Comissiong calls on residents to support Bridgetown Initiative

Barbados Ambassador to CARICOM David Comissiong is calling on Barbadians to be proud of and support the Bridgetown Initiative, which seeks to establish a Global Climate Mitigation Trust consisting of trillions of dollars to help poor countries tackle climate change issues and deal with immediate debt crises.

According to the World Economic Forum, the Bridgetown Initiative is a proposal to reform the world of development finance, particularly as it relates to how rich countries help poor countries cope with and adapt to climate change.

Barbados sets out three key steps in the initiative, the first involving changing some of the terms around how funding is loaned and repaid. The aim is to stop developing nations spiralling into debt crisis when their borrowing is forced up by successive disasters like floods, droughts and storms.

Speaking on the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) Mornin Barbados show this week, Comissiong declared that the initiative is the first serious proposal to suggest a way of finding the trillions in investment to prevent climate change from becoming a catastrophic problem.

“So, especially our young people we need to become environmentalists. This needs to be the call of our young people and you have the Bridgetown Initiative, a home grown instrument that you can embrace to become some of the world’s foremost advocates for dealing with climate change,” he said.

“This is the kind of message that needs to go out all across Barbados. Let us all as a national population, mobilise around this Bridgetown Initiative that belongs to us and that is providing a solution to the most significant and fundamental problem facing the world today.”

Comissiong stressed that assisting developing countries with building resilience to the climate change crisis will also help these nations to deal with combating the evils of underdevelopment.

“So, the Bridgetown Initiative addresses all of the institutions that go to finance either a response to the climate crisis or a response to poverty and underdevelopment. So, for example, it says to the IMF [International Monetary Fund], a lot of the countries coming out of the pandemic are struggling with great debt, and are going into a debt crisis.

“So, the first point the Bridgetown Initiative makes, it says to the IMF, ‘IMF we need to deal with this short term issue of debt stressed countries. So, you need to step up to the plate, you need to give debt relief and debt suspension for temporary periods to all of these debt stressed countries.

“You issue something called special drawing rights that helps to bolster the foreign exchange of countries. You need to reallocate 100 billion of those drawing rights that you have given to big powerful developing countries, to poor developing countries that are really stressful’,” Comissiong said.

The CARICOM Ambassador said the Initiative is also appealing to the World Bank group of companies and multilateral development banks to make access to financing for developing countries to adapt to global warming and meet Sustainable Development Goals (SDS) easier.

“All of these things require much cheaper money because countries have to borrow to deal with these things, but we can’t have them borrowing this expensive money that is driving them into debt.

“So’ World Bank and multilateral development banks, you need to expand the amount of money you make available to developing countries to address all of these problems by at least one trillion United States dollars.

“But that money needs to be cheaper, that money needs to be long-term loans, so if a poor country has to borrow to deal with these things they should not have to repay within a minimum of 30 years,” he said. (AH)