The threat of rising sea levels

The raging Atlantic Ocean on the West Coast of Demerara on Holi Day definitely added an extra frisson to the usual dousing of cold water that is obligatory when celebrating that festival. But the spectacle should also remind us Guyanese of the threat posed by rising sea levels to our coastlands. The coastland was five feet under normal sea levels a century ago, and the ocean has since risen by another eight inches.
Whether we are science sceptics or not about exactly what is driving the process of “global warming”, there can be no doubt about the fact that temperatures over the last century have risen at least one degree Fahrenheit, and this has literally fuelled the process that leads to rising sea levels. Firstly, it is basic science that warm water expands, and secondly, that the continents of ice in the Arctic and Antarctic have been melting exponentially and dumping their waters into the oceans.
If the “carbon sceptics” – those who believe it is not rising levels of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere that are the cause of global warming – are correct, then the situation is even more dire. Rising seas, then, may be due to long- term geological and climatic changes that once saw the ice caps completely melted and seas being SIXTY FEET over present levels. The question, then, is not whether the seas will rise, but how quickly they will do so; and more pertinently for us, what will we do about it. Last June, the UN held its first Ocean Conference, when countries under extreme threat — mostly low-lying islands – made poignant pleas to the world community for help against inundation and extinction. However, with an adamant US administration under Donald Trump charting an increasingly isolationist course, leadership is lacking to lead such a charge.
In a sense, we in Guyana defied nature and her processes when the Dutch moved their sugar plantations from up river to the coastland, which was then swampland. As we all should know by now, African slaves were coerced to move millions of tons of earth in digging hundreds of miles of canals and building hundreds of miles of sea and back dams. This created the habitable environment that was five feet under the sea at high tide. At this time, more than eighty percent of our population and about the same percentage of our economic activities are on this sliver of land that stretches from Essequibo to Berbice.
Looking at the cup half full, it may be rather fortuitous that we have finally acquired the wherewithal — with the expected oil revenues starting in 2020 — to exercise the option that was long suggested to avoid a catastrophe from rising seas: move our capital, where more than a quarter of our population lives, to higher ground. This, in turn, would have a demonstrator effect on all other endeavours away from the coastland.
The PNC regime, during its first term of office, had proposed the move be made to the northeast, while others have suggested the Rupununi.
The latter option becomes more feasible after the construction of the Lethem-Georgetown-Berbice Highway to the deep-water harbour off the mouth of the Berbice River — which is on the cards. The Government has also already committed itself towards establishing a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF), just as the PPP had done during the last elections, when oil was struck. This unanimity must now be tied to a long term development plan that is based on creating the infrastructure for a green economy that incorporates a gradual shift of our economic epicenter away from the threatened coastland.
While the PNC-led Government has emphasised the need for a green economy, it needs to map out a strategy along the lines of the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) adumbrated by the PPP. The rampaging Atlantic should serve as a wake-up call to them to not just wait for our inundation, but work with the Opposition to avert same.