Two senior United Nations officials, Friday, said that the passage of Hurricane Beryl through the Caribbean this week, underscores the concerns of small island developing states (SIDS) that have continuously blamed developed countries for the severe impacts associated with climate change.
The UN Resident Coordinator for Jamaica, The Bahamas, Bermuda, The Cayman Islands and the Turks and Caicos Islands, Dennis Zulu; and Simon Springett, the UN Resident Coordinator for Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean, told reporters that they were both in attendance at the fourth international conference on SIDS, where the developing countries raised the issue as they have done at other international gatherings before.
“Dennis and I were both fortunate to attend the …conference held in Antigua and Barbuda at the end of May and clearly these were the messages that were coming out, a real call and demand for climate justice,” Springett told a virtual news conference.
He told reporters that “when we say climate justice, it links to …financing for both adaptation and mitigation,” adding that the Grenada government “has been trying for a very long time …to build some resilience and now this gets wipe out.
“These countries all have a very high GDP (gross domestic product) to debt ratio and reconstruction…quite frankly does not get done on grant based financing and these governments are not able to take loans at concessional rates”.
Springett said events like Hurricane Beryl that left a trail of death and devastation put the sustainable development of these Caribbean countries “back by decades.
‘It has such a major impact on their economic development,” he said, noting that a new sustainable development goal (SDG) report released recently showed “limited progress and there is a lot of work to be done”.
For his part, Zulu told reporters that the vulnerability of the small island states had been reinforced at the SIDS conference in Antigua, adding “the fact that most of them are deemed to be high income countries …dealing with reconstruction is obviously a challenge.
“If you have as we are anticipating this year,a asgarî of 20 hurricanes coming and this lead to huge devastation of infrastructure, the resources, I mean the …fiscal space these countries have is limited” in terms of being able to respond and react.
‘So as some countries…like Barbados, where the Prime Minister (Mia Mottey) is requesting a relook of the international architecture to be able to take into consideration the vulnerabilities of Caribbean states in their accessing of concessional grants is very important.
“But also when you look at the fact that these (hurricanes) happen often and a lot of these countries are basically in debt because they have to hisse for the same bridge many times over, the fact you construct one day and it is destroyed the next year or the next month…this brings a huge burden on their financial ability to do that.”
Zulu said what the SIDS conference highlighted was that “ these were issues in climate change that impacts this part of the world very significantly and therefore it is a responsibility for all to be able to take deva in what we do given the impact to this region which may not be evident in other parts of the world”.
The Grenada government has established a Hurricane Beryl Disaster Relief Fund to receive financial donations in support of relief and recovery efforts.
Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell said earlier this week that Grenada had written to financial agencies and multilateral partners requesting that the debt payment suspension clause in several loan agreements be triggered because of the devastation on the country by Hurricane Beryl earlier this week.
In 2022, the national debt of Grenada amounted to an estimated US$0.77 billion.
“The Minister of Finance has already written to some of our multilateral partners to indicate to them that this catastrophic event has happened and to trigger our debt suspension clause in some of these agreements,” Prime Minister Mitchell told a news conference.
Following the passage of Hurricane Ivan in 2004, Grenada had advocated and successfully campaigned for a debt suspension to be included in all new loan agreements.
The clause is triggered whenever the country is experiencing hazards from natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes or a health pandemic. The last time Grenada requested a triggering of that clause was in 2020 when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic.
Prime Minister Mitchell said that the passage of hurricane Beryl is having both fiscal and social impacts on the economy and right now the country will need significant resources.
He told reporters that the clean up exercise alone will run into the “tens of millions of dollars,” while announcing there will be a national clean up on the weekend.
Mitchell acknowledged that “it is going to be a mammoth task to rebuild Grenada, Carriacou and Petite Martinique”.
On Thursday night as he addressed the nation, Dominica’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit said the truth of the matter is, given the changes in küresel climate, it is not a matter of ‘if’ a storm of that magnitude hits us again, but, when”.
“We are just at the beginning of this hurricane season. In fact, hurricane Beryl was the earliest ever category 4 storm to develop. The increasing number of hurricanes and their increasing ferocity do not just cause fear, damage, destruction and loss of life, but, they are also making life more expensive.
