The Prime Minister of St. Maarten the Honorable Sarah Wescot-Williams highlighted the importance of addressing issues related to Climate Change and St. Maarten’s ability to respond to these issues. The Prime Minister’s comments were made in the context of her recent meeting at the Association of Caribbean States Heads of State conference which she recently attended in Mexico, where Climate Change was highlighted as a top priority; “I established that we as St. Maarten need to be part of discussions regarding Climate Change and its undeniable effects on St. Maarten. We as a country and a community need to work together to combat and mitigating these effects and we need to place this issue central: we need to focus on this and not think that we should leave this to other generations to cope with. During the ACS conference the Nobel Prize winning physicist Mario Molina gave a presentation at the summit and underscored this issue significantly. St. Maarten as a small island needs to be conscious as well on mitigating the effects of Climate Change. St. Maarten is a Small Island Developing State and we need to realize that, in the context of Environmental Sustainability, we need to focus on mitigating the effects Climate Change will have on us.
St. Maarten now has an Energy Policy which will guide our transition to a cleaner energy and we will implement this step by step. Aruba for example has a goal in mind how they want to use sustainable energy to power their island and St. Maarten is no different and we are currently doing the same,” commented Prime Minister Wescot-Williams.
