With her Guyana 2050 Scenarios Project, Sustainable Development Master student Ana Correia hopes to get Guyanese thinking and talking about the country’s future.
“I wouldn’t say I’m optimistic about our future. I’m hopeful though,” says Correia, who has used interviews she has conducted to construct four possible scenarios that could play out over the next three decades.
“…I don’t want people to read the scenarios and simply pick one. That’s not the point of the experiment. The scenarios illustrate trade-offs. I want people to read the scenarios and pick the parts of each that they want for Guyana so that we can start constructing a vision that truly speaks to and represents us and start finding ways to make that vision real,” she explains.
They are not all happy outcomes as another great flood, albeit with more devastating effects, and an oil market crash feature in all of them. Correia says these were indicated by the majority of the interviewees as likely events to happen in our 30-year future. “It makes sense though, because with humanity’s inability to curb climate change, sea levels will continue to rise. We’re seeing it here already. There is coastal flooding happening at an unprecedented scale and none of the attempts made so far to remedy the breaches have been successful. Yet we seem intent on repeating the same strategy (dumping rip rap in the mud where it sinks and becomes ineffective) hoping for a different result. That’s if the water comes from the ocean. If it comes from the rain, it has nowhere to go because our drainage system is clogged with garbage. It’s madness. We’re essentially sitting in an empty swimming pool in a tropical rainforest next to the ocean, crossing our fingers that no water finds us,” she explains.
According to Correia, the oil market is notoriously volatile and only getting more volatile as the world starts to phase out of fossil fuels and into renewables. “The oil market is also extremely susceptible to geopolitics and we’re sitting right next door to a failed state that insists our land is theirs, and a mega-country with the South-American Donald Trump as their president. It’s extremely risky. There have been five major oil market crashes in the last 30 years with the most recent being due to the pandemic. As the world continues to heat up politically, it’s just silly to think that it won’t happen again,” she adds.
She herself sees the “Greasy Palms” scenario that is presented as being the most likely outcome due to what she suggests is a national tendency to value quick economic prosperity over truly sustainable development and complacency when it comes to corruption.
Correia began her research in March and she notes that the controversy that ensued over the results of the country’s March 2nd polls impacted participants’ views on the future. In the first set of interviews, many were optimistic about the future because of oil. “People’s priorities were on development plans, education, and getting rid of corruption because that was seen as our biggest threat to success. As the controversy continued and it became clear it wasn’t just a delay in the tabulation of votes but an actual attempt to rig the election, most started to believe our dissolution into a dictatorship was inevitable. Priorities were on democracy,” she explains. “As the ethnic tension worsened, priorities shifted to national unity and bridging the divide because people felt that racism and our inability to work together for Guyana’s collective benefit would be our downfall,” she adds.
Correia believes addressing our ethnic and political divide is “100% necessary” for Guyana to progress and achieve sustainable development. “We have to respect and trust each other to be able to collaborate on a shared vision. A vision for a country cannot be considered legitimate if only half of the perspectives and values within that country were considered when crafting it. If half of our people are left out of that activity, half of the country will be disenfranchised and any moves made will not be sustainable because they will be opposed by 50% of the population. Our tribalism will cripple us. Not to mention it’s just plain ugly,” she says.
