The UN Resident Coordinator for Jamaica, The Bahamas, Bermuda, The Cayman Islands and the Turks and Caicos Islands, Dennis Zulu, and Simon Springett, the UN Resident Coordinator for Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean, told reporters that they were both in attendance at the fourth international conference on SIDS, where the developing countries raised the issue as they have done at other international gatherings before.
“Dennis and I were both fortunate to attend the conference held in Antigua and Barbuda at the end of May and clearly these were the messages that were coming out, a real call and demand for climate justice,” Springett told a virtual news conference.
He told reporters that “when we say climate justice, it links to …financing for both adaptation and mitigation,” adding that the Grenada government “has been trying for a very long time …to build some resilience and now this gets wiped out.”
“These countries all have a very high GDP (gross domestic product) to debt ratio and reconstruction…quite frankly, does not get done on grant based financing and these governments are not able to take loans at concessional rates”.
Springett said events like Hurricane Beryl that left a trail of death and devastation put the sustainable development of these Caribbean countries “back by decades”
“It has such a major impact on their economic development,” he said, noting that a new sustainable development goal (SDG) report released recently showed “limited progress and there is a lot of work to be done”.
For his part, Zulu told reporters that the vulnerability of the small island states had been reinforced at the SIDS conference in Antigua, adding “the fact that most of them are deemed to be high income countries …dealing with reconstruction is obviously a challenge.”
“If you have as we are anticipating this year a minimum of 20 hurricanes coming, this leads to huge devastation of infrastructure, the resources, I mean the …fiscal space these countries have is limited in terms of being able to respond and react.”
“So, as some countries, like Barbados, where the Prime Minister [Mia Mottley] is requesting a relook of the international architecture to be able to take into consideration the vulnerabilities of Caribbean states in their accessing of concessional grants is very important.”
“But, also, when you look at the fact that these [hurricanes] happen often and a lot of these countries are basically in debt because they have to pay for the same bridge many times over, the fact that you construct one day and it is destroyed the next year or the next month…this brings a huge burden on their financial ability to do that.”
Zulu said what the SIDS conference highlighted was that “these were issues in climate change that impact this part of the world very significantly and therefore it is a responsibility for all to be able to take care in what we do given the impact to this region which may not be evident in other parts of the world”.
