Sustainable energy a pressing concern
Fri, 05/20/2016 - 12:00am
By:
Patricia Thangaraj
One of the most pressing concerns as it relates to the region’s development landscape is that of sustainable energy.
This is coming from the Executive Director of the Caribbean Policy Development Centre (CPDC), Shantal Munro-Knight, who delivered remarks at the opening of the CPDC CARICOM National Policy Dialogue on Renewable Energy held at the Barbados Coalition of Service Industries (BCSI), yesterday.
“This is a regional process, so it is currently involved. We started this initiative as a pilot initiative in six countries and I am happy to say that we would be expanding the initiative, but it was started as a pilot... and so we have about eight organisations that are currently participating, six countries and two regional organisations that are members of the CCWG and working,” she revealed.
The main aim was to examine areas of concern that are affecting Barbados and the rest of the Caribbean and they thought that things such as poverty or issues facing vulnerable groups like women would have been at the forefront of their agenda.
“Interestingly, one of the things that we were trying to do with this grouping is to say, ‘let’s look at the region’s development landscape and see what is the kind of key and most important issues, pressing development issues that is facing and confronting our society. Many of you again when you think about traditional social science, you would have said that they should have thought about poverty, they should have thought about women, you know, all of the traditional things that we feel that we as civil society would automatically think about,” she pointed out.
However, they were astonished to learn that it was actually sustainable energy that was of the greatest concern to them.
“And it surprised us as well that this grouping said that the most fundamental and pressing issue facing the region for them was the issue of sustainable energy. How were we going to be able to tackle that issue or package it in a way that would enable the lives of citizens?” she queried.
There were also concerns about issues of the environment and its impact and how do they get citizens’ voices to be heard with the knowledge of the various agreements that would have been signed in the international arena such as the critical climate change agreement that was signed in Paris in 2014 and the 2030 Agenda signed in September last year in New York among others, all of which brought to the fore issues that the region is faced with.
“All of these are processes highlighted particularly for countries like Barbados and the rest of the Caribbean, the issue of sustainable energy and you know all of those other contextual things were going to be critical in there.”