Sean Paul named Climate Change Ambassador

Sean Paul named Climate Change Ambassador

By Balford Henry (JamaicaObserver)

DANCEHALL artiste Sean Paul has joined sprint star Usain Bolt as one of the Caribbean’s accelerator ambassadors.

Both were hand-picked as ambassadors for the coalition of global organisations, including the Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank and Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), that have joined Virgin Atlantic’s founder, Sir Richard Branson, to make the Caribbean the first climate-smart region in the world.

They hope to capitalise on an ambitious US$8-billion investment plan to bring greater energy and infrastructure resilience to 3.2 million Caribbean households.

According to the World Bank, this would help Caribbean islands to eliminate their costly dependency on fossil fuels so that they can meet the target of close to 100 percent of their energy needs coming from renewable sources, and embed resilience into communities and livelihoods of all Caribbean people.

The artiste, whose popular tracks include Gimme The Light and Temperature, has been involved with matters to do with promoting the Caribbean’s response to the dangers of climate change for a number of years — from back in 2015 at the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Paris, France.

Sean Paul and singer Natasha Bedingfield were in Paris with producer Toby Gad promoting their single Love Song to the Earth, which aimed to raise the consciousness about the threat of climate change around the world.

As he told the media back then, in what sounded like a direct response to those who refuse to believe that the threat is real, “In a big land mass like the USA, maybe the effect sometimes, we don’t see it as much as we do in an island like Jamaica. But the summers are definitely getting hotter in Jamaica than when I was a kid.”

He added that he wouldn’t like to “leave the earth” knowing that his children and grandchildren would be inheriting a real threat and he didn’t do anything help.

Love Song to the Earth was a multiple collaboration with people like Paul McCartney, Bon Jovi, Leona Lewis, and Bedingfield. It was introduced the global conference as an anthem for the game changers praising Mother Earth with lyrics like ‘you’re no ordinary world/ (you’re) a diamond in the universe’.

Weeks later an American publication, New Republic, noted that when Sean Paul recorded his dancehall hit single We Be Burnin’, he was actually warning about the threat of climate change.

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