ECCB Governor calls for global recognition of climate change

Timothy Antoine, Governor of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB) believes that the “The immediate task is that we must convince the rest of the world to get on board and fight climate change because it is real.”

He also argued, “We have to address this analytical absurdity and this callous classification that these small poor vulnerable countries are high income and cannot qualify for grants and concessionary finance.”

The ECCB Governor was speaking at the Bitt seminar entitled, “Central Bank Meets Blockchain” at Hilton Resort, but against the backdrop of the recent devastation caused by hurricanes in the region he used the platform to indicate, “The most immediate challenge we have right now is to convince the rest of the world, that are doubting, that climate change is indeed real. We have an urgent task to ensure that everybody gets it, looks at it. The US just got the worst storm in history and in the region we got hit with Category 5 Hurricanes. Therefore, the immediate task for us, is to convince those that are still on the fence and those that are doubting that Climate Change is real, and we have to do something about it as a community. It is not enough for the Caribbean to care about it because we by ourselves cannot make changes but the fact is that we are the most affected victims, so we need to get the rest of the world to pay attention.

"I am emotional because three of my members are hurting and I’m hurting with them. We had a direct hit in Dominica, Anguilla and Barbuda. They are our bothers and are disasters and if anything I have extra motivation to move to transformation because that is what these countries need at this time. You can’t put back the old infrastructure that they had because they can’t withstand another Category 5 hurricane and everything we heard about climate change tells us that these incidents will occur maybe more frequently – so what are we going to do?”

Antoine added another concern, “At this moment this region is averaging less that two per cent growth per annum; we need to get to at least five per cent – that is the goal of the ECCB. How are we going to get there? Before Hurricane Irma & Maria, we were talking how we can attain five per cent and sustain it; create 60 thousand jobs over the next eight years because that is what we need to get to single digit unemployment. Last year we were at 2.6 per cent, now we have to rebuild” (NB)