The Caribbean Policy Development Centre (CPDC) is advocating for greater access to concessional grant-based climate financing to address the sovereign debt and climate finance crises facing Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in the Caribbean.

The call was made by Richard Jones, officer in charge of CPDC.

Jones says there must be greater volumes of new concessional and grant-based climate funding must be made accessible to all Caribbean SIDS and less-developed nations of the Global South.

“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 build-up of debt was not sudden. It happened gradually and almost unnoticeably over several decades. In many respects, it is a silent debt crisis,” he argued.

Jones is now calling on the international community to operationalise 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 suggested.

Jones says adequate levels of additional grant-based climate finance will go a long way in ensuring that climate finance responds to the needs of vulnerable communities in a just and equitable manner.

Jones underscores the need for more comprehensive debt relief as a form of reparations similar to the CPDC Caribbean Emancipation 2030 initiative, which 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.

Jones is also calling for the enactment 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 operationalized as an effective 
mechanism to catalyze and deliver the required technical assistance to help climate-vulnerable 
countries” he stated.