2nd CARICOM Climate Change conference ends

Still on environmental news, the Second Caribbean Community Conference on Climate Change ended this week in St. Lucia with Secretary General Edwin Carrington calling for the expedition of the Climate Change strategic and action plans. The draft plan developed by the CARICOM Climate Change Centre here in Belize, is awaiting endorsement from the Council for Economic Trade and Development before it is submitted to the Conference of Heads of Government for final approval in July. The document seeks to mainstream critical issues related to the impact of Climate Change on the Region. The purpose of the conference was to evaluate the outcomes of the Mainstreaming Adaptation to Climate Change project which comes to an end next Tuesday and to share best practices with stakeholders and development partners in the region. That project, which was funded by the World Bank and the Global Environmental Facility, received thumbs up from the World Bank, for work in upgrading and networking of the climate and sea-level monitoring infrastructure, the strengthening of the Coral Reef Warning Systems monitoring network , and capacity strengthening both nationally and regionally. Since its establishment in Belize in 2005, the Climate Change Centre has been headed by Executive Director, Dr. Kenrick Leslie. The next major event on the calendar for the C.C.C.C. is the fifteenth Conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, set for December 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Leslie hopes that at that conference, they will come away with an agreement which will help to expand the Caribbean‘s capacity to reduce its vulnerability to the effects of Climate Change and provide financing for countries to do so.