The past few days have brought not the usu­al light April show­ers, but un­sea­son­al down­pours which caused street and flash flood­ing in sev­er­al parts of the coun­try.

The T&T Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal Ser­vice (TTMS) fore­cast is for a re­turn to dry sea­son con­di­tions by this week­end. Con­trary to some un­found­ed so­cial me­dia claims, this is not an ear­ly start to the rainy sea­son. How­ev­er, the in­ten­si­ty of the haz­ardous weath­er, which did not spare any part of Trinidad, sig­nals the con­tin­u­ing ef­fect of cli­mate change.

It is al­so an in­di­ca­tion that the se­vere weath­er that af­fect­ed the coun­try at this same time last year was no co­in­ci­dence, and there is a sig­nif­i­cant change in weath­er pat­terns af­fect­ing T&T which can no longer be ig­nored.

Al­though the start of the rainy sea­son is weeks away, in just the first two days of this week, rain­fall to­tals of be­tween 25 and 100 mil­lime­tres were record­ed. In San­gre Grande alone, near­ly eight times the av­er­age April rain­fall was record­ed with­in 12 hours.

These chang­ing weath­er pat­terns have not come about all of a sud­den. Da­ta shows T&T has been warm­ing al­most two and a half times faster than the glob­al av­er­age since 1985. There has been a marked in­crease in ex­treme sin­gle-day rain­fall events, as well as in the per­cent­age of rain these ex­treme­ly wet days con­tribute to the coun­try’s an­nu­al rain­fall to­tals.

Since about 80 per cent of the T&T econ­o­my and 70 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion are lo­cat­ed in coastal ar­eas, which are par­tic­u­lar­ly sus­cep­ti­ble to the im­pact of cli­mate change, the warn­ings served up with these lat­est ex­treme weath­er events should not be ig­nored.

It is wor­ry­ing that to date, T&T has tak­en on­ly a few ba­by steps in im­ple­ment­ing green ini­tia­tives.

Al­though T&T is a par­ty to the Unit­ed Na­tions Frame­work Con­ven­tion on Cli­mate Change (UN­FC­CC) and a rat­i­fied sig­na­to­ry to the Paris Agree­ment, there is lit­tle ev­i­dence of out­puts and de­liv­er­ables to show the rel­e­vant na­tion­al poli­cies are in place.

Many of the cli­mate goals this na­tion should be well on the way to achiev­ing, in­clud­ing a re­duc­tion in cu­mu­la­tive emis­sions from pow­er gen­er­a­tion, trans­port and man­u­fac­tur­ing by 15 per cent by 2030, are still low on our de­vel­op­men­tal agen­da.

How­ev­er, re­cent weath­er events are the strongest sig­nals to date that this coun­try does not have the lux­u­ry of time and must take im­me­di­ate ac­tion be­fore cli­mate chal­lenges es­ca­late to a cri­sis lev­el.

Swift im­ple­men­ta­tion of an ur­gent and com­pre­hen­sive pack­age of adap­ta­tion and mit­i­ga­tion mea­sures is need­ed to ad­dress the loom­ing threat to the coun­try’s food and wa­ter sup­ply, phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture, pub­lic health and econ­o­my.

There are sev­er­al cli­mate ini­tia­tives sim­mer­ing on the back burn­er for years that re­quire im­me­di­ate at­ten­tion. Among them is the Na­tion­al Waste Re­cy­cling Pol­i­cy, draft­ed in 2015. This coun­try needs a sys­tem of re­cy­cling, reuse or recla­ma­tion, and must move away from dis­pos­al prac­tices that harm the en­vi­ron­ment.

Al­so, the pace of the sus­tain­able en­er­gy tran­si­tion al­so needs to be in­creased. T&T has been too long in the pre­lim­i­nary stages of a com­pre­hen­sive re­new­able en­er­gy roadmap.

These are just two of the many pro­grammes that need to be ac­cel­er­at­ed now. Ac­tion must be tak­en on cli­mate change be­fore it is too late.