PRESIDENT Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali has touched on an important aspect of our national development during his address on the launch of the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) 2030 for public consultation. The President spoke of the need to strike a balance between optimising our potential to create wealth and ensuring that the creation and optimisation of that wealth is done in an environmentally safe and sustainable manner. This is all the more necessary as the country has now become an oil-producing nation.

The LCDS was the brainchild of then President and current Vice-President Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo and it came into being in 2009. That was over a decade before oil was discovered in commercial quantities and it is now necessary for the strategy to be updated to reflect the new and changing realities. The first LCDS emanated from wide-ranging consultations from a wide cross-section of the Guyanese people and was fully reflective of the views and opinions of the entire country, right across the ethnic, political and geographic divides.

This new round of consultations would be no different and even though the context has changed with the emergence of oil and gas, the PPP/C administration is still committed to a low-carbon development trajectory. In fact, as indicated by President Ali, Guyana still remains a low-carbon economy and ranks among the lowest carbon economies in the world.

The President reiterated his administration’s intention to pursue strong policies to ensure that the oil and gas sector operates within the framework of international standards. Several measures are being implemented to ensure that there is adequate protection against environmental pollution, including the elimination of flaring from oil production, except in the case of genuine emergencies.

According to the President, when the PPP/C took office in 2020, there were no safeguards in place to prevent flaring and it was left to the new administration to introduce taxes on flaring, one of few countries in the world to do so. In addition, new measures have been introduced to ensure that all waste management becomes the responsibility of the oil producer, in keeping with international industry standards. Further, Guyana will work with other oil producers to explore and promote the use of lower-carbon technological innovation such as the use of renewable energy in oil production, carbon-capture utilisation and storage and to the extent possible, “green” hydrogen.

These are all forward-looking initiatives on the part of the President and his PPP/C administration, for which full credit must be given. The optimisation of revenues from oil and gas is important for us as a developing country to raise living and working conditions, but it must be done in a manner that is consistent with global policies aimed at creating a level playing field that aligns the global market place with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.