March 1, 2021 — Barbados’ Prime Minister, the Honourable Mia Amor Mottley, QC, MP, delivered the keynote at the opening session of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) High-Level virtual meeting entitled, “Transformational Climate Financing for the Caribbean Region”. Prime Minister Mottley’s keynote was preceded by remarks by GCF Executive Director Yannick Glemarec. Other presenters included the Honourable John Antonio Briceño, Prime Minister of Belize; Her Excellency Diann Black-Layne, Antigua & Barbuda’s Climate Change Ambassador and current Chair of AOSIS; Dr. Colin Young, Executive Director of the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (5Cs) and; Dr. Didacus Jules, Director-General of the OECS Commission.
Transcript of the Prime Minister’s Keynote:
[00:00:00] Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
[00:00:01] Your Excellency, the Honourable John Briceño, Prime Minister of Belize.
[00:00:05] His Excellency, the Honourable Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, Vice President of Guyana.
[00:00:10] Mr. Yannick Glemarec, the Executive Director, GCF.
[00:00:14] Ambassador Diann Black-Layne of Antigua and Barbuda, and Chair AOSIS.
[00:00:19] Dr. Colin Young, Executive Director of the Caribbean Community Climate Change Center.
[00:00:23] Dr. Didacus Jules, Director-General of the OECS Commission.
[00:00:27] Distinguished friends and colleagues, all.
[00:00:30] Good morning. And for those who might be elsewhere, good night. Or very late night for those participating, I believe in Korea.
[00:00:39] Normally you would be here in this region with us for this occasion and we hope to be welcoming you again very soon.
[00:00:47] I want to thank Mr. Glemarec and the Green Climate Fund for continuing to prioritize Caribbean Small Island Developing States through this GCF Transformational Climate Financing for the Caribbean Region event, and for inviting me to share some thoughts, just a few thoughts during this opening session.
[00:01:06] Our dialog these days has regrettably been overtaken by COVID-19, not just the public health response and what we need to do to save lives, but also the current and future livelihoods, making sure that recovery is less about building-back, because in many respects we shouldn’t want to be repeating the approaches of the past, as so many of us have said – but we want to build forward better.
[00:01:30] And as we acknowledge by our presence here today, this pandemic is not the only global threat we face as at the same time the climate crisis continues, having said that, to be more critical than ever. In fact, as I’ve had occasion to point to just a few days ago in another regional forum, the two C’s of COVID and the Climate Crisis are not the only ones that trouble us in this region. The Caribbean region faces simultaneous threats of chronic NCDs, which has compounded the reality for our people with COVID. We also face, regrettably, the other public health disease of crime in too many of its forms. And then, of course, the fifth and final C to which I have referred always is common for many of us, which is the consequences of colonialism, which cause us to indeed strengthen or organize action around securing reparations, given the absence of a development compact upon our nations, becoming independent.
[00:02:35] Dr. Young, I acknowledge that in this context, there’s a slightly different understanding of 5Cs, and I know you would appreciate that when I therefore refer to those 5Cs just now. This is not an attempt, believe you me, to appropriate, but only just to keep us focused on the challenge and the need for true global partnership and actions in response.
[00:02:59] Our island nations and most of the countries of the Caribbean basin are small, yes, but our region is large, particularly in its diversity and its historic contribution to global economic wealth as it now exists, though held by others at the time, of course, and not by us.
[00:03:17] Because of our small terrestrial size, we are it seems, difficult for many to see, literally, and as I’ve said often too much, otherwise. And even when we are seen, it is similarly difficult for many to justify action, based on economic arguments of scale.
[00:03:37] So perhaps it helps to see us as predominantly countries of water first, as well as land. Barbados, for example, has an exclusive economic zone that is 424 times the size of its terrestrial space. We are truly more blue than green. The Caribbean Sea is the second largest sea in the world, with our region spanning the expanse of water between the South American mainland and the southern tip of the United States of America. We are in one of the most active tropical cyclone regions of the world.
