PAY FOR IT!

by YVETTE BEST

PAY FOR IT!

That is the advice from a leading climate change researcher, who thinks the recent 60 per cent increase in water rates has come t a timely juncture.

The public endorsement of the increase came from University of the West Indies lecturer Dr Leonard Nurse, who delivered the weekly lunchtime lecture at the Democratic Labour Party headquarters yesterday (Friday).

Water scarcity is among a list of things that will start to see an impact from as early as 2020s, when significantly lower percentages of rainfall are projected.

According to Nurse, research on eight islands conducted in 2003 showed that Barbados was the worst off, and in a "fairly precarious state" in terms of renewable water resources per person.

"I had absolutely no difficulty with the increase in water rates, because I think that Barbadians, we have in fact not valued our resources seriously . . . Our water situation is not a very easy one to deal with, [but] I think we have the capacity and the potential to deal with it," Nurse stated.

He added that water was neither free nor cheap and people should be prepared to pay for it.

"We pay our STV, we pay our telephone bills, and we pay our cellphones and everything else, but Government provides water; water is free and everybody has a right to it, so we don't pay our bills and hence the water authority racks up some arrears and millions of dollars. I don't think the country can afford to continue to go down that road," he argued.

Noting that the Barbados Water Authority accounted for 30 per cent of the Barbados Light and Power's revenue, Nurse said the country had to think of the way energy was used and explore forms of renewable energy like wind, solar and bio-fuels.

He added that lessening water also had implications for everything including food supply, agriculture and sanitation.

Nurse was speaking on the topic Economic and Social Implications of Climate Change for Barbados and the Caribbean.

He said the cost of adaptation to climate change was disproportionately higher for small island state like Barbados than for more developed countries.

Dr Nurse is a member of the scientific team of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for its contribution to global climate change research.