Jamaica was on hurricane watch in the days leading up to the United Nations COP28 climate summit. An unusual tropical storm swinging in from the west was heading for the Caribbean, a region often in the eye of the changing climate, with intensifying storms, record flooding, devastating drought, and crumbling coastlines.
In the face of such turmoil, the Caribbean has homegrown solutions that are building resilience and lowering emissions as it girds for fiercer storms: coral reef baskets to protect coastlines, sugarcane waste to create biofuel, recycled plastic to strengthen building blocks, or carbon-absorbing concrete made with saltwater, Corporate Knights reports.
But what it’s missing are greater pools of more equitable funding that help scale these projects and a recognition that the destructive changes it is suffering through are largely not of its making.
That’s part of the message that Racquel Moses, CEO of the Caribbean Climate-Smart Accelerator and a UN ambassador for net-zero, is taking to the climate summit in Dubai this week and next. The gathering of global leaders will see the conclusion of the Global Stocktake—a major point of inflection in which countries see how far they have come in hitting climate targets, and where they are lagging behind.
Scientists have warned that the world is not on track to limit global warming to 1.5°C— and is in fact charting a course to warm up by nearly double that amount this century. The window to take meaningful action is closing, the UN has cautioned.
For Moses, more of the discussion needs to focus on equity.
In Dubai, she’s hoping to drum up more financial support for projects that are under way or in the nascent stages. In 2009, the world’s richest countries committed to allocating US$100 billion a year by 2020 to developing countries to fight climate change, a target that was finally met this year. Earlier this year, Caribbean leaders representing Small Island Developing States issued a call for more transparency and monitoring of the (eventually) $100-billion loss and damage fund that was finally brought into existence on the first day of COP28.
Moses said her region needs access to more concessional financing, which has lower interest rates, as well as philanthropic funding to help carry the burden of hefty emissions-cutting mitigation or resilience-building preparedness projects. “We can’t continue to borrow our way out of a situation created by wealth that we do not have,” she said.
While the region is doing better at reducing its emissions than other better-financed countries, most Caribbean nations are short of hitting their net-zero targets, Moses said. Financing is a big obstacle. “It is not a lack of skill or lack of expertise oftentimes,” she explains. “It is often a lack of bandwidth. We have one person wearing several hats versus having dedicated resources to many of these functions.”
While Caribbean countries have access to funding from the World Bank and the International Development Bank, most are considered to be too wealthy to qualify for concessional funding. But their income level does not take into account their level of vulnerability to the changing climate, Moses notes.
“We shouldn’t all be required to be Haiti in order to access concessional finance to do things that our budgets just won’t allow us to do at this stage,” she said. Take Jamaica. It needs to raise its coastal roads because of sea level rise and coastal erosion. That will cost it about $1 million per kilometre.
“To ask Jamaica to raise their roads and to spend that money and to borrow money to do that, it’s unfair, it’s unjust,” Moses said. “The wealth that the carbon in the atmosphere has generated didn’t come to Jamaica. That went to Europe and the U.S. and China.” According to her organization’s calculations, Caribbean territories received roughly $7 billion in philanthropic funding between 2015 and 2021, with 75% of it going to Puerto Rico or the U.S. Virgin Islands.
While the region has long sounded the alarm over these issues, it is speaking with a more unified voice now, Moses said.
K. Lisana Dyer, an environmentalist and resident of the Commonwealth of Dominica, a tiny island nation, is among the region’s representatives at COP28, taking a message that underscores the injustice of the climate quagmire. “We’re very vulnerable when it comes to extreme weather events,” she said.
While financing is an important topic, she added, so too are the actions of the biggest countries. “Countries like Dominica emit less than 1% of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and yet still we suffer 100%. That’s not fair,” she said. “We need to reach to the root of the problem, where the large emitters reduce their emissions and reduce the negative impact.”
In Dubai, Moses’s team is showcasing innovations such as an Interactive Caribbean Climate Map, which can connect philanthropists to projects that need funding in the region, along with mobile hydroponic farms that are building climate resilience. The “flex farms,” a partnership between Sony Music’s Global Social Justice Fund, the Caribbean Climate-Smart Accelerator, and Wisconsin-based Fork Farms, are a supercharged way to grow produce, yielding 45 times more output than traditional farming methods in a 28-day span. It is a path for island nations to become more food secure, using less water, less land, and relying less on imports, Moses said.
There are a whole host of homegrown projects that have potential. One project in Barbados uses sugarcane waste from rum production to create biofuel. Another company in Costa Rica, founded by Canadian Donald Thomson, who has lived in the Central American nation for decades, is turning plastic waste into resin that strengthens concrete building blocks for housing or infrastructure projects. And a start-up by basketball legend Rick Fox out of Bahamas uses saltwater brine from desalination plants and steel slag waste to create a building material that absorbs carbon.
“What tends to happen in climate is that a lot of the Global North will come in and say, ‘We have a solution for this and for that,’ and we appreciate that outreach,” said Moses. “But we’re not the world’s customer. We also need to be participating in this marketplace.”
Otherwise, she says, “we’re perpetuating this unfairness of climate change by not allowing these solutions the light of day.”
This post originally appeared on Corporate Knights. Republished by permission.
