By Elishya Perera
The United Kingdom publicly commended Jamaica for its efforts to curb the impacts of climate change.
During the 4th annual members forum of the NDC partnership, which was held on Thursday (Dec 7), Lord Martin Callanan, minister of climate change and corporate responsibility for the UK said, “Jamaica remains a bastion of climate ambition in spite of the circumstances of this year.”
The UK and Jamaica were appointed as co-chairs of the partnership during the forum, and will serve for a term of two years.
Callanan said it was imperative in placing climate action at the heart of the post-pandemic recovery. “The UK is proud to have the opportunity to build on the success of our predecessors. But we still all need to raise our game; put more ambition on the table, mobilise more finance and investment, and build back from the pandemic and recession by putting climate action at the heart of our development,” he said.
Callanan’s Jamaican counterpart and the Caribbean nation’s Minister of Housing, Urban Renewal, Environment and Climate Change, Pearnel Charles Jr., made a similar argument, calling on governments to include climate action into every aspect of their national budgets and programmes.
“The partnership has mobilised around a billion dollars for action in our member countries. This is worthy of recognition, but we need to raise this by orders of magnitude if we are really going to build the sustainable future we need. This means bringing in new actors and new sources of finance,” Charles said.
The members of the NDC Partnership are countries which have made commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and have submitted Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) which set out strategies to achieve these commitments.
Jamaica first submitted its NDCs to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2015. According to the updated submission made this summer, by 2030, the Caribbean nation foresees emission reductions covering the energy and land use sectors of between 25.4 per cent and 28.5 per cent, relative to a business-as-usual scenario.
