By SEAN DOUGLAS Wednesday, December 16 2009

TRINIDAD and Tobago’s Newsday yesterday took part in a question and answer session with the United States delegation who are based at the United Nations Climate Change Summit at Copenhagen, Denmark.

A US delegate to the Copenhagen talks — Dr Healy Hamilton, Senior Researcher of the California Academy of Sciences — urged Caribbean nations to preserve their mangrove swamps when asked by Newsday how to mitigate the damage from global warming.

Newsday was facilitated by a video-link known as “The Meeting Room” to the “US Centre” at the Bella Centre, Copenhagen, supplied to us by the Public Affairs Section of the US Embassy in Port-of-Spain.

The Summit is a complex debate, on how to cut greenhouse gas emissions, between rich countries, emerging powers (such as India and China) and developing nations including small island states vulnerable to rising sea-levels.

Newsday was the sole media house in Trinidad and Tobago, and indeed the Caribbean, selected to take part in the debate on “Climate Change and Biodiversity: Advancing Positive Solutions”.

Newsday asked: “Given that the health of coral-reefs is vital to the economies of the Caribbean, how can damage due to climate-change be mitigated?”

Hamilton, in reply, lamented that right now reefs suffer from being damaged physically, and from over-fishing and pollution, including discharge from yachts.

Calling for more to be done to protect reefs, she said, “All of those are things that are currently within our control at the moment if we want to mitigate against climate-change on coral reefs.”

In light of the climate-change threat, she then urged Caribbean countries to save their mangrove swamps, which she said serve as the nursery for many fish species which inhabit their coral reefs. “People rip up mangroves to build golf courses and luxury hotels. That is wrong.” Newsday also asked how climate-change could harm the Caribbean’s biodiversity, and thereby its eco-tourism.

Hamilton replied by calling for the protection of the Caribbean eco-systems ranging from the Blue Mountain Forests of Jamaica to the region’s coral reefs.

She said millions of dollars in US currency are earned annually from tourism based on these natural attractions. If this biodiversity is lost in the region, she lamented, then tourists would go elsewhere.

Hamilton is a biodiversity research scientist at the California Academy of Sciences, and adjunct professor in the Department of Geography at San Francisco State University.

Hamilton, a former Fulbright Fellow, holds a Yale University master’s degree, plus a PhD in Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley.

For both degrees, she conducted extensive field research in Latin America.