Benefits of Dominica’s climate-resilient development strategy explained

Romelli

Dominica’s Low-Carbon Climate-Resilient Development Strategy will promote low carbon growth, sustainable development, tackle poverty, and facilitate a range of other activities, according to Consultant George Romelli who helped develop the strategy.

He says the document which is being used to encourage international donors meeting here over the next three days, is intended as well to help promote exports and the growth of the island’s productive sectors.

“It’s not just the technocrats saying yes we must look at the climate change risks, it’s also the people who say how do we address the needs of the everyday people, how do we address the concerns of food security, livelihoods, how do we address poverty, education, health issues,” he told reporters at a news conference on Tuesday ahead of the international donors conference being held from 21st to 23rd March.

The document speaks to Dominica having a green economy by 2020, and the consultant says the idea is to “help transform the way we do things in Dominica”.

He said while Dominica was fortunate to be in a position of being carbon-neutral, the country was losing forest lands “because of natural events, because of human events”.

According to Romelli, the government “is hard pressed to finance just existing development programmes, let alone these new incremental costs” he said were the result of climate change.

He described the strategy document as the government’s roadmap to underscore how it intends to address “these very pressing issues within the national development context”.

“Climate change is an issue which everyone has to deal with, but the global community has made it quite clear over the last two years they are providing financing to help those governments that cannot manage the very complex problems with their own resources,” Romelli said.

He sees the three-day international donors meeting here as an opportunity for the government to meet with development partners to acquaint them with its development strategy in a bid to attract the funding necessary “to make this roadmap a reality”.

He said the challenge was to ensure that the donors do come forward “with the commitments they said in the last two years that they are making available”.

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5 Comments

  1. Law and order
    March 21, 2012

    Well what do you know, the people who have polluted the world ,telling us how not to pollute Dominic, which is one of the most unpolluted places on earth.When we failed to take our destiny in our hands we gave it away.

  2. simple mind
    March 21, 2012

    “help transform the way we do things in Dominica”;hope the strategy will assist in alleviate poverty and not only facilitate the rich….as we get poorer we cant help but seeing through our own eyes,the eyes of the poor.

  3. Anonymous
    March 21, 2012

    …..consultant says the idea is to “help transform the way we do things in Dominica”. Not a citizen of the country but using the term “we”. I wonder why???

  4. Malatete
    March 21, 2012

    Ironic, whilst reading this they are advertising on the radio for plastic cutlery and styrofoam containers for convenience- & take-out food and drinks. Stop the import of these materials and replace them with biodegradable products, such as carboard and paper. And, can’t we produce simple cutlery out of bamboo for instance, creating local employment at the same time?

    • Mahaut Boi
      March 21, 2012

      what actually needs to happen is that marijuana ought to be legalized for reasons of economic growth, health, and to set us up to become a lower carbon producing country.

      if we legalize marijuana it means we effectively legalize hemp. that being said we could make our own biodegrable plastic. mix the hemp with lime and have a cheaper (just as functional) alternative to concrete. marijuana plants require far less water and land to grow than most crops and we could make hemp clothing and hemp newspapers.

      having these things – such as hemp plastic/concrete or clothing would allow us to SIGNIFICANTLY reduce our demand for landfills etc. it would save us money on importation, create many new industries and thus a lot of employment.

      we would be considered pioneers for this, at least in the caribbean since countries like canada, austrailia and france are already starting investments in this.

      we would have less gang related affairs as marijuana is one of the top drugs sold region wide. this would additionally fuction as a deterrent. not having to buy marijuana through a dealer who pushes harder drugs like cocaine would make marijuana less of a gateway drug.

      also food consumption will probably go up which stimulates our economy and is good for our farmers. we would make a lot of money from intrigued tourists who want to go to marijuana cafes. this would all be a dramatic improvement both to our economy and environment.

      the dutch have already legalized this and they have no problems with abuse of the drug (not that u can really abuse marijuana since u cannot die from it aka impossible to overdose #look it up). dutch citizens are also considered to have matured away from consumption of the drug yet profit massively from the tourists.

      it cures many illnesses but that is already well known.

      lastly it probably wouldnt result in a spike of marijuana consumption because our police force does very little to really monitor the drug and marijuana transactions are currently done back home very openly and without fear.

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