Vanuatu is a small independent island state in the Pacific. Its small population faces an insoluble problem. It is not a problem of economic development. It is not a problem of social or political conflict among its people. Vanuatu is not being subjected to aggression, nobody wants it. Its problem is quite simply and tragically that the entire state of Vanuatu at a foreseeable date, perhaps not more than twenty years hence, will disappear under the ocean as a result of world wide ocean rise. The people of Vanuatu want to know who will take them in , what plans can be made for their resettlement.

The Vanuatu predicament is shared by other islands in the Pacific and the Indian ocean. Several of the outer islands of the Caribbean will succumb. Most Caribbean states may lose their invaluable coastal zones. The coral reefs will disappear. These reefs provide for fisheries, bio-diversity, coastal protection and are a major tourist attraction bringing into the Caribbean l00 million US dollars annually.

Not only islands will be affected but all low lying areas. President Clinton in his Dimbleby BBC lecture mentioned that at least fifty feet of perhaps the most valuable property in the world, Manhattan, will be lost to ocean rise. Guyana's low lying coastlands may suffer irreparable damage.

Ocean rise is an effect of global warming. The solar ice caps and other frozen areas are melting and releasing vast quantities of additional water into the oceans. Ocean rise is part of the wider phenomena of climate change with fundamental alteration in weather patterns including temperature and rainfall.

Guyana may suffer severe effects of climate change. Climate changes may threaten and destroy the sea defences. It could reduce the productivity of the vital export industries of sugar and rice. It could threaten the coastal structure including roads and buildings upon which life on the coastland has been painstakingly built up over the centuries. And there is some evidence that the effects are already being felt.

But to back up. There has been before in the earth's history global climate change. One such change destroyed the dinosaurs. However, current climate change is man-made; the human species is engaged in destroying its own habitat.

Greenhouse gases which mainly derive from the use of fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas, and coal which provide energy for industry, motor cars and households are blanketing the earth preventing solar heat from radiating back into space. This is the main cause of human activated global warming. More than half of all the greenhouse gases are produced by the industrial countries, the major emitter being the USA.

Against this background, more than a hundred countries met in Kyoto, Japan in l997 and agreed in the Kyoto Protocol to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by just over 5% below the l990 levels within fifteen years. At that meeting the President of the small Pacific State of Nauru had warned that the wilful destruction, with foreknowledge, of entire countries and cultures represents an unspeakable crime against humanity.

Kyoto was a start but it was in trouble almost from the beginning. As one of the first acts of his presidency, George Bush announced US withdrawal from the treaty on the grounds that it threatened US industry. There was a universal outcry against such US action. The European Union in particular decided to save Kyoto. At meetings last year in Bonn and in Marrakesh, in Morocco, nearly every country in the world but excluding the USA reached agreement on how to enforce the Kyoto Accord on tackling climate change.

The Guyana Government has shown commendable vision in taking urgent steps to ratify the Kyoto Accord which is already before parliament.

But even if the measures now agreed are put into place, it will take a long time, more than 50 years, before global warming could be halted. In the meantime, Guyana must begin at once to plan on how to cope with the harmful effect of climate change.

There is already much information available. In l989 a Commonwealth Study Group on climate change included in its membership the distinguished Guyanese engineer Bobby Camacho who was very familiar with the problems of Guyana's sea defences. The Commonwealth group in line with Camachos' studies found that because of sea level rise what is at stake in the case of Guyana "is almost the entire agricultural output of the coastal area - sugar, rice and other crops and those processing activities dependent on it".

The study underlined two key points as follows:

"The first is that anticipatory planning and a staged programme of works accompanied by continued monitoring and feasibility analyses are much preferable both to doing nothing - and suffering the costs of flooding - or to belated, once for all construction projects. Second, it is possible, using local experience and expertise in constructing sea defence and drainage systems, to improvise relatively inexpensive but effective protection".

Is this approach being followed?

More recently an OAS study on Caribbean Planning for Adaptation to Global Climate Change has likewise drawn attention to Guyana's vulnerability. This OAS study notes that there have been

steady increases in temperature and that since l960 there has been a steady decrease in rainfall.

The UN panel on climate change has predicted that there will be a general reduction in crop yields for tropical areas due to increases in temperature. Surely such changes will have, must be already having effects on sugar and rice and village crop production. While the sugar industry has significant control over storage and use of water, this is less the case with rice or with village agriculture.

Surely the rate of sea level rise which in the case of Guyana is estimated by the OAS study at about five times the global average and the prevailing new patterns of temperature and rainfall require that long range planning should begin at once. And this is not only a matter for Government. Despite their concern with the immediate issues of wages and costs and markets such bodies as GAWU and NAACIE and the Rice Producers Association must begin to interest themselves in such strategic questions.

Bobby Camacho who as already noted did the studies on Guyana for the Commonwealth Group on Climate Change is an internationally respected authority on sea defences and irrigation. Should not attention be paid to his findings made some twelve years ago? Can we ignore except at our own peril the information marshalled by the OAS team? There is already mounting evidence of perilous climate change - the increasing ferocity of hurricanes such as those which devastated Central America, the floods in Mozambique, the cyclone that killed 30,000 people in the state of Orissa in India in l999 and so on.

Witness also the enormous diplomatic effort which the Member States of the European Union put into the rescue of the Kyoto Protocol, despite the mounting hostility of the US.

While we may not suffer the impending fate of Vanuatu, it is possible that there could be vast destruction of the economy of Guyana. One should not easily forget the TV images of the devastating power of flood waters when a dam or dike breaks as recently on the east coast.

Planning is not a strong point in the administration. The Ministry of Planning and Economic Development which is of over-arching importance is still to be established. The National Development Strategy, in gestation for nearly a decade, is still to reach Parliament and as far as one can make out does not deal with the effects of climate change.

A special working group under the leadership of the Environmental Protection Agency and reporting direct to the president should be established at once, and charged with the urgent responsibility of producing a framework which identifies areas for further study and action.

It is more than likely that special funds could become available for international agencies to cope with Climate Change especially after the Kyoto Protocol becomes operational in September this year.