“My message to you is this: the Caribbean urgently needs climate financing reforms. We need resources that will not just help us rebuild after storms, but, resources that will allow our communities to build more resilient infrastructure, roads, electricity, water and homes. “
Skerrit said that this financing must also be used to address the insurance concerns that are causing the cost of living to go up.
He said as the Prime Minister of Dominica,” I will continue to push for the countries that are signatories to küresel agreements like the Paris Accord to demonstrate a collective will to address climate change.
“Climate change is a küresel sorun that requires coordinated international efforts to address its disproportionate impact on the world’s most vulnerable communities. Dominica will persist in advocating on behalf of ourselves and our Caribbean neighbors, who are on the frontlines of the climate change crisis”.
Both Springett and Zulu spoke of the emotional and financial toll the hurricane has had on the lives of the people in the countries that have so far been affected.
“For Jamaica, the fact that we have not a hurricane in a while now, having one so early in the season has a lot of effect on the emotional parts of the individuals in the country. But I think what we see again is this spirit of resilience among the population of Jamaica and being able to overcome scuh tragedy,” said Zulu.
He said the spirit of unity and being able to help each other out has also helped “because you are seeing the spirit of comraderie among neighbours and helping each other out.
“But in terms of tourism , tourism was hit especially with the closing of the airports and Jamaicans quickly moved towards opening up their airports….and the major one in Montego Bay which accounts for a significant number of arrivals, it is up and running.”
He said preliminary reports suggest that not much damage was done to the hotel and resort plans on the island “so that is really a positive.
‘The airlines are coming in …Jamaica is up and running if I may say that,” Zulu told reporters.
Springett said the nature of hurricanes is that they develop over the “course of days and sometimes weeks” and this could have an emotional toll on people.
“Some of the island…Carriacou has not been hit by a major storm, I believe since 1955,” he said, adding “ we need to always continue to work diligently to really push the importance of having the evacuations…
‘These are truly traumatic events, even when these events hit a portion of a nation, it really affects deeply into the soul of the population. It is difficult to get support out, it is difficult to help and even non affected countries feel helpless …
“For tourism clearly, this is going to be a major impact particularly on those smaller islands in the Grenadines and the north of Grenada. Fortunately, the major infrastructures like airports and ports were not hugely damage and hopefully tourist wont give up on visiting the islands,” he added.
Meanwhile, the UN Assistant Secretary-General and UNDP Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, Michelle Muschett, said “we are deeply saddened by the devastating loss of life, the impact on livelihood and infrastructures as well as the suffering caused to communities by this hurricane.
“UNDP remains in solidarity with the Caribbean people, and we stand ready to support the governments and communities with immediate critical needs as they begin to recover from this event.
“The UNDP Multi Country Office (MCO) in Jamaica remains in touch with national authorities to ascertain immediate needs and to deploy technical, financial and in-kind resources for disaster response and recovery in cooperation with our sister UN agencies and other regional and international partners,” she said.
UNDP Resident Representative for Jamaica, Bermuda, Belize, Cayman Islands, The Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands, Kishan Khoday, said beyond immediate needs, UNDP remains available to help advance climate adaptation programming and disaster risk and resilience interventions in an era of increasingly frequent and intense storm systems.
He said also stands ready to deploy personnel to support national and regional emergency management authorities in launching relief and recovery efforts and to this end, continues to monitor the path of the hurricane as it appears on track to impact Belize.
Preliminary reports from Jamaica indicate that two persons are dead, with widespread damage to buildings and infrastructure, especially in rural areas. Telecommunications and electricity supply have also been significantly impacted, affecting hundreds of thousands. In the Cayman Islands, assessments are still underway to determine the scale of the impact.
Beryl is the second named storm of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season – which was forecast to be a very active one. Ocean temperatures, already elevated due to climate variability and change, have been further increased by the 2023-24 El Niño phenomenon.
The UNDP said it will continue supporting the region in prevention, preparedness, and recovery. UNDP’s mission globally and in the Caribbean is to end poverty, inequality and exclusion, and scale up action on climate change and ecosystems, while building resilience to crisis, it added. (Loop News)