[00:04:16] This places us squarely on the frontlines of the climate fight, quite literally. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that given our vulnerability, our focus in the climate fight has not only been on encouraging all countries to increase their mitigation ambition, including our own, but also on adaptation and building climate resilience in a crisis that is truly not of our making, but by which we are disproportionately impacted. And we don’t tire of saying so because our reality is very much in front of us.
[00:04:53] The same might be said of this pandemic, which is of course, of no one’s making, but which sees some of us less able to access the critical therapeutics and vaccines needed to protect our citizens because of the size of our countries and therefore the scope of our power. We confront the failure of the market daily with respect to this pandemic. Regrettably, we seem not to be able to acknowledge that until every country is safe, no country is safe. And that does not in any way diminish the efforts that each country must take to be safe. But it cannot replace the collective multilateral action to ensure that the global community is a beneficiary of vaccines across the world. COVID does not detect geography or nationality.
[00:05:47] And similarly, if the global community does not act quickly to make up for delays in financing commitments under the Paris Agreement with respect to climate, climate refugees fleeing imminent threat of sea level rise and devastation from disaster will be every country’s responsibility. And I speak to you this morning having had to dispatch the Minister of Maritime Affairs and Blue Economy to parts of the West Coast in my own country, where the sea has already taken away the sea walls of a few properties and where therefore their experience with the climate crisis is real, not conjecture.
[00:06:27] This is why my friends, Barbados and AOSIS have called for more financing dedicated to adaptation. This is not meant to decrease the amount of finance dedicated to mitigation or to reduce the commitment to a small island developing states, to the mitigation targets under our new NDCs. We call for a significant increase in overall climate finance.
[00:06:52] Keeping warming below 1.5 degrees will require tremendous investment in both the developed and developing world to transition energy and transport sectors to renewable energy. And the time is running out on us, largely because our reports received, show that already we have gone beyond 1.2; we’ve gone to 1.2 degrees above the climate, the pre-industrial sectors.
[00:07:21] In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that global mitigation costs would be around 2.4 trillion dollars per year, and a more recent report last December by the Boston Consulting Group and Global Financial Markets Association raised that estimate to 3 to 5 trillion dollars per year; numbers that we can’t even assimilate in the region. Adaptation costs in developing countries, currently estimated at 70 billion dollars per year, is expected to reach up to 300 billion dollars a year by the end of the decade in 2030.
[00:08:03] We welcome the positive signs that the size of adaptation projects funded by the multilateral funds serving the Paris agreement, whether it be the Adaptation Fund, the Green Climate Fund or the Global Environment Facility they are all increasing. According to the latest Adaptation Gap report, since 2017, 21 new projects have had a value of more than US$25 million dollars. And we want to applaud the Green Climate Fund for its commitment to allocate at least 50 percent now of its pledged funds over the first replenishment period up to December 2023 to adaptation. This is news to our ears.
[00:08:45] Barbados has seen the evidence of this commitment by the GCF both in the size and scope of our water sector sustainability project being executed in partnership with the 5Cs and in the readily expressed enthusiasm of the programmatic approach to resilience that we have taken in our own Roofs to Reefs project. For us, Roofs to Reefs is our sustainable development model for the next decade at least, and it reinforces the findings of the reports I referenced, that addressing the climate crisis requires not only investment at scale, but financial instruments that mean that this dual health and climate crisis do not turn into a debt crisis, especially for middle-income, small island developing states like my own and so many other in the AOSIS.
[00:09:41] Our Roofs to Reefs program has already identified at least US$1 billion of integrated projects across the housing, energy, waste and water sectors that would represent a truly transformative approach to lasting resilience – that would prepare us for our future in a way that our past has not done. In this program, you will find not just adaptation measures, but those investments that are required to also allow us to meet our target by 2030 of being fossil fuel free. This is our mitigation target.
[00:10:22] We further accept that these partnerships are needed beyond our bilateral relationships with institutions like the GCF. The private sector and the private finance initiatives need to be brought into these efforts. We have therefore been promoting the following: debt for nature swaps, natural disaster and pandemic clauses in multilateral financing and other debt instruments that have to be issued going forward.
