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The Caribbean Policy Development Centre (CPDC), a regional umbrella organisation for Caribbean non-governmental organizations, is calling on the international community to
provide greater volumes of new and additional concessional grant-based climate financing to
address the sovereign debt and climate finance crises facing Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in the Caribbean.
Richard Jones, Officer-in-Charge of the CPDC, notes that there should be greater volumes of new concessional and grant-based climate funding and that it must be accessible to all Caribbean SIDS and Global south less developed nations.
Speaking recently in relation to the organisation’s regional debt campaign with Debt Justice UK, he outlined how the Caribbean debt burden has been shaped for decades and highlighted several approaches that should be employed to ease the Caribbean’s onerous debt burden.
Since gaining political independence from colonial masters in the 1960s, several countries
in the Caribbean region were and continue to be among the most indebted in the world. At the end of 2020, six Caribbean countries – Barbados, Suriname, Belize, Dominica, Jamaica
and Antigua & Barbuda – ranked in the top 10 of the world’s most highly indebted SIDS, with
their public debt stock far exceeding 10088% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
“Caribbean countries are now saddled with debt burdens well above the carrying capacity of
their respective economies. This negatively impacts the quality of life for citizens, educational services, healthcare and living standards for millions of people. This buildup of debt was not sudden. It happened gradually and almost unnoticeably over several decades. In many respects, it is a silent debt crisis,” Jones noted.
Now more than ever, the CPDC’s Head is calling for the international community to operationalize several existing agreements so they can better serve the Caribbean region.
“As a starting point, the World Bank must supplement its arbitrary income criteria, which it uses to determine access to concessional financing, with a multi-dimensional vulnerability index which takes into account the social, environmental, and institutional characteristics of the countries being assessed,” he said.
Furthermore, Mr. Jones opined that adequate levels of additional grant-based climate finance, including to regional civil society organizations, would go a long way in ensuring that climate finance responds to the needs of vulnerable communities in a just and equitable manner.
Jones affirms that there must be comprehensive debt relief as a form of climate reparations and he explains that the CPDC has developed a sovereign debt and climate justice initiative, called ‘Caribbean Emancipation 2030.’ This initiative seeks to remove the onerous debt that overhangs Caribbean SIDS, free up resources to boost climate resilience actions aligned with the 2015 Paris Agreement, and support sustainable development.
“Caribbean Emancipation 2030 provides a useful template that can be further refined and
expanded to include other heavily indebted, climate vulnerable Global South nations,” he said.
The CPDC Officer-in-Charge is also calling for the operationalisation of the Loss and Damage Fund agreed to at the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (COP27) in Egypt last year.
Jones noted that to be effective, climate financing provided through this Loss and Damage Fund must be in line with the enormous needs of Caribbean SIDS and other climate vulnerable countries and must come in the form of grants and not loans, so as to not worsen the existing debt burden. Civil society’s access to such a fund is also believed to be imperative to complement the work of Caribbean governments to reach those most vulnerable in our societies.
“The Santiago Network on Loss and Damage also needs to be operationalised as an effective
mechanism to catalyze and deliver the required technical assistance to help climate vulnerable
countries” he stated.
The CPDC’s head is confident that when the proposed mix of recommendations is implemented, we will move closer to addressing the debt related challenges that continue to threaten Caribbean sustainable development.
