Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty (CARI­COM) chair­man, Prime Min­is­ter Roo­sevelt Sker­rit Wednes­day re­it­er­at­ed the po­si­tion of the 15-mem­ber re­gion­al in­te­gra­tion group­ing that the up­com­ing Unit­ed Na­tions Cli­mate Change Con­fer­ence (COP28) should be a suc­cess for small is­land de­vel­op­ing states (SIDS) like those in the Caribbean.

COP 28 gets un­der­way in Dubai from No­vem­ber 30 to De­cem­ber 12. Its the­mat­ic pro­gramme is de­signed to unite a di­verse range of stake­hold­ers in­clud­ing gov­ern­ments, youth, busi­ness and in­vestors, civ­il so­ci­ety, front­line com­mu­ni­ties, in­dige­nous peo­ples, and oth­ers around spe­cif­ic so­lu­tions that must be scaled up this decade to lim­it warm­ing to 1.5 de­grees.

“As I have said on sev­er­al oc­ca­sions be­fore we need this COP to be one of ac­tion that de­liv­ers on the promis­es of de­vel­oped coun­tries to pro­vide the much need­ed fi­nanc­ing to tack­le the wors­en­ing cli­mate sit­u­a­tion," said Sker­rit, who is al­so Do­mini­ca’s head of gov­ern­ment.

He told a news con­fer­ence that if re­gion­al coun­tries leave Dubai “with no clear de­liv­er­ables it will be a very un­for­tu­nate pe­ri­od for us in the de­vel­op­ing world.

“Every­body knows of my mis­giv­ings about util­i­ty of such con­fer­ences af­ter all we have walked the walk and talked the talk, and af­ter 30 years or so we have seen no prac­ti­cal ac­tion on the part of the de­vel­oped world to help in ad­dress an ex­is­ten­tial threat to us in the Caribbean and small is­land states.”

Sker­rit told re­porters that the lives of the peo­ple in th Caribbean are at risk “and so I will stay true to the pledge that I have made to the Do­mini­can peo­ple and the wider Caribbean re­gion to keep fight­ing for more eq­ui­table dis­tri­b­u­tion of cli­mate fi­nanc­ing.”

He said such fi­nanc­ing is so “crit­i­cal­ly and ur­gent­ly need­ed to en­sure that all of us have a bet­ter fu­ture."

“And so we will at­tend and we will ad­dress and we will be en­gag­ing the var­i­ous stake­hold­ers of COP 28 next week,” Sker­rit told re­porters.

Caribbean coun­tries re­main hope­ful that COP 28 will de­liv­er, at the very least, sev­er­al ma­jor po­lit­i­cal out­comes, in­clud­ing an am­bi­tious mit­i­ga­tion work pro­gramme that will see de­vel­oped coun­tries and ma­jor economies sub­mit en­hanced Na­tion­al­ly De­ter­mined Con­tri­bu­tions (ND­Cs) aligned to the 1.5 path­way.

The In­ter­gov­ern­men­tal Pan­el on Cli­mate Change (IPCC) Sixth As­sess­ment Re­port (AR6) makes it clear that with­out steep cuts aligned to a 1.5 path­way, the sit­u­a­tion will wors­en.

In ad­di­tion, the re­gion al­so wants a glob­al stock take that will pro­vide an op­por­tu­ni­ty that keeps alive the promise of Paris as well as as­sess the ad­e­qua­cy of adap­ta­tion ef­forts and the fi­nanc­ing, ca­pac­i­ty-build­ing, and tech­nol­o­gy trans­fer that the Paris Agree­ment is to de­liv­er.

In ad­di­tion, CARI­COM coun­tries want the op­er­a­tional­iza­tion and cap­i­tal­iza­tion of the Loss and Dam­age fund that will pro­vide crit­i­cal cli­mate fi­nance to the most vul­ner­a­ble coun­tries who are rav­aged by the ad­verse im­pacts of cli­mate change.

ROSEAU, Do­mini­ca, Nov 22, CMC –

CMC/df/ir/2023