Dominica: 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, according to a Dominica News Online report.
He says the document that 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 DNO report said that 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.
The DNO said that the consultant 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.
The DNO stated that Romelli 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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