Dear Editor,
At this moment of global fear over climate change, and particularly the destruction it may soon cause to low-lying island nation-states like The Bahamas, why has the government chosen to stop cooperating with the international scientific community?
Hurricane Dorian was only the beginning. Bigger storms, flooding, sea surges, and tsunamis will become more and more frequent. They will be our new reality. We urgently need to conduct research on how countries like our own can protect their people from this critical global challenge.
The Bahamas cannot do it alone. We need the best and brightest in the world to work on solutions for our particular circumstances before time runs out. And international researchers are happy to help. All we have to do is cooperate with them, as they are willing to do with us. Simple, right?
Wrong. Because instead of working along with the international community we are shunning them, jealously and small-mindedly guarding our “piece of turf”. The government, in refusing to share the findings of scientific research conducted in The Bahamas, is turning us into a pariah nation in scientific circles.
This is a huge shift from the global standard and a total change of direction from what The Bahamas has always done in the past.
Understandably, the international scientific community is now turning its back on The Bahamas, taking its expertise elsewhere, and our own top Bahamian scientists are being stripped of their international funding money and in some cases losing their jobs as a result.
Across the world, scientists and climate experts are sharing information about what human populations can do to make their communities more resilient, their coastlines more resistant to erosion, and how to build cutting-edge future communities that can deal with the expected sea-level rise. Meanwhile, we are content to sit here, alone in the dark, cutting off our own nose just to spite our face, while the countdown to the next superstorm ticks away. The
Yours Sincerely,
Rohmann Rolle
