Black Immigrant Daily News

The Regional Training Centre (RTC) of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) is currently facilitating its Strategic Leadership Programme for Senior Officers of National Disaster Organizations (NDO).

First offered in 2021, the second cohort commenced training on February 3 and is set to finish on May 17, 2023. The intense 15-week course targets senior officers of National Disaster Organizations (NDOs). This mainly includes National Disaster Coordinators and Directors of Emergency/Disaster Management, and their deputies, as well as persons with equivalent posts in agencies that make up the wider national emergency management system.

Officers on a leadership track, in managerial roles or with portfolios with significant responsibility, were also encouraged to take part. This year’s current student cohort includes fifteen (15) participants in total, from National Disaster Management Offices (NDMOs) across thirteen (13) CDEMA participating states.

The Sandals Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Sandals Resorts International, has pledged its support to the programme, generously agreeing to provide three years of funding valuing approximately US$50,000.00 annually.

President of the Foundation and Executive Chairman of Sandals Resorts International, Adam Stewart says the pledge is reflective of its commitment to taking a structured approach to effecting positive, transformational change within the areas of education, community and environment.

“Building the Caribbean’s capacity to respond in times of emergency is a critical part of our region’s sustainable growth and disaster resilient plan. As an organisation that has been instrumental in providing relief and support in times of need, we have witnessed first-hand the life-changing difference that can be made when local organizations are equipped with the knowledge and resources to act in a timely manner.”

For the second consecutive year, training will be delivered by the UWI-Arthur Lok Jack Global School of Business, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus. An internationally accredited business school, UWI-Arthur Lok Jack GSB has been a leading provider of business education, executive training, management consulting and research in the Caribbean. The programme is designed to help participants understand themselves and their role as leaders by improving both their individual and organizational competence in disaster risk management (DRM).

It hopes to enhance their relationship management capabilities and foster a mindset of constantly exploring ways to enhance their strategic management and leadership skills. Specific course objectives include learning appropriate financial decision-making techniques, understanding the strategic and critical role of Project Cycle Management (PCM), Results Based Management (RBM) and Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E), employing efficient planning and organization of proposals, and understanding the crisis management process.

Director of Executive Education, Jo-Anne Boodoosingh commended Sandals Foundation and CDEMA for their continued investment in the development of Senior Officers of National Disaster Organizations across the region. She notes the increasing number of disasters, the devasting effects and our ability to prepare and respond, continues to be a challenge across the region. As such commitment to people through education and training is one way to sharpen the leadership skills of those charged with the responsibility of balancing prevention, preparedness, mitigation, and response.

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Black Immigrant Daily News

There are multiple, feasible and effective options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to human-caused climate change, and they are available now, said scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released today.

The report, approved during a week-long session in Interlaken, brings in to sharp focus the losses and damages we are already experiencing and will continue into the future, hitting the most vulnerable people and ecosystems especially hard. Taking the right action now could result in the transformational change essential for a sustainable, equitable world.

“Climate justice is crucial because those who have contributed least to climate change are being disproportionately affected,” said Aditi Mukherji, one of the 93 authors of this Synthesis Report, the closing chapter of the Panel’s sixth assessment.”Almost half of the world’s population lives in regions that are highly vulnerable to climate change. In the last decade, deaths from floods, droughts and storms were 15 times higher in highly vulnerable regions,” she added.

In this decade, accelerated action to adapt to climate change is essential to close the gap between existing adaptation and what is needed. Meanwhile, keeping warming to 1.5?C above pre-industrial levels requires deep, rapid and sustained greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors. Emissions should be decreasing by now and will need to be cut by almost half by 2030, if warming is to be limited to 1.5?C.

Clear way ahead

The solution lies in climate resilient development. This involves integrating measures to adapt to climate change with actions to reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions in ways that provide wider benefits.

For example: access to clean energy and technologies improves health, especially for women and children; low-carbon electrification, walking, cycling and public transport enhance air quality, improve health, employment opportunities and deliver equity. The economic benefits for people’s health from air quality improvements alone would be roughly the same, or possibly even larger than the costs of reducing or avoiding emissions.

Climate resilient development becomes progressively more challenging with every increment of warming. This is why the choices made in the next few years will play a critical role in deciding our future and that of generations to come.

Enabling sustainable development

There is sufficient global capital to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions if existing barriers are reduced. Increasing finance to climate investments is important to achieve global climate goals. Governments, through public funding and clear signals to investors, are key in reducing these barriers. Investors, central banks and financial regulators can also play their part.

There are tried and tested policy measures that can work to achieve deep emissions reductions and climate resilience if they are scaled up and applied more widely. Political commitment, coordinated policies, international cooperation, ecosystem stewardship and inclusive governance are all important for effective and equitable climate action.

If technology, know-how and suitable policy measures are shared, and adequate finance is made available now, every community can reduce or avoid carbon-intensive consumption. At the same time, with significant investment in adaptation, we can avert rising risks, especially for vulnerable groups and regions.

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Black Immigrant Daily News

Humanity still has a chance, close to the last, to prevent the worst of climate change ‘s future harms, a top United Nations panel of scientists said Monday.

But doing so requires quickly slashing nearly two-thirds of carbon pollution by 2035, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said. The United Nations chief said it more bluntly, callingfor an end to new fossil fuel exploration and for rich countries to quit coal, oil and gas by 2040.

“Humanity is on thin ice — and that ice is melting fast,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. “Our world needs climate action on all fronts — everything, everywhere, all atonce.”

Stepping up his pleas for action on fossil fuels, Guterres called for rich countries to accelerate their target for achieving net zero emissions to as early as 2040, and developing nations to aim for 2050 — about a decade earlier than most current targets. He also called for them to stop using coal by 2030 and 2040, respectively, and ensure carbon-free electricity generation in the developed world by 2035, meaning no gas-fired power plants either.

