Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor-News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

The Unit­ed Na­tions’ most im­por­tant cli­mate change con­fer­ence, COP30, will start this week in Belem, Brazil. As world lead­ers and ne­go­tia­tors dis­cuss the way for­ward in the cli­mate fight, Ja­maicans, Cubans, Haitians and Ba­hami­ans will con­tin­ue to pick up the pieces from what was left be­hind by Hur­ri­cane Melis­sa.

The close­ness of the hur­ri­cane’s ram­page through the Caribbean to COP30 might lead you to be­lieve it could shake the con­science of ne­go­tia­tors and in­spire them to ramp up am­bi­tions at the two-week con­fer­ence. Cari­com Cli­mate En­voy Dr James Fletch­er said we have been here be­fore.

Speak­ing to the Sun­day Guardian from Seoul, South Ko­rea, last Thurs­day, Fletch­er re­called, “I re­mem­ber when we were strug­gling to get the War­saw In­ter­na­tion­al Mech­a­nism sup­port­ed by par­ties at the War­saw COP. That was just a few weeks af­ter Ty­phoon Haiyan had dec­i­mat­ed the Philip­pines, and over 6,000 peo­ple died. One of the Philip­pines’ ne­go­tia­tors went on a hunger strike to draw at­ten­tion to what was hap­pen­ing.

“When we ne­go­ti­at­ed the Paris Agree­ment in 2015, that was the same year Trop­i­cal Storm Er­i­ca de­stroyed Do­mini­ca, caus­ing dam­age al­most equiv­a­lent to 100 per cent of that coun­try’s GDP. Those things don’t re­al­ly make a dif­fer­ence.”

He added, “It’s like every year just be­fore COP, we get these mes­sages from na­ture telling us that things are get­ting worse, but the coun­tries that need to pay at­ten­tion are not pay­ing at­ten­tion.”

A case for cli­mate fi­nance?

The loss and dam­age in­curred by some Caribbean coun­tries through the de­struc­tive path of Hur­ri­cane Melis­sa will al­so present tan­gi­ble ev­i­dence of the suf­fer­ings of the Glob­al South at the hands of cli­mate change. How­ev­er, will it be enough to sway ne­go­tia­tors to in­crease spend­ing on cli­mate fi­nance? At COP29 in Baku, Azer­bai­jan, last year, the Al­liance of Small Is­land States (AO­SIS) and oth­er de­vel­op­ing na­tions re­quest­ed a new cli­mate fi­nance goal of at least $1.3 tril­lion an­nu­al­ly. The con­sen­sus fell well be­low that, with par­ties agree­ing on $300 bil­lion an­nu­al­ly in cli­mate fi­nance to de­vel­op­ing na­tions by 2035.

Ruean­na Haynes, who is Head of Diplo­ma­cy at Cli­mate An­a­lyt­ics and Di­rec­tor of Cli­mate An­a­lyt­ics Caribbean, warned the geopo­lit­i­cal en­vi­ron­ment could shroud the needs of de­vel­op­ing na­tions at COP30.

She told the Sun­day Guardian in a writ­ten re­sponse, “Glob­al north coun­tries are all deeply fo­cused on do­mes­tic pol­i­tics that are dra­mat­i­cal­ly shift­ing to the right, as well as the prospect of war. I do not know if the cov­er­age of the im­pact of Hur­ri­cane Melis­sa is enough to pen­e­trate that. Es­pe­cial­ly amongst those who hold the purse strings on de­vel­op­ment/cli­mate fi­nance.

“The oth­er is­sue is that it’s not just the so-called Glob­al North that has to be shocked in­to ac­tion. G20 coun­tries col­lec­tive­ly make up over 75 per cent of glob­al emis­sions. Un­less they all take 1.5 aligned cli­mate ac­tion, the nee­dle will not be moved far or fast enough to al­low high­ly vul­ner­a­ble coun­tries to be able to adapt.”

The lat­est Unit­ed Na­tions En­vi­ron­ment Pro­gramme (UN­EP) Adap­ta­tion Gap Re­port 2025 may very well sup­port Haynes’ point. The re­port es­ti­mates adap­ta­tion fi­nance needs of de­vel­op­ing coun­tries will be US$310 to US$365 bil­lion per year by 2035. How­ev­er, in­ter­na­tion­al pub­lic adap­ta­tion fi­nance from de­vel­oped to de­vel­op­ing coun­tries fell from US$28 bil­lion in 2022 to US$26 bil­lion in 2023.

Fletch­er said some Glob­al North coun­tries are fo­cus­ing their ex­pen­di­ture on de­fence be­cause of the in­sta­bil­i­ty of the geopo­lit­i­cal sys­tem. He added, “It’s a very dif­fi­cult time to try to get cli­mate fi­nance even in the face of all of the cat­a­stroph­ic events that are hap­pen­ing and not just in SIDS and LD­Cs (Least De­vel­oped Coun­tries).

“In their own coun­tries, you’re see­ing flood­ing, and you’re see­ing for­est fires that are dec­i­mat­ing pop­u­la­tions and dec­i­mat­ing com­mu­ni­ties and de­stroy­ing in­fra­struc­ture, but there is a huge fi­nance gap that can­not be filled by pri­vate fi­nance. They try to tell us that the fi­nance that they’re look­ing at is not just pub­lic fi­nance, and it’s al­so pri­vate fi­nance, and we keep mak­ing the point that you can’t ask us to bor­row mon­ey from you to de­vel­op re­silience be­cause of a prob­lem that you cause.”

‘The road ahead for the re­gion is a chal­leng­ing one’

For Cami­la Min­er­va Ro­dríguez, who ne­go­ti­ates loss and dam­age on be­half of AO­SIS, the road ahead for the Caribbean is a chal­leng­ing one. Giv­en the glob­al cash crunch fac­ing the cli­mate move­ment, Ro­dríguez said, “I think what is hap­pen­ing is we have less and less op­tions. Hur­ri­cane Melis­sa re­al­ly show­cas­es that. It af­fect­ed Ja­maica, which was still in eco­nom­ic re­cov­ery from Hur­ri­cane Beryl last year, go­ing through Haiti, which of course is un­der a se­ries of cas­cad­ing crises–the lat­est group of which start­ed with the earth­quake in 2012 and then a se­ries of earth­quakes and hur­ri­canes–but same for Cu­ba as well, one event af­ter the oth­er, and this is be­com­ing the norm.”

She will press home this point as she ne­go­ti­ates at COP30, though Ro­dríguez ad­mit­ted she is not short of ex­am­ples to draw from when it comes to cli­mate dis­as­ters. She added, “One of my col­leagues with­in AO­SIS that I work the most close­ly with, Ash­ley, is from Ja­maica and will not be able to join us at COP and is now cur­rent­ly deal­ing with the af­ter­math of an event like this. That will def­i­nite­ly be very present. My goal and my pride as a cli­mate ne­go­tia­tor have al­ways been that I am try­ing to raise the voic­es of those of us that are at the front­lines of cli­mate change.

“This is an op­por­tu­ni­ty to ren­der more vis­i­ble, to have more cur­rent im­ages of what it is that we’re speak­ing about, and then to have clear ex­am­ples in the hopes that we can show­case to some of the oth­er ne­go­ti­at­ing groups why this is an ur­gent pri­or­i­ty for us. It will, of course, be part of the ex­am­ples that we will be giv­ing, but it will be in the line of the lat­est one of the ex­am­ples.”

For small is­land ne­go­tia­tors like Ro­dríguez at COP30, Hur­ri­cane Melis­sa will serve as yet an­oth­er re­minder of what is at stake, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly of what will change.