Dr. Colin A. Young, Executive Director of the Caribbean Community Climate Change Center says the developed world should be reminded of catastrophic outcomes of failing to meet emissions targets. Credit: Aishwarya Bajpai/IPS

By Aishwarya Bajpai
BAKU, Nov 18 2024 (IPS)

Communities living in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) pay the price of climate change in lives, livelihoods, and stunted sustainable development. 

Representatives from Caribbean islands have repeatedly expressed this ongoing concern at COP29.

Dr. Colin A. Young, Executive Director of the Caribbean Community Climate Change Center (CCCCC), reemphasized the catastrophic outcomes of the failure to meet emissions targets.

“What Hurricane Beryl demonstrated to the world is what happens when there is failure to meet the emission reduction target. To meet the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement requires a 43 percent reduction of greenhouse gases by 2030, a peak of fossil fuel production by 2025 and net zero commitments by 2050—without achieving these targets, we continue to face increased frequency and intensity of hurricanes and other climate-related disasters. Large countries often fail to grasp how such events devastate small economies, wiping out critical infrastructure—schools, healthcare, telecommunications, roads, and farms—paralyzing entire communities.”

Instead of a rich future, the futures of the youth are in jeopardy.

“Our young people are inheriting a future where they cannot reach their full potential because of climate-related impacts. In some cases, it sets progress back by years, and in others, by decades.”

Young reflected on the devastating economic toll of the climate disasters—effectively bankrupting small economies, leaving them significantly more vulnerable.

“We have witnessed the scale of destruction hurricanes can inflict. Hurricane Maria wiped out 226 percent of Dominica’s GDP and two years earlier, Tropical Storm Erika had already devastated 90 percent of its GDP,” he said. “This is a matter of survival for our countries and the failure of the developed countries to do more faster to curb emissions in line with the science.”

 Morally Unjust, Bureaucratically Complex

Developed nations need to come to the party.

“G7 and G20 countries are responsible for 80 percent of all emissions. Yet, the burden of providing resources, technology transfers, and capacity building falls disproportionately on others—a morally unjust reality we are confronting.”

Talking about finance and the New Collective Qualified Goal (NCGQ), a major outcome SIDS expects to come out of COP29, Young said he is concerned whether or not the NCQG will meet the needs of SIDS.

Young criticized the inefficiency of the current international climate finance system.

“The current international climate finance architecture is not serving the needs of small island developing states. It is too bureaucratic, complex and difficult to access.”

He highlighted the disparity in funding distribution.

“Take the Green Climate Fund as an example. Out of the USD 12 billion approved, only 10 percent has gone to Small Island Developing States, and within that, the Caribbean has received less than USD 600 million. If resources from the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) follow the same disbursement patterns, it’s clear it won’t serve our interests to meet the scale and speed of the urgent adaptation needs of our countries.”

Radical Change Needed For Climate Financing

Piecemeal change will not work for SIDS, he told IPS.

“For Small Island Developing States, the system of accessing climate under the NCQG and Loss and Damage Fund cannot resemble the existing financial architecture. We need a finance mechanism that is streamlined, equitable, fit-for-purpose and truly responsive to our unique challenges.”

“There is a significant lack of transparency in the climate finance space because developed countries continue to stymie efforts to clearly define what constitutes climate finance under the Paris Agreement.”

Financing often comes as loans, and this has implications for SIDS. Recently, for example, the European Investment Bank (EIB) signed a Euro 100 million (USD 109.4 million) loan agreement with the Caribbean Islands.

Young highlighted the ongoing issues with climate finance transparency and the clarity on financing terms

“Certain types of investments, especially non-concessional loans, should not be counted as climate finance under the Convention. When we talk about the USD 100 billion annual target that developed countries have committed to since 2009, there is widespread disagreement among developing country parties on whether it has been met. The OECD claims it has, but developing countries argue that the funds are not visible or are difficult to track because of lack of transparency.”

Young expressed concern over the mounting debt burden placed on SIDS because of climate change.

“What we’re increasingly seeing is that we are being asked to shoulder a debt burden that is already alarmingly high—well above World Bank and IMF benchmarks.”

He highlighted the cyclical nature of the crisis.

“We’re forced to borrow to build resilience, but even within the loan repayment period, we’re hit by multiple disasters again. It’s a vicious cycle that leaves us unable to recover, exacerbating our debt level.”

