Mark Bas­sant and Tim­o­thy Chasteau

in The Ba­hamas

UN Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al An­to­nio Guter­res said the world is in a cli­mate cri­sis and steps must be tak­en by all world lead­ers in­clud­ing those in the Caribbean to mit­i­gate the ef­fects of glob­al warm­ing and cli­mate change.

Guter­res, spoke at a me­dia con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, at the of­fice of Prime Min­is­ter's Dr Hu­bert Min­nis in The Ba­hamas af­ter ar­riv­ing for a two day vis­it on the is­land. He first met with the Ba­hami­an Prime Min­is­ter to dis­cuss the dev­as­tat­ing im­pact of Hur­ri­cane Do­ri­an that as­sault­ed The Grand Ba­hama Is­lands and the Aba­co is­lands al­most two weeks ago.

"The fi­nan­cial cost of the dam­age caused by Do­ri­an is not clear, but it will be in the bil­lions of dol­lars.The Ba­hamas can­not be ex­pect­ed to foot this bill alone.These new large scale cli­mate-re­lat­ed dis­as­ters de­mand a new mul­ti­lat­er­al re­sponse," Guter­res said.

Send­ing a strong mes­sage to World and Caribbean lead­ers Guter­res said, "Cli­mate fi­nanc­ing is on el­e­ment.We must reach the tar­get of $100bil­lion dol­lars per year from pub­lic and pri­vate sources, for mit­i­ga­tion and adap­ta­tion in the de­vel­op­ing world, as rich coun­tries have been promis­ing for near­ly a decade."

Mak­ing ref­er­ence to the Ba­hamas, he said, "In cas­es like yours I strong­ly sup­port pro­pos­als to con­vert debt in­to in­vest­ment in re­silience. Con­ces­sion­al fi­nanc­ing must be made avail­able to high­ly-in­debt­ed mid­dle-in­come coun­tries that are vul­ner­a­ble to ex­treme weath­er events. But most im­por­tant­ly, the en­tire in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty must ad­dress the cli­mate cri­sis through rais­ing am­bi­tion and ac­tion to im­ple­ment the Paris Agree­ment."

Guter­res said this was ex­treme­ly im­por­tant as he paint­ed a grim pic­ture over the next ten years, if cli­mate change was not tak­en se­ri­ous­ly. "We are in a bat­tle for our lives.But it is a bat­tle we can and must win."

The UN Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al said his heart went out to the peo­ple of The Ba­hamas and pledged re­lief and oth­er as­sis­tance.

Prime Min­is­ter Min­nis said they did all they could have from the very first day the hur­ri­cane hit the is­lands.

He said that de­spite the fact that they were fac­ing a ma­jor ob­sta­cle try­ing to find ac­com­mo­da­tion for sev­er­al thou­sands he was cer­tain that over a pe­ri­od of time the prob­lem would be solved.

PM Min­nis said the Ba­hamas was still eco­nom­i­cal­ly sound and its "ma­jor fi­nan­cial hub of Nas­sau was un­af­fect­ed an still open for busi­ness."