Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor - News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

Min­is­ter of Plan­ning, Eco­nom­ic Af­fairs and De­vel­op­ment Kennedy Swarats­ingh, who holds the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the en­vi­ron­ment, will lead this coun­try’s del­e­ga­tion to the 30th Unit­ed Na­tions Con­fer­ence of Par­ties (COP30) pend­ing the ap­proval of Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar. How­ev­er, he re­vealed the Trinidad and To­ba­go con­tin­gent will be small­er in size.

Guardian Me­dia has learnt that T&T’s long­stand­ing lead cli­mate ne­go­tia­tor and head of the Mul­ti­lat­er­al En­vi­ron­men­tal Agree­ments at the min­istry, Kis­han Ku­mars­ingh, will not head this coun­try’s del­e­ga­tion go­ing for­ward. It is un­der­stood that Ku­mars­ingh learnt of the news dur­ing a meet­ing on Tues­day, which he at­tend­ed vir­tu­al­ly as he is re­cov­er­ing this week from ill­ness.

When asked about Ku­mars­ingh and the T&T con­tin­gent, Swarats­ingh said, “I know one of them is ill at this time. In fact, we had a meet­ing yes­ter­day with the EP­PD (En­vi­ron­men­tal Pol­i­cy and Plan­ning Di­vi­sion) team, and I think Kis­han wasn’t at that meet­ing be­cause he was re­cov­er­ing from surgery. I am not sure what the con­fig­u­ra­tion of the team will be, but we will have ad­e­quate rep­re­sen­ta­tion there.”

He did not state whether Ku­mars­ingh will be pro­posed to the Cab­i­net for in­clu­sion in the del­e­ga­tion.
Swarats­ingh said T&T’s COP30 team could be de­cid­ed by the end of this week or next week.

“Ob­vi­ous­ly, I on­ly pro­pose to the Cab­i­net. All trav­els are ap­proved by Cab­i­net,” he added.

When pressed on whether lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al fi­nan­cial fac­tors were guid­ing the Gov­ern­ment’s de­ci­sion-mak­ing in the com­pi­la­tion of the del­e­ga­tion, he re­spond­ed, “Not on­ly will we see a small­er team, but I my­self am on­ly go­ing for the re­quired min­is­te­r­i­al meet­ings.

“I’m ask­ing Cab­i­net to agree that we go on­ly for the min­is­te­r­i­al days that are re­quired. So, I’m not go­ing to spend two weeks in Brazil. Prob­a­bly, if I’m al­lowed to go and Cab­i­net agrees, I’ll prob­a­bly go for about two to three days for the min­is­te­r­i­al part of it, be­cause some of what we do is spon­sored as well. We don’t pay the full cost. So, the two- or three-mem­ber team that would be at­tend­ing on be­half of the Gov­ern­ment and Trinidad and To­ba­go are part­ly spon­sored by agen­cies.”

De­spite the Gov­ern­ment down­siz­ing the COP30 con­tin­gent, Swarats­ingh said his min­istry wants to mo­bilise ac­tion at a do­mes­tic lev­el.

He added, “I am hop­ing that we could show­case a lit­tle bit more than just sim­ply what poli­cies we as­cribe to and talk about ac­tu­al projects that we are do­ing. We have been do­ing quite a lot. On the oth­er scale, I think we al­so need to fo­cus on in­no­va­tion be­cause I think we have dropped down on the in­no­va­tion in­dex. We need to ad­dress some of that, and then the oth­er area I think we need to fo­cus on is da­ta. I am not sure that a lot of the things we are do­ing is get­ting trapped in da­ta and be­ing re­port­ed prop­er­ly.”

He called on the coun­try to be­come more aware of the im­pacts of pol­lu­tion, adding, “I al­so think that we need to be peo­ple who are more con­scious of the en­vi­ron­ment. I think we need to have a new aware­ness of garbage and lit­ter­ing and use of plas­tics and re­cy­cling. We don’t do re­cy­cling. We ac­tu­al­ly bulk our plas­tics and ship it and it be­comes some­body else’s prob­lems.

“To­day [yes­ter­day], I vis­it­ed a plant in UTT South Cam­pus where they’re re­cy­cling tyres. We need to do more, much more of those things at a com­mu­ni­ty lev­el and to re­de­fine an in­te­grat­ed ap­proach for not just garbage col­lec­tion and garbage dis­pos­als, but al­so in terms of the mind­set we have that peo­ple need to be much more con­scious of the en­vi­ron­ment, plas­tics and lit­ter­ing.”

COP30 takes place in Belem, Brazil, from No­vem­ber 10 to 21.