When asked about a single key negotiation or message to take forward from COP 29, his response was clear:

“The message is that we need greater ambition from developed countries to cut emissions in line with the science. And beyond that, they must deliver on the promises they’ve made to deliver finance at scale, adaptation finance, technology and capacity building to developing countries, particularly to SIDs and LDCs.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Haiti’s Environment Minister Joseph Jouthe says that “climate change is a very big terror in Haiti”, and without funds the Caribbean island nation is unable to adapt and mitigate against it. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
MADRID, Dec 13 2019 (IPS)

Haiti’s Environment Minister Joseph Jouthe has compared the climate emergency to a violent act and appealed to the international community for help to fight climate change.

“Climate change is a very big terror in Haiti. It’s very hard for us to deal with climate change,” Jouthe told IPS on the margins of the United Nations climate summit, the 25th Conference Of The Parties (COP25), in Madrid, Spain.

“Haiti is not responsible for what’s going on with climate change but we are suffering from it. We want better treatment from the international community.”

Jouthe said Haiti remains committed to strengthening its resilience to climate shocks and to contributing to the global effort to mitigate the phenomenon.

Haiti is pursuing a four-fold objective in relation to climate change:

• promoting, at the level of all sectors and other ministries, a climate-smart national development;
• creating a coherent response framework for country directions and actions to address the impacts of climate change;
• promoting education on the environment and climate change as a real strategic lever to promote the emergence of environmental and climatic citizenship; and
• putting in place a reliable measurement, reporting and verification system that can feed into the iterative planning processes of national climate change initiatives.

But Jouthe said the country simply cannot achieve these targets without financial help.

“In Haiti all the indicators are red. We have many projects but as you may know [The Caribbean Community] CARICOM doesn’t have enough funding to build projects,” he said.

Patrice Cineus, a young Haitian living in Quebec, said access to funding has been a perennial problem for Haiti.

But he believes Haiti is partly to blame for the seeming lack of inability to quickly receive financial help.

“Haiti, my country needs to build evidence-based policies, and this will make it easier to attract help from the international community,” Cineus told IPS.

“If we don’t have strong policies, it’s not possible. We need research within the country. We need innovative programmes within the country and then we can look for financial support and technical support.

“We cannot have access to funding because the projects we are submitting are not well done. We don’t use scientific data to build them. They are not done professionally,” Cineus added.

Cineus’ theory appears to be substantiated by the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC), which helps CARICOM member states address the issue of adaptation and climate change.

The centre’s Executive Director Dr. Kenrick Leslie said since 2016, under an Italian programme, it is required to develop projects that would help countries adapt to different areas of climate change.

“One of the areas that we have been considering, and we spoke with Haiti, is to build resilience in terms of schools and shelters that can be used in the case of a disaster.

“Funds have been approved but, unfortunately, unlike the other member states where we have already implemented at least one, and some cases two, projects, we have not been able to get the projects in Haiti off the ground,” Leslie told IPS.

“Each time they have identified an area, when we go there the site is not a suitable site and then we have to start the process again.”

While Haiti waits for funding, Dr. Kénel Délusca, current head of mission of a technical assistance project, AP3C, of the Ministry of Environment and Environment and the European Union, said the country remains one of the world’s most vulnerable to climate change.

Scientists say extreme weather events like hurricanes, floods and droughts will become worse as the planet warms, and Island nations like Haiti are expected to be among the hardest hit by those and other impacts of a changing climate, like shoreline erosion.

“The marine environment is extremely important to the Haitian people. There are more than 8 million people living in coastal communities in Haiti,” Délusca told IPS.

“There are more or less 50,000 families whose activities are based on these specific ecosystems. In other words, this is a very important ecosystem for Haiti and different levels – at the economic level, at the cultural level, at the social level.”

Haiti is divided into 10 départements, and Délusca said nine of them are coastal. Additionally, he said the big cities of Haiti are all located within the coastal zone.

“These ecosystems are very strategic to the development of Haiti. The Haitians have a lot of activities that are based on the marine resources. We also develop some cultural and social activities that are based on these environments,” Délusca said.

For poor island countries like Haiti, studies show, the economic costs, infrastructural damage and loss of human life as a result of climate change is already overwhelming. And scientists expect it will only get worse.

Though Haiti’s greenhouse gas emissions amount cumulatively to less than 0.03 per cent of global carbon emissions, it is a full participant in the 2015 Paris climate agreement and has committed to reduce its greenhouse gas emission by five percent by 2030.