Martin HenryYOU MAY never have heard of Miss Waldron's red colobus. Now you will never meet them. The extinction of these small monkeys which used to live in the Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) and Ghana region was certified last year the first among primates in 200 years. Closer to home, the last Caribbean monk seal was seen in 1952. Columbus' crew hunted these sea mammals for food back in 1494 on that second voyage when they stumbled upon Jamaica. And we thought we had lost the Jamaican iguana forever before a little struggling population was rediscovered in the Hellshire Hills.
In the last 500 years 337 out of 51,000 identified vertebrate species have become extinct. Six of these have been Jamaican in the last 150 years. Some 11,000 known plant and animal species face extinction in the near future. It is estimated that as many as 27,000 unidentified species of all kinds, but predominantly insects and plants, disappear each year in shrinking rain forests alone. Jamaica is rich in endemic (native) species. We are ranked number five internationally among islands for endemic plants. Several of these species are endangered. Some of the first NRCA documents which I encountered as a youngster in the 1970s were leaflets on endangered Jamaican species the manatee, yellow snake, iguana, black-billed parrot, black coral. Since then, a steady stream of policy documentation has flowed out of the agency, even while streams have dwindled or disappeared and surface and ground water has faced increasing pollution.
Two new policy documents have come to hand. In April, a Green Paper Towards a National Strategy and Action Plan on Biological Diversity in Jamaica was put out. Another Green Paper, Towards a National Policy and Strategy on Environmental management Systems (EMS), came out in June. The Biodiversity Paper performed the very useful service of listing and reviewing a multitude of earlier environmental policy documents, committees, "actions", and international agreements with which we have been involved. A good progress/lack of progress checklist is now conveniently in one place.
These Green Papers offer opportunities for public discussion of environmental issues. The EMS Green Paper starts out with the sensible recognition that "we must seek to balance the growing of economic capital with the protection of our natural resources for the purpose of improving our quality of life". "The challenge to policymakers", the Paper says, "is the integration of economic, environmental and social considerations and furthermore to see that policy is supported by effective management." Many would argue that there is no shortage of policy, of even good policy; what is lacking is the "effective management".
Another policy tool now being proposed is the environmental management system, "a management tool which enables an organisation to address the impact of its products, services and processes on the environment. There is already pressure on exporting companies to demonstrate their greenness under the ISO 14000 series of global regulation of environmental standards and on the tourism sector to satisfy Green Globe standards. With environmental factors as factors of trade, an EMS becomes "a tool to improve internal efficiencies, increase competitiveness and profits".
What the Jamaican Government needs urgently to do is to make environmental management a critical factor of domestic trade. Take basic matters like emission and effluent flow: the laws and regulations are there but hardly enforced with any rigour.
The emerging EMS policy and strategy is driven by four principles: natural resources are a part of the nation's capital and must be managed for sustainable growth. An EMS is a management tool to achieve sustainable development. The Polluters Pay and the Users Pay principles will be applied in a set of sanctions and charges for the use of natural resources and for any degradation of the environment, while providing incentives for environmentally responsible behaviour. Since all citizens are individually and collectively responsible for the quality of the environment, environmental awareness and participation of civil society will be encouraged and facilitated.
This is no laughing matter; the government "will provide leadership by 'greening' its own operations as a first step towards responsible environmental stewardship". The same commitment was made also for the National Environmental Action Plan in 1995. Besides holding our breaths to see if Government will seriously follow through on this oft-repeated promise, under a new Minister, it is left to be seen if the critical strategic matters of funding, education and enforcement will be forthcoming.
I must confess that I have always been wary of the environmental accounting by which organisations are declared "green". Enterprises are locked into such a complex web of raw material input, processes and product output in an economy, that it must be incredibly difficult to account fully for the environmental impact of any single entity. But perhaps what needs to be done, as they do in the natural sciences, is to simplify systems to their bare essentials so they can be analysed and manipulated within human capacity.
The question of what those bare essentials should be now arises. There are opportunities in crises. National environmental policy is creating all kinds of opportunities for entrepreneurship in environmental consultancy and in providing goods and services for more efficient use of resources and the reduction of negative environmental impact. A number of enviro-companies have emerged in the last few years. I don't think policy has ever been sufficiently sensitive to the dynamics of environmental entrepreneurship. The EMS Policy and Strategy Working Group was loaded with state bureaucrats with the token presence of non-technical managers of the JMA and the JEA. There is powerful evidence, particularly out of the United States, the leader of free enterprise, that a great deal can be accomplished for environmental conservation by profit-making free enterprise regarded as part of the solution rather than the cause of the problem.
Renewable resources
Paradoxically, one of the best means of conservation is responsible use allowing regeneration of renewable resources. There is nothing which says the state has to be the manager, and it often does a bad job in that role, anyway. The parks and protected areas, which figure so prominently in the biodiversity Green Paper, could perhaps be more successfully managed by private enterprise as eco-tourism areas and as centres of commercial production of indigenous species which are in demand, species like parrots, orchids and marine fish.
Careful consideration needs to be given to how the state can assist environmental entrepreneurship towards achieving policy objectives, while building a new economic sector. The new EMS approach, in fact, centres on market forces, voluntary action and regulation, in that order of importance. The "old paradigm" rested on a base of regulation. NEPA is hosting a series of consultations on the EMS between November 27 and the end of January next year.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant.
