Climate Change and what Barbados is doing Maxime Beaugrand is a French lawyer with the international (non government organisation) NGO IGSD (the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development), and is in charge of the Paris office. What does IGSD do? IGSD is an international NGO working on strategies to reduce the impacts of climate change. As the world is facing a risk to see unmanageable impacts and points of no return (such as for instance the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet), IGSD is focusing on the strategies available to slow climate warming in the near term to 2050. These strategies focus on reducing super climate pollutants such as methane, and harmful refrigerants used in airconditioners and cooling systems while making sure the systems are energy efficient. In the course of this work, IGSD has been working with leading governments for decades to explain and deploy these strategies, and recently with Barbados.
Why Barbados? Under the leadership of its Prime Minister Mia Mottley, Barbados is a leading voice for the populations most vulnerable to climate change impacts including islands such as Barbados, in a region where temperatures and sea levels will rise the most. This vulnerability makes it imperative that impacts are delayed as much as possible. Prime Minister Mottley’s leadership has been a game changer of the international finance conversation, with the Bridgetown initiative, a proposal to rethink international finance and make it fit to support the transformation needed in the face of the climate emergency for the vulnerable and for the world. Again, later this month, Barbados will show leadership by hosting an international event related to climate change: a historic hearing of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights from the 21 to 23rd of April. A little bit of the context: the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has been asked by two countries, Colombia and Chile, to give its opinion (referred to as an “advisory Opinion”) on the following question: What are the obligations of countries in the face of the climate emergency and how delay in addressing the
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climate emergency is breaching human rights. To help respond to this question and related ones, the Court has invited countries, civil society, NGOs, think tanks, UN bodies and agencies, experts and academic institutions to submit their opinion and answer questions during two sets of hearings. The first hearing will happen during three days in Barbados, while the other will happen in the heart of the Amazon, in Brazil, at the end of May. This is an historic opportunity for the international judicial system to give its legal opinion on the state of the climate emergency and what is required from countries to slow climate warming in the near term to prevent catastrophic impacts and protect the human right to resilience.