Home > With SIDS in limelight, Christophe Mazurier pleads for more awareness

With SIDS in limelight, Christophe Mazurier pleads for more awareness

by Open-Publishing - Friday 19 September 2014

By all accounts, the Third Annual Conference on Small Island Developing States (SIDS) was a resounding success. On Sept. 4, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) announced that the conference brokered nearly 300 partnerships between governments, businesses and NGOs to help these island states make further strides toward sustainable development and against the rising tide of a warming climate.

UNEP valued these partnerships at a total of $1.9 billion but in many ways, the attention the conference drew — especially with the Climate Summit in New York coming later in September — was worth even more.

Still, those at the heart of the fight say now is the perfect opportunity for SIDS to raise even more awareness — and even greater funding. In SIDS like The Bahamas, activists such as Christophe Mazurier, a world renowned French financier, have made their adopted nation’s fight their own. Mazurier has worked with Bahamian leaders as well as private citizens in the industrialized world to broker private and public partnerships, fundraising, training and education to an archipelago threatened by the climate’s whims.

Christophe Mazurier

Mazurier and other activists across a vast network of nations (representatives from 115 countries, including 52 officially-recognized SIDS, attended the conference in early September) want to demonstrate that these island states occupy a tenuous position. The position, generally, of economically disadvantaged and underdeveloped nations who are simultaneously feeling the most devastating effects of climate change.

To understand this conundrum, take the example of The Bahamas. Of the 193 United Nations member states, The Bahamas ranks among the top five most sensitive to climate change. Much of the country (80%) is no more than 1.5 meters above sea level, meaning the rising waters are already eating away at the coastline. Warming waters, ocean acidification, de-oxygenation and pollution combine to compromise the health of the marine ecosystem, from fisheries to coral reefs to migration routes.

Thanks to its location just east of the Florida panhandle, the Bahamian archipelago is right in the midst of “Hurricane Alley.” While large tropical storms have always posed a threat to the region, The Bahamas is even more susceptible now that climate change has contributed to stronger and more unpredictable storm systems.

Economically, The Bahamas behaves much like many other Caribbean SIDS — Antigua & Barbuda, the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, and so on. Much of their GDP — more than 60 percent, according to the CIA — is based on tourism. This poses particular issues, not least the country’s perception as nothing more than a tropical getaway for well-heeled Westerners. But much of the infrastructure which makes The Bahamas so welcoming for tourists — roads, beachside resorts and ports where cruise liners and yachts weigh anchor — is under threat from climate change.

The tourist-focused economy also serves to ignore the 370,000 permanent residents of the archipelago. Many of those citizens rely on fisheries or more artisan, traditional forms of fishing for their livelihood. If those are compromised by a disrupted marine ecosystem, there is a little recourse for many in the indigenous population.

What The Bahamas and other nations like it need, now more than ever, is the attention, funding and partnerships that can empower the population, create economic sustainability and mitigate climate change’s effects. Mazurier argues that it is up to him and those like him — along with policymakers from island states and their industrialized counterparts — to achieve these very attainable goals.

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