The UN recently released a report stating that millions of people living in coastal areas around the Caribbean and Latin America will have to contend with major risks to healthcare and infrastructure in the face of the more severe weather events brought by climate change. There were over 1,400 key hospitals located in low-lying coastal areas, said the report, and these accounted for over 80% of hospitals in the nations of Suriname, Guyana and The Bahamas, as well as the territories of Aruba and the Cayman Islands.
We don’t need any UN report to tell us of the danger we are in, and both the government and the opposition understand the realities. But our problem goes well beyond hospitals and key infrastructure. Leaving aside Venezuela, the effects of climate change represent the greatest existential threat to the future of this country there is, although no one would think so the way our politicians behave. As things stand we have seventy-odd miles of built sea defences, while huge swathes of our coast where most of our population lives lie below high-tide level.
Georgetown is particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels, and as one drainage engineer observed, if you were going to select a site for a capital nowadays it wouldn’t be where the city currently stands. But of course when the British selected the location in 1781, they did not have flooding and drainage issues on their minds; they saw only military advantages. One year later the French succeeded them, and presumably thinking along the same lines as the British they actually did some construction work. When the Dutch returned in 1784, they just accepted the site as a fait accompli, and abandoned their earlier plans to build a new capital on the East Bank.
Periodically letters appear in this newspaper advocating the relocation of the capital inland on the assumption that in due course Georgetown would disappear beneath the waves. Moving the capital along with its population and institutions as opposed to creating a new centre of government are entirely different notions. When Brazil created Brasilia there was no intention of moving Rio de Janeiro there; it is just that the latter was no longer the national capital. The same is true of Nigeria, which built Abuja as the government centre, while Lagos, the former capital is still its largest city. Similarly with Naypyidaw and Yangon (Rangoon) in Myanmar.
President Irfaan Ali is indulging his dream of building a city up the highway, although details concerning it have been scant, and the public really doesn’t know what it will look like or what its economic foundation will be. While he has casually mentioned climate change as one of the reasons for creating the whimsically named Silica City, he has not said whether it will replace Georgetown, or if not, how it will relate to Georgetown.
However, as already said our problem of rising sea levels goes well beyond the question of the capital. Huge sections of our population live in vulnerable coastal areas where agriculture constitutes the main source of income. We already live in a hydraulic society, and have been managing the water in our local environment going back into Amerindian times. At one stage the Arawaks of the coast created raised fields along with drainage canals where they farmed, although why they abandoned the system has not yet been determined by archaeologists.
Climate scientists tell us that when the sea level rises, the groundwater rises too and the flooding risk increases. This is in addition to the changing weather patterns which are a consequence of climate change and the floods which can follow excess rainfall. In that connection many of us have not forgotten the devastating floods of 2005. But our current system of keeping the sea out at the same time as managing and expelling excess land water will come under increasing challenge.
It was the Dutch who were the first Europeans to establish themselves here, and perhaps it is something of an irony that they should have chosen a portion of this continent which is so similar to their own homeland. That said, when they first settled here, they went a good way up the Rivers Essequibo and Berbice; it took them more than a hundred years before they started to venture down to the coast.
In the low-lying Netherlands they have been building sea walls (dikes) and empoldering land for centuries, and in addition to their massive reclamation project now underway in the Zuider Zee they are all too conscious of the danger rising sea levels represent. In March this year the NL Times cited a report by the Netherlands Delta Commissioner which said that the country could keep itself safe either with higher dikes and heavier pumping stations, or a massive dam in the North Sea, or by moving along with the water. The media house said that the report had been drawn up for the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, and the Delta Commissioner had worked with consultancy firms, scientists, government and social organizations to produce it.
The report operated on a sea level rise of two to five meters, and the first option involved continuing with the existing approach for as long as possible but making the dikes higher and wider and the polders deeper. Eventually, however, two rivers might have to be dammed which would have ecological consequences and require increasingly stronger pumping stations so the nation did not fill up with rain and river water.
The second option was for a massive dam and lake off the Dutch coast into which the rivers would flow before flowing into the sea. This too would eventually need strong pumping stations. Where the third option was concerned the report was quoted as saying: “Think of elevated or floating housing, salt-tolerating agriculture, and a shift of investments to the upper Netherlands.” The good news, it was said, was that the Netherlands still had time to choose, while the Infrastructure Minister added, “That time is also needed to gather more knowledge and to prepare our country for the big choices we will make in the future.”
Our politicians have no vision; any of them. What are our options if sea levels rise between two and five metres? None of them knows; none of them has thought about it; and none of them has proposed the commissioning of an in-depth report utilising the expertise of foreign scientists and specialists as well as our own hydraulic engineers and others. Why are we throwing all this money at coastal infrastructure without knowing what our options are, and what we might have to expend in the not-too-distant future to maintain life on the coastal strip including the capital?
President Ali’s only vision has been ‘One Guyana’, and some vague, undefined concept of unity. Yet while this is being promoted all over the country his government is engaging in divisive tactics, calumniating all manner of people perceived to be critics, especially the opposition. Not, it must be emphasized, that they have displayed any vision either where climate change is concerned.
The good news is that if the Netherlands still thinks it has time to decide what to do, then so probably does Guyana. Will the government’s leading political exponents lift their noses out of the vituperation playbook and put their minds to a truly national issue which affects all our futures. They have tried to do it with Venezuela, and this should now be extended to encompass the problem of rising sea levels and our coastal existence as well.
Everyone is tired of the abuse and pettiness and vindictiveness; now is the time to explain to the population that our future is under threat, not from other politicians, but from climate change. Citizens should be assured that a report will be undertaken employing the best minds in the field to look at the possibilities – or otherwise – for adaptation, and that they will be informed of the findings so a national conversation on these can then be conducted. Everyone awaits a government response.
