No, dat don’t make sense, Doc.” I then asked, “Would you put a cigarette company CEO in charge of tobacco control talks?” They answered quickly, “Dem selling de ting (tobacco)! How you expect dem to be honest?” In their responses, my friends were describing conflict of interest, where a person or organisation has two or more competing interests, leading to a tension between personal interests and the duty to serve others or the public interest.

If ordinary folks can quickly see this, how do we allow oil company CEOs to oversee climate-control negotiations, or hundreds of lobbyists from the oil and gas industry into these talks? Citizens everywhere need to demand private companies be excluded from these talks as they are putting profit before the health of people or the planet. If this pattern of ‘corporate takeover’ is allowed to continue, we and our children face much needless suffering and death and many of our small island states will be uninsurable and unliveable.

The main climate negotiations are the annual Conference of the Parties (COPs). The first COP was in Germany in 1995 when a treaty was signed by 192 nations to “stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations (GHG) concentrations in the atmosphere”. The main GHG is carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels like oil and gas.

NO LONGER FIT FOR PURPOSE

Have the COPs been effective? I argue that based on evidence of increasing GHG emissions, COPs are no longer fit for purpose. Many eminent experts agree. COP-27 in Egypt had over 600 lobbyists from the oil and gas industry infiltrating the talks - more than the total delegates of the 10 countries most impacted by climate change! Over 2,000 fossil fuel lobbyists were in COP-28 in the United Arab Emirates, and over 1,700 were in the recent COP-29 in Azerbaijan! This cannot be right!

The president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, declared in opening COP29 that oil and gas were gifts from God. I could say that tobacco is also a gift from God and use of tobacco kills an estimated seven million people annually!

The attached graph shows the atmospheric concentration of CO2 from 1958-2023. When I was born in 1955, it was 314 ppm; today, it is 427 ppm. The chart shows a near-perfect correlation between the year and CO2 levels and the upward trend is getting steeper since COPs began!

The lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere is 300-1,000 years. That means that the CO2 from oil burnt that Trinidad and Tobago has exported since 1910 or that Guyana is now exporting will still be in the atmosphere 10 generations from now! Now that is a frightening thought!

This story gets worse. Climate change has two ‘evil twins’: bio-diversity loss and pollution. And guess what? Private companies have also deeply infiltrated the UN negotiations to address these global challenges.

Biodiversity loss refers to the decrease in the number and variety of species locally or the world as a whole. Global populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians have dropped by 68 per cent between 1970 and 2016. We are not being good stewards of God’s creation. Much of this is driven by destruction of nature, human overconsumption, population growth and intensive agriculture. This loss in the variety of life can seriously damage the cycle of life, e.g., loss of bees, which pollinate many food crops, will cause massive food shortages.

Reducing loss of biodiversity is subject to an international treaty and has its own COP. Sadly, negotiations at COP-16, the 2024 UN Biodiversity Conference in Colombia, failed to agree on how the treaty forged at the last COP to protect 30 per cent of nature will be achieved. Over 1,200 meat, oil, and pesticide company lobbyists were allowed access to the crucial talks!

HARMING HEALTH

Pollution of the environment is harming health of people and animals and plants everywhere. Plastic pollution is a huge problem, blocking water ways and worsening the floods accompanying climate change. Plastics break down into microplastics and are being eaten by people and associated with a range of health problems like cancer and obesity.

There is now a UN treaty under discussion to control plastic pollution. But environmental groups recently slammed the presence of dozens of fossil fuel industry lobbyists at UN talks on the treaty, accusing them of “obstruction” and “misinformation” Delphine Alvares, global petrochemical campaign coordinator at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) said, “Their interests conflict with the objective of the talks and their presence here challenges independent science.”

One international treaty that deals well with the private sector conflict-of-interest issue is the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). Recognising that the tobacco epidemic was killing millions of people, especially in low- and middle-income countries, Article 5.3 of the FCTC wisely minimises the influence of the tobacco industry in tobacco control negotiations.

We desperately need to have a treaty to reduce and phase out in a just way the use of fossil fuels, the continued use of which is destroying our future. One such is the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, which has been signed by 14 countries and hundreds of civil society organisations. Antigua and Barbuda in the Caribbean is a signatory and showing leadership that hopefully others in CARICOM will follow.

Dr C James Hospedales is the founder of the EarthMedic and EarthNurse Foundation for Planetary Health and former executive director of the Caribbean Public Health Agency. This article is adapted from the EarthMedic and EarthNurse climate and health column in the TT Guardian. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com