Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor – News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

Dr James Fletch­er, the St Lu­cian who played a key role in draft­ing the Paris Agree­ment has been named CARI­COM’s cli­mate en­voy.

It comes as CARI­COM seeks to en­hance its lead­er­ship in glob­al cli­mate fo­rums.

His ap­point­ment took ef­fect from Jan­u­ary 1.

This fol­lows a 2024 de­ci­sion tak­en by the Con­fer­ence of Heads of Gov­ern­ment to ap­point a cli­mate en­voy as part of mea­sures to en­sure that the re­gion’s cli­mate pri­or­i­ties are ef­fec­tive­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ed and ad­vanced at the high­est diplo­mat­ic lev­els.

Com­ment­ing on the ap­point­ment, CARI­COM Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al, Dr Car­la Bar­nett, not­ed that CARI­COM has been tak­ing every op­por­tu­ni­ty to ad­vo­cate for am­bi­tious cli­mate ac­tion. “CARI­COM has long rec­og­nized the ex­is­ten­tial threat posed by cli­mate change to the re­gion’s so­cial, eco­nom­ic, and en­vi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­i­ty, and there is in­creas­ing ur­gency to take ac­tion to en­sure that lim­it­ing glob­al tem­per­a­ture rise to 1.5 de­grees Cel­sius re­mains vi­able,” she ob­served.

Dr Fletch­er is a well-recog­nised cli­mate change ad­vo­cate. Dur­ing his min­is­te­r­i­al tenure, he played a lead­ing role in the Caribbean’s ‘1.5 to Stay Alive’ civ­il so­ci­ety cam­paign. He was in­vit­ed by the Pres­i­dent of COP 21 to be part of the min­is­te­r­i­al team that helped to achieve con­sen­sus on the his­toric Paris Agree­ment, for which he re­ceived recog­ni­tion by the cli­mate change ad­vo­ca­cy group, “Glob­al Op­ti­mism”.