While there can be no question of putting other regional emergencies, including food security to one side, even for a limited period, President of the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) Dr. Gene Leon is disinclined to sacrifice the prevailing climate change crisis on the altar of any optional emergency that may be facing the region at this time.
A week ago, Dr. Leon used the occasion of the closing ceremony that followed the Bank’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) in St. Lucia to remind governments not to relent in the search for measures designed to mitigate the potential havoc that climate anomalies are likely to wreak in the region. In using the forum of the CDB’s Annual General Meeting to make the remark, Dr. Leon, it seemed, was seeking to send a message that included continued economic hardships and the need for adequate and sustainable financing that cannot be considered outside of a framework that precludes the increased frequency of natural disasters. While the CDB President did not lose sight of the priority of the Bank’s member countries pressing forward with their respective development agendas, he placed a high premium on those countries’ need for disaster risk financing to targets mitigation of the worst excesses of climate change. Accordingly, the CDB President’s focused almost exclusively on the issues of climate and disaster risk financing, private sector mobilization and the fashioning of policies aimed at propelling fit-for-purpose investment. Dr. Leon also used his presentation to call for what one report describes as a “paradigm shift in international financing systems” and the fashioning of improved measures for sustainable development.
