President Bharrat Jagdeo leaves Guyana tomorrow for a two-day meeting in London with his colleague members of the high-level panel organised by United Nations (UN) Secretary General Ban-ki-moon to advise on financing for countries in the fight against climate change. Speaking to the media at a press conference yesterday at the Office of the President, the Head of State said the panel will include the four appointed heads of Government (himself, the Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom, Ethiopia and Norway) and a number of finance ministers and others from the ‘big’ countries.
The highlight of the agenda, the President said, will be to design ways to raise US$100B per annum by the year 2020 for climate related purposes. He said however that he will make it his personal duty to show how this can be achieved.
The $100B per annum fund was among the four goals which President Jagdeo had highlighted in his address at the 15th Conference of Parties (COP 15) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen, Denmark.
“I hope to push this further there, because frankly speaking, I think I have to represent more the interest of the developing world in this committee which is stacked largely by big countries,” President Jagdeo said.
President Jagdeo’s appointment to the panel confirms Guyana’s presence on the world stage and the opportunity of a small country to influence global dialogue and mobilisation efforts on combating climate change.
The work of the panel is seen as critical to the recently held UNFCCC meeting in Copenhagen and the follow up slated for Mexico later this year.
President Jagdeo’s lobbying efforts in the fight against climate change gained him international recognition as a hero of the environment, a pioneer in efforts on avoided deforestation policies and the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS)
Lobbying efforts in Copenhagen enabled the expansion of the Reduced Emissions on Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) initiative to include countries, such as Guyana, that have low levels of deforestation.
This new initiative, REDD+, includes cutting deforestation rates, conservation of forest stocks, sustainable forestry management, and expansion of forest stock.
Guyana also succeeded in sealing a cooperation deal with Norway for the receipt of US$250M by 2015 in performance-based payments.
It represents one of the first attempts between a developed and a developing country to work together to implement a national scale model on how forests can be deployed to address climate change without compromising sovereignty or national development priorities. (GINA)