A great deal has been written and said about climate change and its potential effects. Special interest lobbies are certainly pulling the strings on this issue. In any case there are so many divergent views on the matter that one really wonders where the truth really lies. Time will eventually tell, and I fear that when time really tells, the ones that will most suffer are those most vulnerable.

One of the possible effects of climate change and, as a consequence, global warming, is the melting of glaciers in the Arctic, the most northern region of the world. It would at that stage open up fully for commercial shipping the mythical Northwest Passage, linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. In the past centuries many explorers have lost their lives seeking this Northwest passage. Climate change could provide it for free.

What is so special about this? There is one particular aspect that may be of very great interest to Malta and the Mediterranean Sea. It has to do with trade routes.

In the past centuries, man sought to develop trade routes from east to west and vice versa. Europeans sought a route to get to China and India. Marco Polo did it using a land route which came to be known as the Silk Route. Christopher Columbus tried to get to China and India by going west and stumbled on America. Vasco da Gama went southwards and sailed to Asia via the Cape of Good Hope.

If our country has a responsibility towards future generations, we need to be prepared for an eventual severe dilution of the importance of the Mediterranean

These trade routes were developed simply because of politics (the Euro-pean powers of the time wanted to colonize the world) and economics (they allowed scope for trade between Asia and Europe to flourish). These were very compelling reasons.

The next effort that was made to facilitate trade between Asia and China was the opening of the Suez Canal, thereby significantly reducing the time need to transport goods from Japan or China or other Asian countries to Europe. The opening of the Suez Canal provided great opportunities to the Mediterranean Sea and the countries surrounding it.

These countries became the gateway to Europe. Even if the ships were meant to get to northern Europe, they still had to pass through the Mediterranean Sea. This in fact helped Malta to develop its Freeport, especially since 1987.

In the meantime the US became a world economic power, trading both to its east with Europe and to its west with Japan, China and other countries in the Far East. In order to open a route for ships to travel west to east and vice versa, the US opened the Panama Canal. So again, we have a consolidation of east to west trade routes and not north to south.

So creating a route through the Northwest Passage became a necessity because transporting goods from the Atlantic to the Pacific through this northern route reduces the time taken significantly. This is because the leading economies are all well placed in the northern hemisphere.

However the opening of the Northwest Passage for commercial shipping would eventually lead to irrelevance the Mediterranean Sea. It will become easier and less costly to transport goods and deliver them in northern Europe rather than use the Suez Canal and land the goods in a Mediterranean port. And this would all be thanks to climate change and global warming.

Whether all this will come to pass, I do not know. However in the context of the geography, the history and primarily, the economics, what I wrote is definitely a possibility. What this means is that if our country has a responsibility towards future generations – which I believe it has – we need to be prepared for an eventual severe dilution of the importance of the Mediterranean in the world economy.