[00:10:50] We are already, as you know, the biggest issuer of natural disaster clauses in Barbados, as we prepared for this moment when we sought to restructure our debt three years ago. A vulnerability index is needed that removes GDP as a central consideration for accessing concessional finance and prioritizes climate and debt vulnerability. I’m sure many of you are tired of hearing me talk those words as you were tired of hearing almost every previous Caribbean leader for the last 30 years refer to them. But vulnerability remains at the core of what we face as developing nation-states and the absence of the global community to appreciate that, and to put it into play such that we can truly be given the opportunity to access what we need at the global level, based on our vulnerability, as opposed to indices that have no relevance to our real needs going forward.
[00:11:51] The restructuring of the pandemic and the possible climate crisis related debt, I should say, not restructuring, reprofiling of the pandemic and possibly climate crisis debt. Why? Because debt incurred between January last year and whenever the pandemic finishes, literally needs to be refinanced into longer-term instruments so that we may be able to resume the development trajectory and we may be able to put ourselves in a place in order to access the funding necessary for adaptation and resilience in particular in our region, given the fact that the climate crisis has not paused in spite of the presence of the pandemic.
[00:12:37] My friends, the Global Commission on Adaptation in 2019 estimated that US$1.8 trillion investment in adaptation measures would bring about US$7.1 trillion dollars in avoided costs and other benefits. In other words, just about four times the benefit.
[00:13:00] Despite this, it remains more difficult to attract private sector investment to adaptation projects than it does to mitigation. And this places tremendous pressure on public financing for adaptation; financing that can then not be used on key well-being responsibilities of the state like health and education, or the other aspects of the development trajectory that we set out upon independence to achieve for our people. This is disturbing.
[00:13:34] Equally, in 2009 in Copenhagen, developed countries promised to mobilize US$100 billion dollars over and above the ODA promised under the Monterrey Consensus for Climate Finance. That amount, developing countries agreed to allow both grants and loans to be accounted at face value rather than on a grant equivalent basis. Oxfam in 2020 estimated that donors reported US$59.5 billion dollars per year on average in 2017 and 2018.
[00:14:13] But the true value of support for climate action may well have been as little as US$19 to 22 billion dollars per year once loan repayments, interest and other forms of overreporting were stripped out. I want to repeat myself. The true value of support for climate action in spite of that promise made in 2009 for a US$100 billion dollars a year over ODA, the true value of support has been in the vicinity of US$19 to 22 billion dollars per year once you’ve taken out the loan repayments, the interest and the other forms of reporting.
[00:14:55] Alongside a new financial architecture, there are other efforts to be undertaken including agreement on internationally accepted methodologies to quantify the significant roles of the Caribbean Sea and the associated reefs, seagrass beds and mangroves in carbon sequestration, which would allow our roles in the mitigation fight to be recognized alongside those of our larger neighbours.
[00:15:23] My friends, as we meet in this regional context, we acknowledge that there is a role for functional cooperation among our countries, especially in developing the knowledge and financial instruments required to be transformational and holistic, and at a scale commensurate with the challenges faced. However, any regional approaches must be owned and must be led by countries who drive the demand and the execution, rather than being consulted on the basis of a fully-developed concept in which they’ve had little or no voice. Let us not ourselves perpetuate the invisibility of our region, of which we often accuse others. But let us ensure that we continue to strive in partnership, that we give voice to our people and inside our countries, to our communities, because we know deeply that if we act collectively, if we act decisively, we can win this battle. But as is showing with COVID, if we allow time to become our enemy and if we allow complacency to be our ally, then we shall not win this most important of battles. For what we fight is for our very existence in this our land that has shaped us to be who we are.
[00:16:53] I trust and pray that your deliberations will bring us that much closer to winning battles that we should have won long ago. In particular, that with respect to the issue of vulnerability. If we have to set but one goal over the course of the next two years to be able to secure, then the most important role is to settle the issue of vulnerability criteria, because that is the only thing that is going to unlock access to oxygen, namely finance, for us to be able to fight our own battles.
[00:17:29] I wish you all the very best in your deliberations. Thank you very much.