Update Country Report Curaçao 17 Jul 2019

The Caribbean Community (Caricom) held its annual meeting in early July in St Lucia, with a focus on climate change. The issue is particularly important for Caribbean countries, as the 2019 hurricane season is beginning and many Caricom members are still recovering from the devastating hurricanes of late 2017.

The UN secretary-general, António Guterres, attended the meeting and gave a keynote speech highlighting the challenges that climate change poses for the Caribbean. Mr Guterres noted that the risks will rise as climate-related natural disasters increase in intensity and frequency, and called for greater global and regional action on climate change.

The impact on the Caribbean

As an island region with most of its economic development at sea level along the coast, the Caribbean is exceptionally vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Rising sea levels will endanger facilities along coastal areas, both in terms of housing and also tourist resorts and facilities. As tourism is a key economic driver within the region-and indeed the major component of GDP for many of the smaller islands-a risk to the tourism industry poses an existential risk to the regional economy.

The Caribbean has already experienced some of the impacts of climate change in the form of hurricanes of unusual intensity. Hurricanes Irma and Maria in September 2017 caused major damage in Barbuda, Dominica, Turks and Caicos, Anguilla and the British Virgin Islands, as well as some islands not in Caricom, such as Sint Maarten/St Martin, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

Hurricane damage has always been a risk in the Caribbean but increased intensity threatens the sustainability of businesses and tourist facilities located in high-risk areas. Over the longer term, the rate of tourist arrivals to the region may slow if natural disasters are perceived to be more frequent and more destructive. In addition, the cost of post-hurricane reconstruction is a major expense that has drained the resources of several islands since 2017; frequently repeated hurricanes could make reconstruction of major projects untenable for investors.

Countering climate change

The threat posed by climate change is recognised across the Caribbean, with Caricom and other island nations having already begun to implement measures to mitigate its impacts. Caribbean countries have ratified the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and in 2018 St Lucia, Grenada and Jamaica joined with the EU and other countries to agree to emissions targets designed to reach the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Although the Caribbean is currently responsible for less than 5% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) estimates that the region's emissions increased by more than three times the global average in 1990-2011.

Caricom has declared the Caribbean a "Climate Resilient Zone", supported by an initiative launched in 2018 called the Caribbean Climate Smart Accelerator. This aims to co-ordinate with regional governments to launch transformational regional projects with the aim of "modernising digital, physical and social infrastructure to integrate essential activities that are climate-adaptive, mitigative and secure a low-carbon future for the region".

Such projects also aim to develop awareness among communities about the importance of climate change, translating it from an abstract concept to a real phenomenon that is having an immediate impact on lifestyles and incomes. In addition, a medium-term aim is to build a pool of skilled professionals specialising in climate change who can export expertise learnt from the Caribbean to other Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and areas at risk from the changing climate.

Next steps

Mr Guterres emphasised the importance of global co-operation in the campaign against climate change-interpreted in some quarters as a thinly veiled rebuke to the US, which has held back from endorsing several global initiatives. He invited government and public-sector leaders to attend the UN Climate Action Summit in New York in September and contribute firm proposal to implement the UN's aims. Two of the key goals are to secure a 45% cut in greenhouse emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

These are ambitious objectives, particularly as some of the world's largest economies are not yet signed up to these, or similar, targets. The Caribbean appears to be focusing on implementing regional initiatives at the same time as encouraging international co-operation. These regional initiatives will aim to reduce emissions-although mitigation efforts by the Caribbean alone will be insufficient-and increase resilience, such as focusing on more durable structures during post-hurricane reconstruction and improving emergency planning.

Caribbean efforts will remain constrained by national budgets, but Caricom's willingness to support projects such as the Climate Resilient Zone makes the region a conducive environment for companies to set up new technology aligned to climate change requirements and also helps it to attract funding from donors and aid agencies specialising in related initiatives. With Irma and Maria still less than two years in the past, Caribbean states will count any project, however small-scale, as an investment in preventing a recurrence of the devastation wrought by these unusually powerful hurricanes.