‘Can’t be influential by staying home’

Barbadians are being told to weight the cost of travel against the potential benefits the country may derive.

Senator Elizabeth Thompson digressed briefly from discussion of the Civil Aviation Bill 2022 to respond to critics of Government’s overseas travel yesterday in the Senate.

“When Barbadians ask ‘what is the value of going to all these meetings’, my response is . . . We are one of the frontline countries in relation to climate change. We have been pushed on to those frontlines not by our own actions but by the actions of others. It is a frontline from which we cannot escape and we are addressing a cost of climate that we can ill afford. We cannot influence the space if we stay home,” she said.

Thompson, who is deputy president of the Senate, was among the touring party to the UN Climate Change conference COP27 in Egypt at which Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley played a lead role in persuading the global community to make a tangible response to the position of countries like Barbados which are suffering the ravaging results of climate change. (Nation News)

Leave a Reply