Since I have spent almost half of my life living in Jamaica, I have decided to do a small investigation to see how climate change had affected the island. Before taking this class I was a little unaware of the things that cause climate change, and being that I was raised up on how to be a responsible person, I always try to play my role as being a good citizen of society, so for example, most of the times I will place my trash—soda bottle, empty biscuits bags, etc—into the trash can instead of just littering it around. Climate change is a worldwide or regional change in climate pattern, in particular, a change apparent from around the late 20th century onwards that was caused by the tremendous amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide produced by the use of fossil fuels.
According to cep.unep.org, the island of Jamaica is impotent to the impact of climate change due to the geographic location, and because of this, the preliminary research proposes that there will be a higher increase in extreme weather events, for example, flood rains and droughts, the rise of the ocean level, and stronger hurricanes. This sounds like a terrifying situation, and if we all, especially the world leaders, don’t clean up our acts, then there will not be a bright feature for the younger generations; I think this is not fair because it is not the younger generation fault, but the actions of the past generation, along with today’s generation. In addition, according to the same article, because of climate change, there is a reduction of seagrass beds and a reduction of forested area; we know that one major hurricane or other disasters do not mean that it is the result of climate change because it was a short-term disaster which falls under the weather category. On the other hand, climate change is basically how the atmosphere responds over long periods of time, so there is proof of climate change in Jamaica because between the year 2004 and 2008, some major hurricane-related events that contributed to lots of damage that is estimated to over 1 billion US dollars.
As we can see in the picture above, there is a drought going on in that region of Jamaica and lots of trees are dying.
In figure 2, we can see in the picture that people are aware of climate change in Jamaica, and they are doing their part by planting back trees in Portland. Thanks to Professor Blake, I can say that I am more aware of not just climate change, but also natural disasters in general; my advice to everyone is to just play your part as being a responsible person in society because all of us live here. All of our actions have consequences; something as small as throwing garbage into the ocean or burning trees to something as huge as wildfires destroying a town or dropping a hydrogen bomb on another country has a consequence which will affect several lives. So play your part and help protect this wonderful place that we called earth, our home before it is too late. Jamaica has launched a program called Vision 2030 Jamaica National Development plan which I believe is a good platform to tackle problems such as climate change and other environmental problems.
