APIA, Samoa (CMC) — Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Belize-based Caribbean Community Climate Change Center (CCCC), Dr Leonard Nurse says while regional countries are making progress in their effort to resolve climate change issues they are still in the same category as other developing small islands states that have much more to do.

“We do have somewhere to go but we are no worse off than other regions. We are fortunate to have the kind of political support and some good internal capacity, we have to build on that but I don’t think we are in a desperate situation by a long shot,” Dr Nurse told the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC).

Nurse was among climate change experts guiding discussions and offering counsel at the four-day ‘Lessons for Future Action: Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction in Small Island Development States” conference that ended here yesterday.

He complimented the Caribbean Community (Caricom) for their vision in taking an active interest in the development of climate change issues and in ensuring that the programmes and plans prepared for the region were properly administered.

“Admittedly the implementation of programmes addressing the various concerns has been poor, but the heads have moved to ensure that we don’t just have a regional strategy but a road map as to how we implement the strategy, and that has been extremely useful,” he said.

The Barbadian national, who is also a senior lecturer at the University of the West Indies, said that the Caricom leaders will seek to adopt the implementation plan for regional climate exchange strategy at their next summit in July .

“We have just completed implementation of the plan which has gone through stakeholders and that will be presented for the consideration and approval of the heads.

“It sets out the broad strategy and principles for adaptation and the plan for the implementation of a regional strategy,” Nurse added.

He said that his Belize climate change operation was now implementing a number of community based projects such as the construction of a desalination plant in the Grenadines and other indigenous projects in Belize, St Lucia and St Vincent.

“We are attempting to link these development initiatives to people where ever possible and work with stakeholders and we believe we are on the right track.

“The pace at which everything is moving may not be to everyone’s satisfaction but we believe we are getting there.”

Nurse said that part of the strategy was to develop the adequate linkages including agriculture and help transform the energy sector.

“Those are the kind of linkages we need to exploit rather than seeing everything in a discrete sectoral manner. When we do something in one sector we ensure that it has a positive spin off in others,” he added.

Nurse said that despite the progress, the CCCCC is still faced with major challenges in relation to food security and the region’s scarce water resources.

He spoke of the threat to staple food products such as corn, kidney beans, and rice noting that experimental work and modeling suggests that the region is likely to face declining yields over time.

Nurse also focused on the reduced availability of fishery as a result of the negative effect on coral reefs the result of exposure to bleaching, elevated sea temperatures and increasing ocean acidification.

“Most research on fisheries and climate change seem to suggest that a lot of tropical warm water species are close to upper limit to tolerance temperatures and migrate north to cooler waters. Fish is important for diet and livelihoods and that will affect food security.

He said water resources in the region were also under severe threat in some islands, such as Barbados, which was listed among the five most water scarce countries per capita.

Nurse noted that models as far up to 2050 and 2070 suggest that the region will encounter more extensive droughts as these will have major effects on agriculture irrigation and the availability of irrigation water.