Jamaica was on hurricane watch in the days leading up to the UN 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 home-grown 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.
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, will be taking to the climate summit being held in Dubai starting this week. 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 equitability.
She will be in Dubai hoping to drum up more financial support for projects that are underway or in the nascent stages. In 2009, the world’s richest countries committed to allocating $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 $100-billion "loss and damage fund".
Moses says that her region needs access to more concessional funding, 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 says.
While the region is doing relatively better at reducing its emissions than other better-financed countries, most Caribbean nations are short of hitting their net-zero targets, Moses says. Financing is a big obstacle. “It is not a lack of skill or lack of expertise oftentimes. It is often a lack of bandwidth. We have one person wearing several hats versus having dedicated resources to many of these functions,” she adds.
While Caribbean countries can access 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 says. Take Jamaica. It needs to raise its coastal roads because of sea-level rise and coastal erosion. That will cost it about US $1 million per kilometre, Moses says. “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,” she says. “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 that going to Puerto Rico or 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 says.
K. Lisana Dyer, an environmentalist and resident of the Commonwealth of Dominica, a tiny island nation, will be 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 says.
She says that while financing is an important topic, 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 says. “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 will be 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 super-charged form of growing produce, yielding 45 times more output than traditional farming methods in a 28-day time frame. It is a path for the island nations to become more food secure, using less water, less land and relying less on imports, Moses says.
There are a whole host of home-grown projects that have potential. One project in Barbados is using sugarcane waste from its production of rum 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,” says 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.”
