For the small island developing states of the Caribbean, there is nothing more important than the United Nations Climate Change Conference taking place here at the national stadium of Poland from Nov. 11-22.
"We're being impacted by climate change right now. We have to fight sea level rise, we are looking at increases in the frequency and severity of storm events, so it's about survival," Hugh Sealy, vice chair of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) Executive Board, told IPS.3
"In my humble opinion, and forgive me for being melodramatic, this is the most important decade facing mankind," said Sealy, a national of Grenada. "What we do in the next seven years will affect generations to come."
The CDM is the largest carbon market in the world. It has so far delivered more than 315 billion dollars in assistance to developing countries. It has launched more than 7,400 projects since 2004 and has saved the developed countries about three billion dollars in cost compliance. The CDM now has a regional collaboration centre at St. George's University in Grenada with two more centres in Lome and Kampala.
A new report released here shows that Haiti led the list of the three countries most affected by weather-related catastrophes in 2012. The others were the Philippines and Pakistan.
Germanwatch presented the ninth annual Global Climate Risk Index at the onset of the Climate Summit in Warsaw.
"The landfall of Hurricane Sandy in the U.S. dominated international news in October 2012. Yet it was Haiti - the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere - that suffered the greatest losses from the same event," said Sönke Kreft, team leader for international climate policy at Germanwatch and co-author of the index.
In the last two decades, the 10 most affected countries have without exception been developing nations, with Honduras, Myanmar and Haiti taking the brunt during the period 1993-2012, the report noted.
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Although water is an essential input for agriculture and industrial production, it is also scarce in many regions. When it crosses international borders via shared rivers, lakes and aquifers, it can become a source of conflict and contention. Yet while water can be a source of instability, especially in the face of climate change, it can also be a source or catalyst for cooperation and even peace.
The Gulf Cooperation Council’s grid operator is studying the feasibility of a cable to Ethiopia, which would run through currently war-torn Yemen.
Small Island States will be facing dramatically higher adaptation costs to build resilience against the kind of impacts the IPCC projects in its most recent Special Report. Thoriq Imbrahim, former Environment and Energy Minister of the Maldives, urges the international community to attend to the political demands of countries particularly exposed to the impacts of climate change and also confront loss and damage with renewed urgency.
Three years after the talks that delivered the Paris Agreement, the world is gathering in Poland to take stock of the progress that has been made and to raise its ambitions. But as new nationalist leaders take power, has the world lost its appetite for climate action?