RYAN BA­CHOO | Lead Ed­i­tor – News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

St Lu­cia’s Prime Min­is­ter Phillip Pierre has said he ex­pects this week's CARI­COM-Cana­da sum­mit to en­hance fur­ther the re­gion's ef­forts to get the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty to ho­n­our their com­mit­ments to­wards as­sist­ing small is­land de­vel­op­ing states (SIDS) deal with the im­pact of cli­mate change.

Speak­ing at a news con­fer­ence ahead of the Oc­to­ber 17-19 Sum­mit in Ot­tawa, Pierre said he and his Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty col­leagues would look to the North Amer­i­can coun­try to put for­ward their case.

“Re­gard­ing cli­mate re­silience, we know the world will not meet the 1.5 de­grees Cel­sius bench­mark for glob­al warm­ing,” he ob­served. “There are se­ri­ous is­sues as it re­lates to that. We have seen the dev­as­tat­ing ef­fects of floods, droughts, earth­quakes, etc. Cana­da is com­mit­ted to as­sist­ing us in this re­gard. But hav­ing said so, the rest of the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty has not met its com­mit­ment of the US$100 bil­lion that they promised to give the de­vel­op­ing world re­gard­ing cli­mate re­silience… or even cli­mate mit­i­ga­tion."

Ac­cord­ing to Prime Min­is­ter Pierre, if one looks at the debt pro­file of the re­gion—and of St. Lu­cia in par­tic­u­lar:

“You will find we have had to bor­row the most af­ter a hur­ri­cane."

The St Lu­cia Prime Min­is­ter not­ed:

“In some coun­tries—like Do­mini­ca—a hur­ri­cane wrote off 97 per­cent of their GDP (gross do­mes­tic prod­uct). So, you can­not treat us like you treat coun­tries re­gard­ing de­vel­op­ment fi­nanc­ing.”

“So, we are look­ing for spe­cial and dif­fer­en­tial treat­ment. We are look­ing for loss and dam­age claus­es as far as our bor­row­ing is con­cerned.  There is a dis­cus­sion go­ing on that most of our debts should be writ­ten off, but it is dif­fi­cult," he added.