UTECH International Climate Conference
Keynote Address
By
The Most Honourable Andrew Holness ON, PC, MP, DLP
Prime Minister of Jamaica
At the
UTECH International Climate Conference
On
October 17, 2024
_______________________________________
Good morning.
Thank you, Master of Ceremonies, Professor Garfield Young, for the mastery with which you have conducted the ceremony.
I’m not sure if there is a professorship in directing ceremony and protocol but Mr President, if there is, I know who the candidate is to hold that first seat.
The Honourable Fayval Williams or Minister of Education
His Excellency Olivier Guyonvarch, our Ambassador to Jamaica from France.
Dr Kevin Brown, our President of the University of Technology.
And I noted very carefully what the president said that he doesn’t hear a lot of noise about climate change in the society, but he hears a lot of noise about it at the government level. I reflected on it and wanted to point out to him that the government doesn’t make noise. The government must always make coherent statements, and if we make them more frequently, which we do on climate change, then they will filter down into the consciousness of the people in the society who won’t make noise but will make a chorus of conscious statements that will be uplifting and enlightening.
What you are trying to say, Mr President, and I speak as your interpreter in this regard, is that climate change ought to be an issue for the common man as well as for our intellectual elites because it cuts across all facets of society. It is something that affects our lives in every single way and I accepted the invitation for precisely that reason, because I need to be not only speaking more on the issue, but I need to be speaking to specific audiences on the issue and so I’m happy to see that we have representation from our high schools. I believe Calabar High School is here, I’m not certain that I’m seeing other schools, but if you are here, I’m recognizing you as well. And you did claim to have an international audience and a global audience as well so that is always a very good incentive.
Let me also acknowledge Dr Newsome, the organizer of the event. Very well done, congratulations.
Stakeholders,
Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, good morning again.
It is a great pleasure to address this esteemed gathering at this inaugural international climate change conference. Climate change is one of the most pressing global challenges of our time and represents an existential threat to small island developing states like Jamaica. I therefore want to commend the University of Technology and all the organizers for launching this important event to discuss adaptation and mitigation strategies for Jamaica and the region.
Let me say that climate change is not a distant threat. It is here, now. Climate change is not something that is happening to us, climate change is what we are doing. I think those are two key points that targeted specifically to our young people. Existential in that it not only can change the way in which we live, it has the potential to- let me not be so dramatic, but it could if it changes in a dramatic way, it could change life as we know it. And there is always a raging debate about climate change, whether or not the climate will change regardless of what we do, there is a cycle of the earth and there will be a change in the climate. Some people say the climate changes every few months, you have winter, summer, spring, autumn; climate changes, but the truth is that the climate is changing in a more rapid way than we had projected and anticipated by virtue of the activity of humankind.
Clearly, over the last 100 to 150 years, we were never consuming as much fossil fuel as we are now. We weren’t clearing the forests as rapidly as we are now. We weren’t practicing the kind of agriculture that would change the content of carbon and other global warming chemicals and gases in our air. We are having an impact on our climate so in effect we are causing an existential threat to ourselves. It makes the point, we in this room at this esteemed institution, we know this, but what about the rest of the population?
For the rest of the population, I am worried about the pothole that is in front of my house, don’t tell me about climate change. I am concerned that I can’t get any water in my house, you come to tell me about greenhouse gas and the earth, of course Jamaica has always been hot, we’re a tropical climate. Don’t tell me about climate change, when I can’t get electricity where I live, and my electricity bill is high. That is what the government must talk about, don’t talk to me about climate change.
And of course it becomes even more complex because- and this is very much again speaking to the students here from high school, it’s a very complex issue because it is not only a consumer behaviour issue, meaning how we consume and how we treat our environment, but it is also a serious political issue because the level of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere didn’t just get there because we consumed the products that were created from those greenhouse gases. There is a case that is strongly being made that these gases that are there now which pose the existential threat to us now, occurred as a result of the industrial revolutions that have taken place on the back of, at that time, an unconscious but rabid use of natural resources, particularly fossil based resources. And that created wealth for some people in the world, which is now creating an existential threat for others who occupy the space now.
