Barbuda ’Likely To Sink’

By: Annabel Fuller on December 11th, 2008

At the current rate of sea level rise, most of Barbuda will be submerged by the year 2060. This sombre conclusion, says Ambassador Diann Black-Layne, is based on projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report. The IPCC shared the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 with former US vice-president Al Gore.

Asked whether constructing protective sea walls around Barbuda’s coast would be an option to offset the impacts of rising seas, Black-Layne said: “No, it would not be economically feasible. Unfortunately, at the rate at which we are going, Barbuda will be fully submerged in the next 50 to 60 years.”

Black-Layne, Antigua’s former chief environment officer, was speaking exclusively to the Daily Observer at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poland this week.

The IPCC ’s 2007 report has reinforced the urgency for developed countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, and the need for all countries to recognize they are not doing enough.

In his speech at the opening of the conference the IPCC chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, said: “We need to consider whether the effort to limit the increase in global mean temperature to about 2C would be adequate, because sea level rise due to thermal expansion alone with this trajectory would be between 0.4 and 1.4 meters.”

“Add to this the melting of ice bodies, and we would have serious effects of sea level rise on low-lying coastal areas and small islands.”

Black-Layne says the future of the Caribbean and many islands is at stake. “For Antigua and Barbuda it means that our coastal zone is going to be flooded by the sea,” she said. “Tourism is 50 or 60 per cent of our GDP, and it exists mostly on the coast.”

This means Antigua will need somehow to protect its coasts, and besides building roads the government will have to build structures to protect the coastline.

They will no doubt be a major eyesore. “It will not be the beautiful island that you knew, that most people see in photos – that is going to change our tourism product,” Black-Layne said.

The negative impacts of climate change are much more than damage to infrastructure and nature itself. According to Black-Layne it will become more and more difficult for individuals and households to afford insurance – if they can get it.

Many businesses will not be able to get insurance because they will be in a flood zone, and boat owners will find it harder to insure their vessels because of the increased risk of extreme weather caused by climate change.

The Munich Climate Insurance Initiative says there are currently already economic losses of US$100 billion a year caused by climate-related natural hazards. Developing countries have the “lowest coping capacity and the highest vulnerability.”

Meanwhile, as the sea warms, coral reefs will continue to die off, impacting the local fishing industry.

Black-Layne said: “It is not that it is getting extra water from the ice cap, although that is also occurring, but as you heat water it expands. So the expansion of the oceans will be the primary cause of sea level rise.”

So countries such as Antigua and Barbuda need to adapt to the impacts of climate change. According to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) adaptation is one of the two central approaches to tackling the problem (the other is mitigation – reducing emissions of greenhouse gases).

But the cost of adaptation will be high, and it is still unclear who will pay. The UN says $86 billion a year will be needed by 2015 for poor countries to adapt, and a UN Adaptation Fund has been established to help affected countries pay the bills.

The Adaptation Fund will be financed by a 2 per cent levy on projects in the Clean Development Mechanism that allows countries to invest in clean energy projects in the developing world in return for offsetting carbon emissions.

“Why are we here? We are here because we are trying to encourage those countries that are emitting CO2 (carbon dioxide) and have in the past emitted CO2 and have caused this problem to first of all assist us financially to adjust to it,” Black-Layne said.

“It is their responsibility and we are here to remind them of that,” she added. “The second reason we are here, even if we do get the money to adjust to the new environmental climate that we will expect, it can get hotter, it can get worse than that, and every year that we wait it will get hotter and hotter and hotter.

“What we are trying to do is get developed countries to cut back on their emissions so that the temperature rise we are expecting remains lower than two degrees,” Black-Layne said.

Climate change is real. We as a country need to be responsive to the effects that are brought about by the changes in the environment. In addition, bad environmental practices such as the unnecessary clearing of land and the illegal removal of sand from our beaches must avoid exacerbating the looming impacts of climate change.