Advocates urge the rich to do more to help SIDS tackle climate change

Climate change champions are calling on multilateral institutions and larger industrial countries to show how serious they are about tackling the issue of climate change by making adequate funding available to vulnerable small island developing states.

In fact, insisting on climate justice for vulnerable states, officials suggest that the rich and powerful regions should provide the necessary funding in the form of grants.

The issue came under the microscope on Tuesday during a climate reparations online discussion hosted by the Commonwealth Foundation.

The panelists examined the issue of loss and damages and who should pay, as they identified opportunities and obstacles for small island developing states.

In a pre-recorded message, Former President of the Maldives Mohamed Nasheed said it was unfair that developing countries had to borrow to build out their infrastructure and pay their own way to tackle issues relating to climate impacts that were caused by more developed nations.

“This is injustice piled on injustice and adds to the economic case for urgent debt relief. If there is no Maldives we cannot pay the debt back,” he said.

He proposed a “large-scale climate debt swap” for debt-distressed vulnerable countries.

Outlining it would work, he said “Countries would first undergo a debt sustainability analysis that assesses their ability to continue to service commercial and official debt. The World Bank or a bank would then supervise a substantial write down of unpayable debt and the issuance of new guaranteed bonds. This way creditors and bondholders will get some repayment rather than saying ‘defaults’.

“With at least 18 months of interest payments on these bonds guaranteed by the World Bank, little countries will not be locked out of capital markets. Governments will still be able to invest in strategic areas of development including health, education, sustainable energy and climate resilient infrastructure. Governments are not willing to singularly announce their need for debt restructuring, but collectively we must find solutions and ways of sustaining our economies,” said Nasheed.

Panelists Sabra Noordeen, Maldivian Special Envoy for Climate Change, and Dr James Fletcher, Former Chief Climate Change Negotiator for St Lucia, agreed on the need for greater financial support for small island developing states to adequately put measures in place to tackle climate impacts.

“I think the multilateral space can certainly foster empathy, but what follows afterwards is also crucial, which is what we need in terms of concrete technical and financial support,” said Noordeen.

Fletcher said he welcomed the idea of a debt swap initiative for the Caribbean given the limited fiscal space and high debt levels many countries in the region faced. He noted that a lot of the borrowing for some countries was associated with recovery efforts from extreme climatic events.

However, acknowledging that not all countries had debt from multilateral institutions, he said it would be difficult for some to enter into this kind of debt swap arrangement.

He proposed that any mechanism put in place to help small island developing states should consist mostly of grants.

“I think it is unconscionable and that is why when we speak of funding for adaptation and more certainly, when we hope that funding for loss and damage comes through, it can’t be loans that these countries will go and borrow at market rates to deal with a problem they did not cause. A significant portion of those funds have to be in the form of grants because that is the only way we can see a real compensatory mechanism being put in place that would allow there to be some level of climate justice,” he said.

The former government minister expressed frustration that the Caribbean and other small island developing states were “always the ones accepting the compromise” while depending on the multilateral process and global climate summits.

“While these discussions are taking place and there are all these negotiations about wording, there are countries that are losing coastlines, there are people who are losing their livelihood, there are ecosystems disappearing. So in addition to the economic impacts of loss and damage we also have the non economic losses,” he said.

“I think the political temperature needs to be increased. It is something that small island developing states have been at the forefront of, but we need to see not just other climate vulnerable countries, but the rest of the world to understand just how dire a situation these countries are facing.

“There is need for not just dialogue, not just mechanisms, but there is need for significant financial support to these countries and that is what we need to get the international community to understand, and to get the politics to wrap its head around. We can’t just continue to talk about this just in esoteric terms. It is a life and death issue for many of the small island developing states and other climate vulnerable countries,” said Fletcher. marlonmadden@barbadostoday.bb