So, in other words, there’s this issue of climate justice that the centuries of industrialization have created this problem that small island states we didn’t create it, but we are losing our shorelines. We are prone to more devastating hurricanes, acidification of the oceans around us, the loss of our coral reefs because other countries that benefited from the use of fossil fuels and industrial agriculture and other such practices, they have the wealth and the resources to defend their own countries from it, but we didn’t benefit from that and so we can’t defend, adapt and mitigate the climate change which is why the UN Secretary General had invited me to be a part of a group of global leaders to speak about climate change and to ask for a hundred billion dollars a year for climate mitigation and adaptation.
And of course, the rich countries all said yes. Of course, from a conscientious climate justice point of view, but we haven’t seen it really in any significant way because there’s also another issue. How do you tell the taxpayers in the developed world that benefited from these hundreds of years of industrialization to take up their tax dollars to fix a beach in Jamaica, or build a revetment, or help with water, or so forth especially in democracies, these are realities. When we talk about climate change, these are some of the intricate issues that we have to understand. So, yes, I’m speaking now of climate change from the scientific level of this greenhouse gas effect, and the warming of the oceans, and all of those things which the average person might say this is not going to affect me in my lifetime so don’t tell me about that.
And then, there is the social justice political issue that there are those of us who recognize, as was quoted from President Macron, “There is no Planet B”. Elon Musk doesn’t think so. So, this is a planet we have, and this is a planet we should save and so there are those of us who are thinking in an enlightened way, Professor Archer, that we should restructure the way in which we administer global and national affairs to redirect financing in ways that support the climate and that’s what this issue of climate financing is about.
Whether or not it will work, and the developed countries will be able to make the allocations from their budget relative to what their electorate feels, it would only work unless there is a very robust international movement that keeps calling for it and pricking that conscience and morality and saying, this has to be done and it is constantly being done. That’s part of my job, my responsibilities to speak on these issues and to bring it to light in ways that the average person can understand it. I’m speaking very simplistically now so that I can bring more people into the conversation so when there are many persons here and if we are lucky to have our students from Calabar start to do research on this and they start to write papers and they become passionate about it, who knows, we may have another advocate on the global scene and that’s how you start. You mentioned Extinction Rebellion and other social groups. There is a spectrum of how the issue is being treated with so I’m doing my little part in trying to raise consciousness about the issues.
Now, let’s come back to Jamaica. What is Jamaica’s strategy? Jamaica’s strategy is one, to play its role in the advocacy in terms of creating this global architecture, supporting the COP movement in ensuring that all countries are doing what they can to mitigate and adapt, slow down and, and to educate their population about climate change. Jamaica has done very well in terms of its nationally determined contributions to the whole climate change issues trying to make sure that we meet the 1.5% goal.
Now, outside of that, Jamaica has to take responsibility for itself. My administration is one that believes in self-reliance. I’m not going to wait on anybody’s conscience to save me. I believe in saving myself. If somebody’s good grace or conscience comes through, hey, great, but every Jamaican must stand on their own two feet and face the world. Don’t wait on anybody and that has been my view on climate change issues, on reparations, on loss and damage. We’re going to fight to get them, but we’re not waiting on them and therefore, in our resource plan we believe in building buffers in our budget.
What does that mean? There are really two types of events that could occur, one would be a high frequency low severity event caused by climate change so, you could have a consistent period of heavy rains. It will cause some localized damage, floods, crop loss, some housing damage, roads damaged so that’s high frequency, low impact, low severity and then you have some events caused by climate change that are low frequency. The probability of them happening is low and it may happen once every hundred years, but the impact of it is so great that it could wipe out your entire GDP.
The problem with climate change, however, is that the hundred-year event is now happening every 10 or 20 years. And the problem with climate change is that the 100-year event that is now happening every 10 or 20 years, it is overlapping so you have high frequency, low severity events overlapping with low frequency but high severity events.
