Ongoing media coverage of the devastatingly destructive outbreaks of fires in wooded parts of those regions resulting from what we are told are record temperature rises this summer, have added a further dimension to what has been, for some time, one of the most reported-on issues on the agenda of the international media. Few, if any, international media reports over the past several weeks have neglected some substantive reference to alarming temperature rises in parts of ‘the North’ that have been sufficiently significant to ignite fires that have devastated huge swathes of real estate in those regions, destroying properties, driving people from their homes and crippling farming communities. Some of these occurrences have been sufficiently destructive to warrant official declarations of limited national emergencies.
The current wave of what we are told are climate catastrophes have previously been visited on other regions, mostly swathes of Africa and Asia. The people of those regions have become familiar with climate-related catastrophes and their consequences. Including instances in which entire impoverished communities in poor countries endure protracted and devastating long-term consequences. Where some of the major consequences have directly targeted their food-production capabilities, diseases and death have lurked on doorsteps and entire communities have ground to a halt.
The longer-term knock-on effects of climate change in those regions are a matter of public and deeply disturbing record which continues to attract a far less than deserving level of global attention.
Whereas climate change and its consequences in poor countries have attracted periodic international media focus, mostly as an extension of wider reportage of the societal conditions that obtain in those communities, the prevailing climate-driven wildfires that have been wreaking havoc across regions of North America and Europe have been deemed to warrant sustained media coverage across the widest swathe of the western media houses.
Climate change and its human consequences that have been rampaging in poor countries for several decades have finally shown up in the ‘rich North.’ It has come in the form of catastrophic fires.
Ironically, the current climate-related travails of ‘the North’ come only a handful of months after last October’s Glasgow Climate Summit was convened “to accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate.” With Glasgow now behind us the climate change lobby, though it has grown, still finds itself confronted by varying measures of popular indifference to the climate change agenda among emerging ‘oil economies,’ notably in Africa and South America.
Here in the Caribbean there is, on the one hand, the worrisome vulnerability of the island states of the Caribbean Community to the foreboding winds of climate change, (a phenomenon, incidentally, to which CARICOM continues to demonstrate an insufficient sense of urgency). There is, as well, the practical reality of the potential extended region-wide economic opportunities that could derive from the fact that two of the Community’s member countries, namely Guyana and Suriname, have become ‘signed up’ members of the global oil and gas community and the practical impact that this could have on a regional position on climate change.
If it might have been felt that the Glasgow Summit could help to close the fissures that still defy a consensus on climate change, the North’s long hot summer, on the one hand and the still solid wall that separates fossil fuel adherents from the growing numbers of ‘climate changers,’ appears to be as immovable as ever.
Whether or not the now prevailing climate-related challenges in the developed world might sway the global ‘argument’ in favour of the ‘climate changers’ or whether, on the other hand, the fossil fuel adherents will continue to hold sway is difficult to tell since there continues to be evidence of a digging in on both sides. Either way, however, it has become increasingly difficult to ignore the compelling evidence that a line has to be drawn in the sand.
The current climate-related travails that obtain in regions of ‘the North’ at this time may well be pointing at a raising of the stakes in a manner that now holds our feet more firmly to the fire.
