White House Announces Partnership to Help Caribbean With Climate Change

The small island nation of Haiti seems forever beset by crises, many of them climate related. Hurricanes, earthquakes, rising sea level, and floods that bring waterborne diseases are just a few of nature’s events that have repeatedly devastated an already severely impoverished country, where nearly 11.4 million people live. Such disasters in the region don’t just affect Haiti though. Throughout the Caribbean, from Jamaica to Dominica, developing island countries are suffering the misery of climate change, and they are doing so disproportionately to wealthy nations. On top of that, the islands don’t have the funds to mitigate or prevent most of the damage inflicted.

On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris announced a multipart effort to address this disparity. Called the U.S.-Caribbean Partnership to Address the Climate Crisis 2030, the effort makes what the White House called “fresh commitments to — and integration of — climate adaptation and resilience and clean energy programs across the Caribbean region.” The goal of the partnership is to make these countries more resilient to climate change, and involves creating jobs that strengthen energy security as well as an effort to create “climate-resistant” infrastructure.

“The Caribbean is on the front lines of the climate crisis, including sea level rise that threatens low-lying islands and exacerbates storm surge associated with hurricanes,” the White House said in a fact sheet. “Addressing energy security and building climate resilience can unlock new opportunities and safeguard communities.”

One of the pillars of the partnership is to improve access to development financing, but no actual numbers have been announced. This is problematic for a couple reasons:

1. A new study by Oxfam estimates that over the past five years, UN humanitarian appeals linked to extreme weather were only 54 percent funded on average. International efforts by the United States and others to pay for these essential improvements have historically fallen way short of promises.

2. As The New Republic points out, developing countries owe a lot of debt to the International Monetary Fund and elsewhere, and that debt will “continue to play a major role in how the Biden administration approaches climate finance” in the Caribbean. The U.S. Treasury Department says it will “explore” debt forgiveness — a muddy answer to a troublesome problem.

Also barely addressed is a need to lessen harmful emissions. But there’s a reason for that. Caribbean countries are destroying the atmosphere and warming the oceans nowhere near to the degree to which wealthy countries are.

“Tiny islands in the Caribbean … [are] “not the main contributor to the problem,” John F. Kerry, the U.S. presidential envoy for climate, said on Thursday. “The main contributors to the problem are 20 countries; 20 countries equal 80 percent of all the emissions.”

It’s a step forward for the White House to acknowledge this disparity and attempt to address it. But while the words in the proclamation of the partnership sound good, it remains to be seen how many of the promises the government will actually fulfill.