In other words, you could have heavy rains, heavy rains, heavy rains, little floods, road break away and then you have a big hurricane so the complexity of why the common man must not just say climate change don’t affect me. It affects you every single day, so governments have to think about this and plan for it. The average person doesn’t realize the asset you have in this government because we have taken an entirely different approach to the management of your affairs. What we have done is to create buffers in our budget to be able to address the high frequency but low severity events.
Previously, what used to happen when we were affected by low severity, high frequency events or any event at all? Can anybody tell me? We used to borrow and then you wonder why the debt is so high. Clearly, there are other reasons why the debt became high but a large part of why the debt became high was because we were always being hit by these weather events and we can’t budget for it because we don’t have the economic growth to do it so we have to go and borrow, and every storm, every rain, every flood, every road that got washed away; there is some borrowing that takes place. So, you see why managing climate change is important?
What we have done now is to put buffers in our budget. We have a Disaster Recovery Fund, and we have a contingency and every year we put to that. So before, what we used to do was to take from the future revenues and consume it today to deal with today’s threat, and that is effectively borrowing. What we are doing is taking the future taxes that these students here would pay when they grow up and become employed and become productive citizens to pay for the challenges that we are experiencing today. Now, they are going to be left with the burden of not only today’s challenges, but the challenges that they will face in the future. What we have done is to take today’s savings and put it aside so that when they have an event in the future, they can call on the savings that we left for them. That is what we mean by putting a buffer. It’s biblical. It’s putting aside the corn for seven years. We have never been in a position to do that before.
Does the common man appreciate that? Is that something that he will vote for? That’s what we face, right? Because as far as he’s concerned, I’m only worried about my road and I want my road fixed now but not seeing the complexities that go into ensuring that his road can be fixed. And that’s why we have universities. And that’s why I’m here today, because it’s the universities that need to get these complex issues to the common man.
The role of the university is not to keep knowledge circulating in its halls. It’s to circulate the knowledge outside the society to combat the high level of misinformation and ignorance that exists. We spend billions of dollars every year on our universities, and they do great work, but it is trapped inside textbooks and their computers and within their campuses. It needs to get out there to the common person so that they become informed voters.
We have also developed risk transfer mechanisms to deal with the low frequency, high severity events and that would be participating in the insurance schemes like the CCRIF, (Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility) but we did an innovative one. We had a catastrophe bond, we’re the first Caribbean country to issue one and it has been very successful. If a major event were to occur, we would have access immediately to a high level of financing to be able to address it.
People say Jamaica is not going in the right direction, stop talking foolishness. Don’t talk what you don’t know. Jamaica has changed in fundamental ways. We have addressed the issue of Jamaica being able to withstand multiple crises happening all at once; crisis that are not just low severity, but high severity, crises that are overlapping. Let’s talk about the last eight years. Almost every two years you have had a major rainfall event that has destroyed our roads. Just reflect, almost like clockwork then we have had a pandemic, several major tropical storms, and we have had Beryl, and they are all overlapping. We’ve just come out of Beryl, and now look at the number of rains that we have had. There are some areas that have been localized, videos circulating in St James where you had a massive, just out of nowhere, heavy rain that damaged properties.
Now, just think of it, could we repair all of those roads that were damaged all at once? Just look at the heavy rains that we have had and the impact on the roads, you begin then to understand how climate change impacts your lives. But let’s look at another impact of climate change, drought. Think about it, when you look at the rainfall patterns, the northeastern end of the island would get the highest level of rainfall. I’ve seen data, which is suggesting that that has shifted, that the northeastern end is not getting as much rainfall as it used to get. The droughts are longer and more intense so when you are quarrelling about your water, it’s not a government that doesn’t care to give you water, that’s not the issue. Sometimes the question is, where is the water source and how do we get the water from where it is to where you choose to live?
These are planning issues that UTECH needs to be speaking on to explain to people that if you choose to go live way up in some top of the hill where there’s no water, the cost it’s going to take for us to move water from where it is to you is uneconomical and therefore the issue in dealing with climate change is also a settlement issue where you choose to live but our universities don’t get into this conversation to get people to understand that you have to be making the proper choices as citizens.
