With sustained winds of nearly 300 kilometres per hour, storm surges of four metres, and half a metre of rain, Hurricane Melissa flattened much of western Jamaica, doing somewhere between US$8 and $15 billion in damage. But even as roofs were still flying off churches and palms were bending like stalks of grass, Edmund Bartlett, Jamaica’s minister of tourism, was already giving interviews to international media, encouraging travellers to visit and to visit soon.

The almost manic push to have all the island’s hotels operational by mid-December, when the peak season begins, threw into sharp relief a contradiction that underlies the Caribbean as a whole: it depends on an industry that, in some respects, is also responsible for its undoing.

The Caribbean is the most tourism-dependent region in the world. It is also one of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Warming oceans, rising sea levels and increasingly frequent extreme weather events represent existential threats to the region: not only to residents but also to the tourism industry on which they depend. Sustainability, in this context, is not a nice add-on, but a necessity. If tourism is to remain a mainstay of Caribbean economies, it has to be resilient to the impacts of climate change, protective of increasingly fragile ecosystems and beneficial to local economies as a whole.

It’s asking a lot of an industry that, as Antiguan author Jamaica Kincaid argued in her 1988 book A Small Place, exhibits a similarly extractive quality to the slave-based plantation economies of the 17th and 18th centuries. Kincaid draws a direct line from Caribbean sugar to sand: resources that have been exploited by foreign powers with little to no regard for the well-being of locals.

“Tourism is both a lifeline and a liability,” says Therez Walker, who grew up in Antigua and is now a lecturer on sustainable tourism at NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. “It’s a very uncomfortable reality that a lot of people don’t want to face.”

Half a century ago, when the imperial powers that colonized the Caribbean dropped preferential trade arrangements for their agricultural exports – primarily bananas, sugar and rum – these tropical islands, with World Bank support, set their sights on the postwar middle class’s growing appetite for beach vacations. Tourism ministries were established and tax incentives were offered to foreign developers. In 1970, some four million international guests visited the Caribbean. Since then, the figure has increased almost 10-fold.

Tourism now accounts for an average of 11% of the gross domestic product of the 33 political entities – sovereign states, dependencies and overseas territories – that make up the Caribbean. But in some countries, the sector constitutes a virtual monoculture. In Antigua, for instance, tourism generates 88% of the country’s GDP and provides 91% of all jobs, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council.

Such dependency on a single industry creates vulnerability, particularly when only a fraction of its economic benefits flow back to the country. The vast majority of revenue generated by Caribbean tourism lands with the foreign operators who control it: airlines, cruise companies and hotel chains. The United Nations World Tourism Organization puts the level of economic “leakage” from Caribbean tourism at about 80%. At the same time, local governments have to contend with 100% of the waste that the industry generates.

Climate change is only amplifying this vulnerability. Over the last five decades, rising sea temperatures have cost the Caribbean almost half of its hard coral cover: a blow to the marine life that coral sustains as well as the huge revenues generated by snorkelling and diving. At current rates, sea level rise is expected to reduce the Caribbean’s sandy beaches by half and to force the closure of a third of existing hotels by the end of this century. Likewise, extreme heat and storm events like Hurricane Melissa are becoming more intense and frequent.

When Walker, who has been based in the Netherlands since 2022, returns home to Antigua, she feels both frustration and sadness. The beach she went to as a child is barely recognizable. The water is higher, the shore depleted. Gone are the mangrove swamps and the thriving fish populations they once hosted. In her community, water is in chronically short supply: many households have running water only twice a week. When she drives past water trucks parked outside the island’s all-inclusive resorts, she is resentful – not of the guests inside, but of decision-makers who have failed to protect domestic and environmental interests.

The needs of tourists and residents are often not aligned. Drought for locals translates into a sun-filled vacation for visitors. The mangroves that serve as natural barriers against erosion and storms are the enemy of the pristine sand beach. The protected coastline that hosts animal, plant and marine life is an obstacle to shoreline resorts.

“Our policymakers go to UN climate conventions and talk about our vulnerability,” Walker says. “And then they come home and approve another huge development on an ecologically sensitive coastline.”

According to Beienetch “Bennie” Watson, who teaches tourism policy and planning at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, the problem with Caribbean tourism is its foundation in a “colonial logic” that is top-down and externally driven. “Those seated around the table haven’t reflected the voice of ‘the people,’” she says. “The people’s vision of tourism hasn’t been heard.”

But in recent years, Watson has seen a shift, prompted in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, when Caribbean hotels stood empty and tourism revenue dropped by half. Some islands took the opportunity to promote homestays and longer-term accommodation options. Others directed visitors to more tailored experiences in eco-, adventure, and rural tourism. Watson is encouraged by a younger generation of traveller that, often prompted by social media, wants to explore outside resort walls.

A 2025 World Bank report on the future of Caribbean tourism emphasized the importance of moving beyond “sea, sun and sand,” pointing out how the short-term economic benefits of volume tourism – all-inclusive resorts and cruise tourism – have overshadowed their high environmental, energy, water-consumption and emissions costs.

Three months after Melissa, Jamaican Tourism Minister Bartlett went on an international marketing blitz to boost investor and traveller confidence in his island. At a luncheon in New York City, he announced that 70% of Jamaica’s hotels were up and running: a remarkable accomplishment.

But Watson, who lives in Kingston, has witnessed recovery on another level. Members of her church go out every Thursday to help communities that are rebuilding. She says the hurricane has proven something important to Jamaicans: that the island is close-knit, solidarity is strong, and residents’ needs matter.

Therez Walker agrees that change has to come from below. “We need to demand more of tourism,” she says. “This is an ‘us’ problem.”

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.

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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.”

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