That date is key because nations soon have to come up with goals for pollution reduction by 2035, according to the Paris climate agreement. After contentious debate, the U.N. science report approved Sunday concluded that to stay under the warming limit set in Paris the world needs to cut 60% of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2035, compared with 2019, adding a new target not previously mentioned in six previous reports issued since 2018.

“The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts for thousands of years,” the report, said calling climate change “a threat to human well-being and planetary health.”

“We are not on the right track but it’s not too late,” said report co-author and water scientist Aditi Mukherji. “Our intention is really a message of hope, and not that of doomsday.”

With the world only a few tenths of a degree away from the globally accepted goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, scientists stressed a sense of urgency. The goal was adopted as part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement and the world has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit).

This is likely the last warning the Nobel Peace Prize-winning collection of scientists will be able to make about the 1.5 mark because their next set of reports may well come after Earth has either breached the mark or is locked into exceeding it soon, several scientists, including report authors, told The AssociatedPress.

After 1.5 degrees “the risks are starting to pile on,” said report co-author Francis X. Johnson, a climate, land and policy scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. The report mentions “tipping points” around that temperature of species extinction, including coral reefs, irreversible melting of ice sheets and sea level rise on the order of several meters (several yards).

“1.5 is a critical critical limit, particularly for small islands and mountain (communities) which depend on glaciers,” said Mukherji, who’s also the climate change impact platform director at the research institute CGIAR.

“The window is closing if emissions are not reduced as quickly as possible,” Johnson said in an interview. “Scientists are rather alarmed.”

Many scientists, including at least three co-authors, said hitting 1.5 degrees is inevitable.

“We are pretty much locked into 1.5,” said report co-author Malte Meinshausen, a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia. “There’s very little way we will be able to avoid crossing 1.5 C sometime in the 2030s ” but the big issue is whether the temperature keeps rising from there or stabilizes.

Guterres insisted “the 1.5-degree limit is achievable.” Science panel chief Hoesung Lee said so far the world is far off course.

“This report confirms that if the current trends, current patterns of consumption and production continues, then … the global average 1.5 degrees temperature increase will be seen sometime in this decade,” Lee said.

Scientists emphasize that the world, civilization or humanity won’t end suddenly if and when Earth passes the 1.5 degree mark. Mukherji said “it’s not as if it’s a cliff that we all fall off.” But an earlier IPCC report detailed how the harms — from Arctic sea ice absent summers to even nastier extreme weather — are much worse beyond 1.5 degrees of warming.

“It is certainly prudent to be planning for a future that’s warmer than 1.5 degrees,” said IPCC report review editor Steven Rose, an economist at the Electric Power Research Institute in the United States.

If the world continues to use all the fossil fuel-powered infrastructure either existing now or proposed Earth will warm at least 2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, the report said.

Because the report is based on data from a few years ago, the calculations about fossil fuel projects already in the pipeline do not include the increase in coal and natural gas use after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It comes a week after the Biden Administration in the United States approved the huge Willow oil-drilling project in Alaska, which could produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil a day.

The report and the underlying discussions also touch on the disparity between rich nations, which caused much of the problem because carbon dioxide emissions from industrialization stay in theair for more than a century, and poorer countries that get hit harder by extreme weather. Residents of poorer climate vulnerable nations are “up to 15 times more likely to die in floods, droughtsand storms,” Lee said.

If the world is to achieve its climate goals, poorer countries need a three-to-six times increase in financial help to adapt to a warmer world and switch to non-polluting energy, Lee said. Countrieshave made financial pledges and promises of a damage compensation fund.

The report offers hope if action is taken, using the word “opportunity” nine times in a 27-page summary. Though opportunity is overshadowed by 94 uses of the word “risk.”

“The pace and scale of what has been done so far and current plans are insufficient to tackle climate change,” IPCC chief Lee said. “We are walking when we should be sprinting.”

Lee said the panel doesn’t tell countries what to do to limit worse warming, adding “it’s up to each government to find the best solution.”

Activists also found grains of hope in the reports.

“The findings of these reports can make us feel disheartened about the slow pace of emissions reductions, the limited transition to renewable energy and the growing, daily impact of the climatecrisis on children,” said youth climate activist Vanessa Nakate, a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF. “But those children need us to read this report and take action, not lose hope.”

Peter Thorne, a researcher at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth and one of the report’s authors, said the responsibility for action rests with everyone.

“The reality is we at all levels — governments, communities, individuals — have made climate change somebody else’s problem,” he said. “We have to stop that.”

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Black Immigrant Daily News

The Group of Francophone Ambassadors (GAF) Award for 2022 was presented to WTO Director-General Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala on 20 March.

Ambassador Makaila Ahmad of Chad, President of the Group of Francophone Ambassadors in Geneva, said that the Group is honoured to present this award to the Director-General on the International Day of La Francophonie.

He said the award honours “the Director-General’s commitment both to strengthening the capacities of French-speaking countries for inclusive and sustainable international trade and to her efforts in favour of multilingualism”.

In her acceptance speech for the award, the Director-General expressed her deep appreciation and sincere gratitude to the GAF. She stressed that “la Francophonie can be a strong ally in the search for consensus within the WTO. The diversity of economic profiles within the OIF makes the organization a kind of laboratory for multilateralism. If la Francophonie reaches a common position on one of the topics discussed at the WTO, it can help forge consensus on this or other issues among all our 164 members.”

On 27 February, the WTO and the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at strengthening cooperation with a view to increasing the participation of French-speaking countries in the multilateral trading system.

The Group of Francophone Ambassadors (GAF) prize for 2022 was also awarded to the Swiss Press Club.

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