I give you the situation in Negril recently. Our major tourist area, big problem with water and a part of the issue was that the source dried up. Now, the sources will change where they are because sometimes the tree covers- people cut down the trees, mining, all kinds of issues that disrupt the natural hydrological flows. So, climate change, and then of course the disruption in the rainfall patterns, affects us every day. You talk about the heat and the time is hotter. I agree with you, Mr President. My perspective when I was growing up, time was never so hot but I’m speaking anecdotally, I don’t have the evidence. That is why we need the universities now; somebody go do a study on it and publish it so we can see it.
Yesterday I toured the Montego Bay Bypass, the Perimeter Road Project, massive project. And that project, we ensured that it was built to resilience, it was built to withstand a hundred-year event. Reinforcements, culverts, the path that we chose, the corridor; all of that we did just to ensure that it can withstand so if anything were to happen to our roads on the shoreline, which these are decisions taken centuries ago, we will have roads on the interior at higher ground where we can continue to navigate and travel. So, if you notice, we are building our roads, we are carrying them in as much as we can. The South Coast Road Improvement Project, which still skirts the coast of St Thomas, as much as possible, we have tried to realign and we’re going to realign even further when we do the bypass for Portland.
From a development and spatial management strategy, Jamaica must move its roads to higher ground and inland and we’re doing that right now. So, if there were to be a catastrophic event where our shoreline roads are affected, we would still be able to move. Now for the common man, he doesn’t care about that. He’s quarrelling about his road not fixed, but not seeing that there are existential threats that we have to address now. And as we address those existential threats in building these highways, it is to ensure that Jamaica can continue if an existential threat were to materialize.
So yes, we announced a SPARK Programme to fix your local roads, but we have to continue building these highways because there are risks involved. And you just need to look at what has happened in Miami recently where a storm just formed out of nowhere in the Yucatan Peninsula there and how it just flooded out. What happened there is just crazy, one right after the other but consider the impact on the United States. Barely a blip but consider if that were to happen to Jamaica. It would have wiped out our GDP so don’t believe that these existential threats can’t materialize. As far as I’m concerned, it’s God who saved us so we must use the reprieve to make wise decisions, not foolish short-term decisions and that’s what we have been doing.
Look at all our infrastructure projects. Just look at every one of them. If a natural disaster were to happen, that pose an existential threat, we could still continue to have economic activity. We don’t get credit for that. Nobody sees it in that way but that is what we’re doing, and that’s the right thing for Jamaica given this context of the threat of climate change. The last point I wanted to make on this matter, just to make the connections with why climate change is so important.
We toured the Perimeter Road Project in Montego Bay yesterday and one of the lasting legacies of that project is that we built a testing lab for a materials testing lab and whilst we were there, we were discussing asphalt, and roadways, and the various tests that we should do and one of them we were looking at is the life of the asphalt. They have a machine that they can heat up the asphalt and it will tell you how long it will last based upon heat exposure and so forth. Now, the hotter the time is, the greater the exposure to sun will determine the useful life of the surface.
So yes, there is always this issue of the quality of work and the quality of material use but please when we are talking about our roads also talk about the change in the temperature and how that will affect the wearing life of the surface laid. And that is something that we now need to internalize to figure out what standard we need to use, what kind of change in composition of the asphalt we lay we need and that’s where our universities come in. That’s where particularly a university like UTEC come in, that you need to be studying these things to say based upon the impact of climate change your roads are going to have more water events and much more heat and therefore what is the appropriate standard that we should be building at or what material changes we need to make.
So, Ms Joyce, the road in front of your house that is damaged, a part of that is climate change. Mr Mack, you quarrelled with me about the water, a part of that is the climate change. And so, as you form your political view and as you form and become part of what is called the political economy, you should get information on those things to inform your outlook and your perspective, very important.
I don’t know if you’re still happy that you invited me to this conference, but I took it because I wanted to have this conversation and I’m happy that I did. And you have been a lovely audience, and I hope that you have been enlightened in even the smallest way about the impact of climate change.
God bless you and thank you.